I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
I feel like suddenly I can't trust what Leon says.
Sorry to rock the foundations of your belief system in that way. Help is available, I believe.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, but 2008 was obviously a shock.
There are metrics showing things going wrong in the UK since about the year dot.
Put it this way: if you could choose a starting point to go back with the benefit of hindsight and steer the UK towards a better outcome, I don't think 2007/8 would be the year you'd choose, but rather 10 years earlier.
So as to get the full benefit of Tony Blair's period of government?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
Weren't we hit harder because of our overreliance on the sector that collapsed? Live by the sword ...
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
You can see the wage squeeze from the UK being the employer of last resort for the EU after the financial crisis:
But dubious about this chart, the decline in UK disposable incomes measured in EUR in 2008 largely reflects GBP devaluation. And net EU migration equivalent to 0.3% of UK employment each year doesn't seem close to enough to deliver a fall in living standards of that magnitude in any case.
You mean the way the chart is measured in EURs? And therefore the primary component is going to be the EUR-GBP exchange rate? And that it doesn't actually therefore measure real incomes at all?
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
I feel like suddenly I can't trust what Leon says.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. "Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga." He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
"It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?"
At the end of the day, I like Michael Pettis’s theory - to which I believe you subscribe - that Britain has found itself to be a debtor nation and so, absent any contrary policy or exogenous shocks, it basically hollows out much of its productive export sector on an ongoing basis.
Germany is the opposite.
Michael Pettis is generally excellent, and is well worth reading.
However... it is worth remembering that plenty of nations were debtors and yet did not see their manufacturing hollowed out. Likewise, the US in 1980 was massively a creditor nation and - over the following 40 years - very definitely saw its manufacturing hollowed out.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
That’s a fair point. I shall investigate
Possibly one of the Bells, of whom there are several?
A quick google will tell you who it is. There aren’t many to choose from - quasi direct descendants of Virginia Woolf. And female. That look like her. But given that she’s in the Colombian jungle to do ayahuasca id best not specify
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
That's an interesting one, bearing in mind that Virginia Woolf did not have any children. Per Wiki, which is unlikely to be wrong on that one.
This isn't Dominique is it, or are you already in Afroman mode?
Everton’s financial future will be plunged into major doubt by the end of the month if 777 Capital’s proposed takeover remains unresolved.
Pressure is mounting for the Premier League to finally make a decision on the deal as working capital and new stadium financing is assured only to March 31.
The coming weeks could be among the most consequential in the Merseyside club’s history, with executives also fighting a second alleged spending breach.
A decision on the outcome of the league’s toughened owners’ and directors’ test can be ruled out for at least another week, sources tell Telegraph Sport. More meetings are anticipated between the top tier and the Miami-based investment firm in the coming days to clarify outstanding questions face to face.
Even if the Premier League board is then satisfied it has received all information, an independent oversight panel of KCs will be called in to review conclusions under the new rules.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, but 2008 was obviously a shock.
There are metrics showing things going wrong in the UK since about the year dot.
Put it this way: if you could choose a starting point to go back with the benefit of hindsight and steer the UK towards a better outcome, I don't think 2007/8 would be the year you'd choose, but rather 10 years earlier.
So as to get the full benefit of Tony Blair's period of government?
So as to get the full benefit of the golden economic legacy he inherited.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
I feel like suddenly I can't trust what Leon says.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. "Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga." He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
"It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him. It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?"
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
That's an interesting one, bearing in mind that Virginia Woolf did not have any children. Per Wiki, which is unlikely to be wrong on that one.
This isn't Dominique is it, or are you already in Afroman mode?
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Your Incas seem rather more confident about their knowledge of the Bloomsbury Set of the 1920s than is justified.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
The great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf who had no children herself? Miraculous.
That’s a fair point. I shall investigate
Possibly one of the Bells, of whom there are several?
A quick google will tell you who it is. There aren’t many to choose from - quasi direct descendants of Virginia Woolf. And female. That look like her. But given that she’s in the Colombian jungle to do ayahuasca id best not specify
Revealed: Met Police routinely failed to record basic details about sex offenders
After a 14-month legal battle, Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report commissioned after Wayne Couzens killed Sarah Everard
Rapists are likely to have avoided justice because the Metropolitan Police has been routinely failing to record basic details about sex offenders and their victims, despite repeatedly being told by regulators that its methods are failing women and girls.
Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report detailing its failures to prevent violence against women and girls after a 14-month legal battle.
These key details, which may help to identify similarities between offences and better link suspects to crimes, could have helped investigators bring violent criminals to justice by establishing patterns of offending.
The 2022 document commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard shows that for 356 serious sexual offences reported the previous year — 7 per cent of all crimes recorded — officers did not record detailed information about the reported sex offence which could have helped to identify any trends or linked attacks.
Officers regularly failed to properly record details of suspects, which meant they could not easily be identified by other investigators. In thousands of cases the relationship between victim and offender was not recorded on police computer systems.
And while the internal police reports relate largely to 2021, Baroness Casey said last month, on the anniversary of when her report on the Met came out, that progress in the wake of Everard’s murder was “not good enough, try harder.”
A failure by police to spot trends was a key feature of Lady Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into Met Officer Wayne Couzens, who murdered Everard in 2021. Couzens is alleged to have attempted to kidnap someone at knifepoint, attempted to rape a woman in the mid-2000s and raped another woman under a bridge in London in 2019, and should never have been a police officer, Angiolini found.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Your Incas seem rather more confident about their knowledge of the Bloomsbury Set of the 1920s than is justified.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, but 2008 was obviously a shock.
There are metrics showing things going wrong in the UK since about the year dot.
Put it this way: if you could choose a starting point to go back with the benefit of hindsight and steer the UK towards a better outcome, I don't think 2007/8 would be the year you'd choose, but rather 10 years earlier.
So as to get the full benefit of Tony Blair's period of government?
So as to get the full benefit of the golden economic legacy he inherited.
We should get on record right now, is Starmer about to inherit another golden economic legacy?
The evidence would seem to say no but it may be wise to pretend he is so that the Tories can take the credit for the next 10 years of steady growth.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
Didn’t mean to imply it was, just to express a hope that the wheel of fortune spins favourably for the UK soon.
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Your Incas seem rather more confident about their knowledge of the Bloomsbury Set of the 1920s than is justified.
Revealed: Met Police routinely failed to record basic details about sex offenders
After a 14-month legal battle, Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report commissioned after Wayne Couzens killed Sarah Everard
Rapists are likely to have avoided justice because the Metropolitan Police has been routinely failing to record basic details about sex offenders and their victims, despite repeatedly being told by regulators that its methods are failing women and girls.
Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report detailing its failures to prevent violence against women and girls after a 14-month legal battle.
These key details, which may help to identify similarities between offences and better link suspects to crimes, could have helped investigators bring violent criminals to justice by establishing patterns of offending.
The 2022 document commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard shows that for 356 serious sexual offences reported the previous year — 7 per cent of all crimes recorded — officers did not record detailed information about the reported sex offence which could have helped to identify any trends or linked attacks.
Officers regularly failed to properly record details of suspects, which meant they could not easily be identified by other investigators. In thousands of cases the relationship between victim and offender was not recorded on police computer systems.
And while the internal police reports relate largely to 2021, Baroness Casey said last month, on the anniversary of when her report on the Met came out, that progress in the wake of Everard’s murder was “not good enough, try harder.”
A failure by police to spot trends was a key feature of Lady Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into Met Officer Wayne Couzens, who murdered Everard in 2021. Couzens is alleged to have attempted to kidnap someone at knifepoint, attempted to rape a woman in the mid-2000s and raped another woman under a bridge in London in 2019, and should never have been a police officer, Angiolini found.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
The problem for those advocating the centre is to determine where exactly the centre is.
What is the ideological cul de sac the Tories are pushing themselves into?
A truly interesting question with a very boring answer. Here is a suggestion. The centre in UK politics is located firstly where the state's income is spent and the big items the government encourages or allows.
So the centre believes in: State pensions, welfare benefits, defence and NATO, the NHS, free education to 18, law and order and the rule of law, regulated free markets, private enterprise and wealth creation and incremental taxation.
As to the ideological cul de sac, I suspect this is mostly rhetoric + attention to marginal issues, and the narcissism of small differences. What do others think?
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Ok. But you should have applied the Sniff Test before believing it. Drugs are no excuse for not applying the Sniff Test.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
Didn’t mean to imply it was, just to express a hope that the wheel of fortune spins favourably for the UK soon.
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
Trouble is people might well say that the time you talk about was just a brief period of irrational exuberance before returning to post 1945 reality. And what's wrong with Vienna?
Oh god we're not here again, are we? As it stood there were around 4m people (12% of the electorate) who wanted a Brexit referendum and used their democratic welly to bring it about. Exactly as it should be. Had Dave not agreed to the referendum there is every chance that the Cons wouldn't have won the GE. Dave did it for this reason. It's simple (and effective) politics.
And he thought the answer, in a delivery was to have the referendum and win.
Doesn’t take many butterflies in 52% vs 48%
For example, at the start of the coalition, the Lib Dems blocked such a referendum which would have been a 60% vs 40% for Remain, minimum, then.
Well his big error was in thinking that a large enough proportion of the people were vaguely intelligent. There was no provision for the idiots, who, it turns out, won it for Leave.
Insulting the voters you don’t like, even harder, would have won it?
Luigi Cadorna would have approved this message.
Look we are where we are. A non-trivial proportion of Leave voters had no idea why they were voting for Leave nor the implications of having done so, and are likely the first to complain about the increased red tape and inconvenience as a result of having voted that way.
That is just the plain god's honest truth. I mean you can call it an insult but it is the case. Of course you have the sincere but misguided folk, plenty on here, who shouted about unelected this or that, and about sovereignty, all rubbish but there was a coherence to it, if it did ignore the way the modern world operates, but I digress.
I'm not insulting anyone by pointing out the truth.
The Remain campaign warned us that Leave would mean wages going up. Some of us were prepared to take that risk.
Thank goodness for you that risk didn't transpire
"Real wages lower than 18 years ago and have fared much worse than any peer nation"
Looks like the damage was done during the GFC, and the immediate aftermath. Set the baseline to 2014 and the blue curve would be almost identical to the thick black line.
Indeed. Most of the damage was caused by the Tory austerity policy and a smaller part by the Tory Brexit policy.
Nevertheless real wages haven't increased as @sandyrentoul feared they might do.
We should have a moratorium of sorts.
Austerity in some form was supported by all three major parties in 2010, and by the “centrist” press. Only with some hindsight is it clear that it likely went too far and fell way too heavily on capital expenditure, thereby damaging future growth prospects.
For a long time it was actually assumed to have “worked”, remember Nabavi’s golden tables?
I'd like to see some serious analysis of this rather than some just resorting to shout "austerity" and "brexit".
The decline happened immediately in 2008. I wonder if some of it was a weakening of the value of the pound v the euro, a structural correction, and then you have the fact that the UK maintained good & high levels of employment throughout the 2010s.
Is it better to have fewer people in work on a slightly higher wage growth trend, or more people in work on a slightly lower one?
There is lots of analysis in the economics/productivity “community” as analysts continue to puzzle over why Britain has such uniquely poor economic performance since 2008.
Your last paragraph is interesting. I have seen one view that Britain basically paid for the GFC via low wages rather than unemployment. The problem is that the low wages don’t seem to have corrected, whereas unemployment in the EU has “normalised”.
There are metrics that show things going wrong in the UK before 2008. I think it's a mistake to assume that we were going in the right direction before then.
Yes, but 2008 was obviously a shock.
There are metrics showing things going wrong in the UK since about the year dot.
Put it this way: if you could choose a starting point to go back with the benefit of hindsight and steer the UK towards a better outcome, I don't think 2007/8 would be the year you'd choose, but rather 10 years earlier.
So as to get the full benefit of Tony Blair's period of government?
So as to get the full benefit of the golden economic legacy he inherited.
We should get on record right now, is Starmer about to inherit another golden economic legacy?
The evidence would seem to say no but it may be wise to pretend he is so that the Tories can take the credit for the next 10 years of steady growth.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
Didn’t mean to imply it was, just to express a hope that the wheel of fortune spins favourably for the UK soon.
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
By the way, for anyone wanting the same experience today, visit Japan. The flights are longer because of the war in Ukraine, but you can live on peanuts. £200 a week based on two sharing for decent basic accomodation, even in Tokyo, noodle soup lunches for £3 etc. If you're only likely to go once in your life, now is a great time.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
Didn’t mean to imply it was, just to express a hope that the wheel of fortune spins favourably for the UK soon.
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
Trouble is people might well say that the time you talk about was just a brief period of irrational exuberance before returning to post 1945 reality. And what's wrong with Vienna?
Nothing, if you like mobility scooters and the orthopaedic shoe shops.
It has probably been discussed here, endlessly, but I don't know if there is a consensus on the question: Were John Major's policies good for the UK, net?
If so, do his current ratings reflect that?
(Harry Truman had horrible ratings when he left office, but most historians think he got the big decisions right. In contrast, Nixon's wage and price controls were very popular at the time, but most economists will tell you they were a serious error.)
George Galloway has compared Israel’s operations in Gaza to the Holocaust, less than an hour after being sworn in as MP for Rochdale.
In an impromptu press conference outside parliament, Galloway said the International Court of Human Rights had already found that there was a “plausible” case that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide and provocatively questioned why mainstream politicians were critical of his stance.
“If the by-election had been in February of 1940, or 1941, would anyone seriously have condemned me for putting the crimes of the Holocaust at the centre of my election campaign?” he said.
He later responded to questions about Israel, saying “Israel exists, it’s not up to me,” but repeating his claim that “no state has the right to exist — not the Soviet Union, not Czechoslovakia, not the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
Galloway called on Labour voters to oust Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, as an MP and declared that his Workers Party would “make sure that Keir Starmer doesn’t win” the next election.
Rayner has a majority of 4,263 and Galloway said that could be easily overturned if traditional Labour voters deserted her.
“Angela Rayner has a parliamentary majority of around 3,000,” he told journalists outside Westminster. “There are around 15,000 supporters of my view in her constituency so we’ll be putting a candidate up against her, either a Workers Party candidate or more likely an independent candidate that we support, and that will vitally affect the election of the Labour deputy leader.”
Galloway also called on the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to “launch and lead” a coalition of “socialist progressive” campaigners to contest seats at the general election. In a video released on Monday he urged Corbyn to stop “procrastinating” and join with his party, claiming that “time was running out”.
“I don’t know why he has procrastinated so long in making a final total break with Labour and leading something himself,” Galloway told the left-wing YouTube channel Not the Andrew Marr Show.
Has this been noted here? HMG want AI [sic} to be given access to claimants' bank accounts etc. to see if anything looks dodgy.
"Computer Says Dodgy" combined with a preconception on the commissioning powers' part that half of the population under scrutiny is bent, only they haven't been able to prove it till now ... sounds familiar.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Your Incas seem rather more confident about their knowledge of the Bloomsbury Set of the 1920s than is justified.
The problem for those advocating the centre is to determine where exactly the centre is.
What is the ideological cul de sac the Tories are pushing themselves into?
A truly interesting question with a very boring answer. Here is a suggestion. The centre in UK politics is located firstly where the state's income is spent and the big items the government encourages or allows.
So the centre believes in: State pensions, welfare benefits, defence and NATO, the NHS, free education to 18, law and order and the rule of law, regulated free markets, private enterprise and wealth creation and incremental taxation.
As to the ideological cul de sac, I suspect this is mostly rhetoric + attention to marginal issues, and the narcissism of small differences. What do others think?
The centre is quite broad and varied rather than something to be triangulated precisely. It will also shift considerably over time and especially as major shock events happen. Parties can appeal to the centre in lots of different ways, and centrist governments can be good, bad, reforming or supporting a status quo.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
Didn’t mean to imply it was, just to express a hope that the wheel of fortune spins favourably for the UK soon.
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
Trouble is people might well say that the time you talk about was just a brief period of irrational exuberance before returning to post 1945 reality. And what's wrong with Vienna?
Nothing, if you like mobility scooters and the orthopaedic shoe shops.
It always comes top of quality of life measures. But it it's really true, why do so few Germans live there? (Only 70000)
I’m scared again now. Everyone keeps recounting their ayahuasca horror stories of totally shitting themselves as they hallucinated huge jungle monsters eating their internal organs. For seven hours
Great
All I want is a MASSIVE gin and tonic to calm me down. Not allowed
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
Didn’t mean to imply it was, just to express a hope that the wheel of fortune spins favourably for the UK soon.
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
Trouble is people might well say that the time you talk about was just a brief period of irrational exuberance before returning to post 1945 reality. And what's wrong with Vienna?
Nothing, if you like mobility scooters and the orthopaedic shoe shops.
It always comes top of quality of life measures. But it it's really true, why do so few Germans live there? (Only 70000)
Same question of Canadian cities to which US citizens very mostly do not migrate.
What to make of the latest Delta (data gathered 1–4 March)?
Their previous three polls had Labour leads of 18, 21, 21, and now this one shows 14. Quite a change. Are Labour suffering from the fallout from Rochdale? Did Sunak's Friday speech go down better than most pundits thought?
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
It has probably been discussed here, endlessly, but I don't know if there is a consensus on the question: Were John Major's policies good for the UK, net?
If so, do his current ratings reflect that?
(Harry Truman had horrible ratings when he left office, but most historians think he got the big decisions right. In contrast, Nixon's wage and price controls were very popular at the time, but most economists will tell you they were a serious error.)
Major, like Truman, faced an unwieldy and unco-operative “opposition” (in Major’s case, on his own backbenches).
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I had a fun trip to New York in 2009, two dollars to a pound. But the dollar was weak against many currencies then, not just the pound. Not sure that was Labour's doing.
Didn’t mean to imply it was, just to express a hope that the wheel of fortune spins favourably for the UK soon.
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
By the way, for anyone wanting the same experience today, visit Japan. The flights are longer because of the war in Ukraine, but you can live on peanuts. £200 a week based on two sharing for decent basic accomodation, even in Tokyo, noodle soup lunches for £3 etc. If you're only likely to go once in your life, now is a great time.
The CoE has warmly welcomed a report from its “Oversight Group” calling on the church to apologise to black Africans for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional belief systems”.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
It has probably been discussed here, endlessly, but I don't know if there is a consensus on the question: Were John Major's policies good for the UK, net?
If so, do his current ratings reflect that?
(Harry Truman had horrible ratings when he left office, but most historians think he got the big decisions right. In contrast, Nixon's wage and price controls were very popular at the time, but most economists will tell you they were a serious error.)
I think Major struggled with a fag end of a government that went on too long, and ran out of ideas. The few it had came from the bellends (hat tip Scully!). Broadly he and Clarke ran the economy well, but public services were terribly run down.
Rishi has similar problems, only without the dull, genial everyman persona or sound economy. Its beginning to look like a 1997 style result would be a success for the Tories.
It has probably been discussed here, endlessly, but I don't know if there is a consensus on the question: Were John Major's policies good for the UK, net?
If so, do his current ratings reflect that?
(Harry Truman had horrible ratings when he left office, but most historians think he got the big decisions right. In contrast, Nixon's wage and price controls were very popular at the time, but most economists will tell you they were a serious error.)
Major gets a far better assessment these days than when he left office. Rightly so, I think. He had a very difficult hand to play and did fairly well.
I just met the great granddaughter of Virginia Woolf. In a jungle by a waterfall. Taking mambe coca powder. 20 minutes from the cocaine palace of pablo Escobar which is now a hippo-themed water park. We agreed we both prefer “Orlando”
How’s your Monday?
Wouldn’t have thought Orlando, FL would be your kind of burg.
Sounds like he'll soon be posting under the influence of a powerful mind bending drug.
So we should see an improvement.
I was told the “great granddaughter” story by a Colombian indigenous man already off his gourd on this weird mambe stuff. She must be the great niece - his English is not up to snuff
Weird thing is tho, she really does look like Virginia Woolf. You can tell
Your Incas seem rather more confident about their knowledge of the Bloomsbury Set of the 1920s than is justified.
Surely someone can acknowledge my immaculate pun
“Not up to snuff”
We've acknowledged the immaculate conception that led to Virginia Woolf's great granddaughter, what more do you want?
What to make of the latest Delta (data gathered 1–4 March)?
Their previous three polls had Labour leads of 18, 21, 21, and now this one shows 14. Quite a change. Are Labour suffering from the fallout from Rochdale? Did Sunak's Friday speech go down better than most pundits thought?
The next polls will be interesting.
Redfield and Wilton showed no change so perhaps it’s just Deltapoll .
'The Met, facing claims about its performance on more humdrum crimes, was at pains to point out officers worked on this particular case for no more than four days.'
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
We could join the single market - that would kickstart the economy by a few percent.
The problem for those advocating the centre is to determine where exactly the centre is.
What is the ideological cul de sac the Tories are pushing themselves into?
A truly interesting question with a very boring answer. Here is a suggestion. The centre in UK politics is located firstly where the state's income is spent and the big items the government encourages or allows.
So the centre believes in: State pensions, welfare benefits, defence and NATO, the NHS, free education to 18, law and order and the rule of law, regulated free markets, private enterprise and wealth creation and incremental taxation.
As to the ideological cul de sac, I suspect this is mostly rhetoric + attention to marginal issues, and the narcissism of small differences. What do others think?
The cul de sac is being built from the attempt to turn those marginal issues into wedge issues.
That may be a sensible way for a more-ideological leadership candidate to separate themselves from a less-ideological one - you can see how Boris made it work for him against Hunt in 2019, and to a lesser extent Truss vs Sunak in 2022.
But in the situation the party finds themselves in now, with a number of extremely ideological factions jostling amongst themselves for pre-eminence, the wedges are having to be positioned further and further towards the fringes of political opinion.
Whoever comes out on top after the GE will have done so only by entirely cutting themselves off from the common ground.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
We could join the single market - that would kickstart the economy by a few percent.
This isn't realistic. The hypothetical 'doppelgaenger' isn't a real counterfactual and doesn't tell us anything about what would happen if we rejoined.
What to make of the latest Delta (data gathered 1–4 March)?
Their previous three polls had Labour leads of 18, 21, 21, and now this one shows 14. Quite a change. Are Labour suffering from the fallout from Rochdale? Did Sunak's Friday speech go down better than most pundits thought?
The next polls will be interesting.
Redfield and Wilton showed no change so perhaps it’s just Deltapoll .
Yes good point. I think that's most likely.
There are some oddities in the Delta when you drill down. Compared to their previous poll a week ago the lead reduction seems to be nearly entirely due to changes in the female vote and 18-24 vote.
The latter went from a 3/46/18 split (C/L/LD) to 19/58/4. In one week. We're only talking small numbers of respondents in that subsample though.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
We could join the single market - that would kickstart the economy by a few percent.
This isn't realistic. The hypothetical 'doppelgaenger' isn't a real counterfactual and doesn't tell us anything about what would happen if we rejoined.
I have no idea what you are trying to say in that post.
I’m scared again now. Everyone keeps recounting their ayahuasca horror stories of totally shitting themselves as they hallucinated huge jungle monsters eating their internal organs. For seven hours
Great
All I want is a MASSIVE gin and tonic to calm me down. Not allowed
I'm scared that you're going to spam the site with these 'stories' for seven hours...
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
We could join the single market - that would kickstart the economy by a few percent.
Extend the Windsor Framework to cover GB as well as NI...?
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
We could join the single market - that would kickstart the economy by a few percent.
I wasn’t really looking for policy prescriptions; more structural effects which might unexpectedly work in our favour. As far as I can see, we have quite serious structural problems.
I read that if Hunt or Reeves amends non dom status then upto 50 premier league players will leave the country
Maybe but where are they going to get better salaries other in the middle east
Not sure the players would get much sympathy, especially since they so clearly live and work in the UK. You could maybe make a case for F1 drivers whose work is more global, but they're mostly based in Monaco anyway...
Something else for Leon to ponder with his expanded consciousness.
Unpopular Opinion: The US is woefully unprotected and ill-prepared for drones in combat & at a national security level. If an organization or country wanted to reek havoc on the US. It could be done with 3-4 people and a bunch of small quad copters with explosives built from Amazon and a few hardware stores and decent IMUs/gsm/pi boards with a shit tercom uploaded into it.
Airports=vulnerable Ports=vulnerable Stadiums=vulnerable Subway/rail=vulnerable Chemical storage areas=vulnerable Oil storage=vulnerable
The pure threat/fear alone after a drone hits a passenger plane full of people & fuel about to take off would have disastrous consequences on our economy. Now think of 3 or 4 attacks across the country simultaneously. .. https://twitter.com/IhateTrenches/status/1764723309063671843
I’m scared again now. Everyone keeps recounting their ayahuasca horror stories of totally shitting themselves as they hallucinated huge jungle monsters eating their internal organs. For seven hours
Great
All I want is a MASSIVE gin and tonic to calm me down. Not allowed
I'm scared that you're going to spam the site with these 'stories' for seven hours...
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
The problem of no-one in a large nation wanting any babies is the problem. It only has a more babies solution. Babies are an end in themselves, not a means to an end. AI may be jolly clever but is not an end in itself, and I rather doubt if it is better at making babies than the tried and tested method.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
We could join the single market - that would kickstart the economy by a few percent.
I wasn’t really looking for policy prescriptions; more structural effects which might unexpectedly work in our favour. As far as I can see, we have quite serious structural problems.
(Also would like to avoid futile arguments.)
Ok, you asked for upside gamechangers. I do think joining the single market would provide a structural effect working in our favour and I don't think it's a futile argument but...
We have fantastic untapped green energy resources (tidal, wind).
We still have a massive cultural advantage via English as the global language which we fail to exploit fully. Strength in culture (film, theatre, books, music) and further education that we could exploit more.
Also our cultural diversity is a big advantage and long has been.
We could and should have world-leading infrastructure - HMG needs to lead on the investment strategy to make that happen. (Oops sorry, that a policy point.)
Our geographic location might be an advantage against (offer some protection from) global warming.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
The problem of no-one in a large nation wanting any babies is the problem. It only has a more babies solution. Babies are an end in themselves, not a means to an end. AI may be jolly clever but is not an end in itself, and I rather doubt if it is better at making babies than the tried and tested method.
In Korea’s case it perhaps solves their looming economic problems, though. Manufacturing lends itself to automation.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I am not aware of a big rise in the comparative value of Sterling taking place in the late 90s to 2010s.
No, that was the Brexiteers who said it would be the easiest deal in history/could be sorted out in an afternoon.
It was. All it took was replacing Theresa May as PM and it could be wrapped up quickly without a backstop since we held the cards and got a good deal as a result.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
We could join the single market - that would kickstart the economy by a few percent.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I am not aware of a big rise in the comparative value of Sterling taking place in the late 90s to 2010s.
2000 to 2008 saw a large revaluation of sterling - from around $1.40 to $2.00. Then downhill.
Revealed: Met Police routinely failed to record basic details about sex offenders
After a 14-month legal battle, Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report commissioned after Wayne Couzens killed Sarah Everard
Rapists are likely to have avoided justice because the Metropolitan Police has been routinely failing to record basic details about sex offenders and their victims, despite repeatedly being told by regulators that its methods are failing women and girls.
Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report detailing its failures to prevent violence against women and girls after a 14-month legal battle.
These key details, which may help to identify similarities between offences and better link suspects to crimes, could have helped investigators bring violent criminals to justice by establishing patterns of offending.
The 2022 document commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard shows that for 356 serious sexual offences reported the previous year — 7 per cent of all crimes recorded — officers did not record detailed information about the reported sex offence which could have helped to identify any trends or linked attacks.
Officers regularly failed to properly record details of suspects, which meant they could not easily be identified by other investigators. In thousands of cases the relationship between victim and offender was not recorded on police computer systems.
And while the internal police reports relate largely to 2021, Baroness Casey said last month, on the anniversary of when her report on the Met came out, that progress in the wake of Everard’s murder was “not good enough, try harder.”
A failure by police to spot trends was a key feature of Lady Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into Met Officer Wayne Couzens, who murdered Everard in 2021. Couzens is alleged to have attempted to kidnap someone at knifepoint, attempted to rape a woman in the mid-2000s and raped another woman under a bridge in London in 2019, and should never have been a police officer, Angiolini found.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
The same people were saying exactly the same stuff twenty-two years later.
Revealed: Met Police routinely failed to record basic details about sex offenders
After a 14-month legal battle, Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report commissioned after Wayne Couzens killed Sarah Everard
Rapists are likely to have avoided justice because the Metropolitan Police has been routinely failing to record basic details about sex offenders and their victims, despite repeatedly being told by regulators that its methods are failing women and girls.
Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report detailing its failures to prevent violence against women and girls after a 14-month legal battle.
These key details, which may help to identify similarities between offences and better link suspects to crimes, could have helped investigators bring violent criminals to justice by establishing patterns of offending.
The 2022 document commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard shows that for 356 serious sexual offences reported the previous year — 7 per cent of all crimes recorded — officers did not record detailed information about the reported sex offence which could have helped to identify any trends or linked attacks.
Officers regularly failed to properly record details of suspects, which meant they could not easily be identified by other investigators. In thousands of cases the relationship between victim and offender was not recorded on police computer systems.
And while the internal police reports relate largely to 2021, Baroness Casey said last month, on the anniversary of when her report on the Met came out, that progress in the wake of Everard’s murder was “not good enough, try harder.”
A failure by police to spot trends was a key feature of Lady Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into Met Officer Wayne Couzens, who murdered Everard in 2021. Couzens is alleged to have attempted to kidnap someone at knifepoint, attempted to rape a woman in the mid-2000s and raped another woman under a bridge in London in 2019, and should never have been a police officer, Angiolini found.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Iceland on Thames.......
A lot of the bien pensant are essentially deeply embarrassed by Britain and would far rather it was wound up.
No, that was the Brexiteers who said it would be the easiest deal in history/could be sorted out in an afternoon.
It was. All it took was replacing Theresa May as PM and it could be wrapped up quickly without a backstop since we held the cards and got a good deal as a result.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Iceland on Thames.......
A lot of the bien pensant are essentially deeply embarrassed by Britain and would far rather it was wound up.
Maybe I don’t hang in the right circles, but the bien pensant I know aren’t at all embarrassed by the UK.
I do know one GenZ who is, though, but she’s incredibly left wing and too young to be a proper “bien pensant”.
So a May election is still possible if things are being done quickly
Merging NI and income tax?
Sh.. don't tell Malcolm.
Seriously, merging them is the right long-term goal but it cannot be done in one move - that would imply a 12% tax rise for a lot of pensioners. Impact would dwarf removing the triple-lock. DM and Express would self-combust.
No, that was the Brexiteers who said it would be the easiest deal in history/could be sorted out in an afternoon.
It was. All it took was replacing Theresa May as PM and it could be wrapped up quickly without a backstop since we held the cards and got a good deal as a result.
So a May election is still possible if things are being done quickly
Merging NI and income tax?
Sh.. don't tell Malcolm.
Seriously, merging them is the right long-term goal but it cannot be done in one move - that would imply a 12% tax rise for a lot of pensioners. Impact would dwarf removing the triple-lock. DM and Express would self-combust.
It could and should be done in one move by Starmer if he wins the next election.
The CoE has warmly welcomed a report from its “Oversight Group” calling on the church to apologise to black Africans for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional belief systems”.
Utterly barking.
The CoE is essentially staffed by self-flaggelating Corbynites.
However, in such a system, it's very difficult to make an opposing argument without being ostracised: I'm trying to do it at the moment on a "sustainability committee" for a major organisation that has loud, voluble and rather dominant people who want to advocate for banning private car ownership and enforce vegan-only diets at all events.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I am not aware of a big rise in the comparative value of Sterling taking place in the late 90s to 2010s.
2000 to 2008 saw a large revaluation of sterling - from around $1.40 to $2.00. Then downhill.
Great for those who wanted a holiday in the USA.
Not so great for those who wanted to export to the USA.
The UK's balance of payments went from a deficit of £3bn in 1998 to a deficit of £62bn in 2008.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
I am not aware of a big rise in the comparative value of Sterling taking place in the late 90s to 2010s.
2000 to 2008 saw a large revaluation of sterling - from around $1.40 to $2.00. Then downhill.
Great for those who wanted a holiday in the USA.
Not so great for those who wanted to export to the USA.
The UK's balance of payments went from a deficit of £3bn in 1998 to a deficit of £62bn in 2008.
The CoE has warmly welcomed a report from its “Oversight Group” calling on the church to apologise to black Africans for “seeking to destroy diverse African traditional belief systems”.
Utterly barking.
The CoE is essentially staffed by self-flaggelating Corbynites.
However, in such a system, it's very difficult to make an opposing argument without being ostracised: I'm trying to do it at the moment on a "sustainability committee" for a major organisation that has loud, voluble and rather dominant people who want to advocate for banning private car ownership and enforce vegan-only diets at all events.
I just think it’s batshit that a group that by definition is dedicated to observing and promoting a certain belief should decide that it’s something to apologise for).
So a May election is still possible if things are being done quickly
Merging NI and income tax?
Sh.. don't tell Malcolm.
Seriously, merging them is the right long-term goal but it cannot be done in one move - that would imply a 12% tax rise for a lot of pensioners. Impact would dwarf removing the triple-lock. DM and Express would self-combust.
It could and should be done in one move by Starmer if he wins the next election.
Well, perhaps I am being a bit too hesitant. If you have a 400 seat majority why not go for it, eh?
Anyone know how much it would raise? Enough to cut a few pence off the consequent standard ICT rate (of 32%) I'd warrant.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Iceland on Thames.......
A lot of the bien pensant are essentially deeply embarrassed by Britain and would far rather it was wound up.
Maybe I don’t hang in the right circles, but the bien pensant I know aren’t at all embarrassed by the UK.
I do know one GenZ who is, though, but she’s incredibly left wing and too young to be a proper “bien pensant”.
I disagree. I think they see European and ultimately World government as more progressive and, ultimately, enlightened whilst thinking there's something decidedly non-U about any ties to national identity.
I went to school in Britain in 1993/4 and the mood was pretty desolate. The papers would write about how Britain was basically finished. A decent chunk of the bien pensant thought that Britain should basically join the forthcoming European currency and dissolve itself. The last chapter of Roy Porter’s History of London (pub. 1994) basically says, oh well it was fun while it lasted, but London’s basically a sedate, damper Vienna now: a saved-up slice of wedding cake to be enjoyed by the very old.
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
Swings and roundabouts.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
What are the upside gamechangers for the U.K. ? (Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis. That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
The problem of no-one in a large nation wanting any babies is the problem. It only has a more babies solution. Babies are an end in themselves, not a means to an end. AI may be jolly clever but is not an end in itself, and I rather doubt if it is better at making babies than the tried and tested method.
In Korea’s case it perhaps solves their looming economic problems, though. Manufacturing lends itself to automation.
And AI lends itself to automating knowledge work...
So, playing on Britain's strengths: * Pioneer the use of AI in our legal system - become the global venue of choice for cheaper, faster legal action * Extend / improve copyright to better protect the output of AI, at the expense of traditional media if necessary * Lower compliance costs for those who want to store and process large data sets * Get the FCA to approve and encourage AI finance products.
Comments
Yep, that's one issue with the chart.
Aerol, with no particular provocation, related the tale of the baby who had burst from his forehead and scampered into a forest of hydroponic ganja. "Ver' small baby, mon, no long' you finga." He rubbed his palm across an unscarred expanse of brown forehead and smiled.
"It's the ganja," Molly said, when Case told her the story. "They don't make much of a difference between states, you know? Aerol tells you it happened, well, it happened to him.
It's not like bullshit, more like poetry. Get it?"
Case nodded dubiously.
However... it is worth remembering that plenty of nations were debtors and yet did not see their manufacturing hollowed out. Likewise, the US in 1980 was massively a creditor nation and - over the following 40 years - very definitely saw its manufacturing hollowed out.
He is slightly guilty of sole actor syndrome.
This isn't Dominique is it, or are you already in Afroman mode?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeYsTmIzjkw
Pressure is mounting for the Premier League to finally make a decision on the deal as working capital and new stadium financing is assured only to March 31.
The coming weeks could be among the most consequential in the Merseyside club’s history, with executives also fighting a second alleged spending breach.
A decision on the outcome of the league’s toughened owners’ and directors’ test can be ruled out for at least another week, sources tell Telegraph Sport. More meetings are anticipated between the top tier and the Miami-based investment firm in the coming days to clarify outstanding questions face to face.
Even if the Premier League board is then satisfied it has received all information, an independent oversight panel of KCs will be called in to review conclusions under the new rules.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/football/2024/03/04/everton-future-777-peril-premier-league-owners-test-march/
What is the ideological cul de sac the Tories are pushing themselves into?
That explains a *lot*...
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/jul/19/new-band-wolfette
I may be late to this, but I have a suitable video clip to hand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myP5hP-SFCo
https://twitter.com/MirrorCeleb/status/1764422340715118674
To be fair to Christian Horner his wife's seminal debut track did include the lyrics 'If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends'
After a 14-month legal battle, Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report commissioned after Wayne Couzens killed Sarah Everard
Rapists are likely to have avoided justice because the Metropolitan Police has been routinely failing to record basic details about sex offenders and their victims, despite repeatedly being told by regulators that its methods are failing women and girls.
Scotland Yard has been forced by The Times to disclose a highly critical internal report detailing its failures to prevent violence against women and girls after a 14-month legal battle.
These key details, which may help to identify similarities between offences and better link suspects to crimes, could have helped investigators bring violent criminals to justice by establishing patterns of offending.
The 2022 document commissioned after the murder of Sarah Everard shows that for 356 serious sexual offences reported the previous year — 7 per cent of all crimes recorded — officers did not record detailed information about the reported sex offence which could have helped to identify any trends or linked attacks.
Officers regularly failed to properly record details of suspects, which meant they could not easily be identified by other investigators. In thousands of cases the relationship between victim and offender was not recorded on police computer systems.
And while the internal police reports relate largely to 2021, Baroness Casey said last month, on the anniversary of when her report on the Met came out, that progress in the wake of Everard’s murder was “not good enough, try harder.”
A failure by police to spot trends was a key feature of Lady Elish Angiolini’s inquiry into Met Officer Wayne Couzens, who murdered Everard in 2021. Couzens is alleged to have attempted to kidnap someone at knifepoint, attempted to rape a woman in the mid-2000s and raped another woman under a bridge in London in 2019, and should never have been a police officer, Angiolini found.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/met-police-report-failed-sex-offenders-basic-details-wmtml2h9m
Ten years later the exchange rate was so generous to the pound that you could fly to Manhattan and feel like a millionaire. London felt like the centre of the world from about 1997 to 2012.
Hopefully things get better when the Tories are finally ejected. I genuinely believe just a change in government will improve investment prospects, even absent any real change in fiscal policy.
The evidence would seem to say no but it may be wise to pretend he is so that the Tories can take the credit for the next 10 years of steady growth.
Broken, sleazy Tories and Labour on the slide!
It’s been a pisspoor decade or so. It’s time for the next thing.
“Not up to snuff”
Why not save a few bob by scrapping them?
So the centre believes in: State pensions, welfare benefits, defence and NATO, the NHS, free education to 18, law and order and the rule of law, regulated free markets, private enterprise and wealth creation and incremental taxation.
As to the ideological cul de sac, I suspect this is mostly rhetoric + attention to marginal issues, and the narcissism of small differences. What do others think?
"Britain is booming, don't let Labour blow it"
I dare you...
If so, do his current ratings reflect that?
(Harry Truman had horrible ratings when he left office, but most historians think he got the big decisions right. In contrast, Nixon's wage and price controls were very popular at the time, but most economists will tell you they were a serious error.)
In an impromptu press conference outside parliament, Galloway said the International Court of Human Rights had already found that there was a “plausible” case that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide and provocatively questioned why mainstream politicians were critical of his stance.
“If the by-election had been in February of 1940, or 1941, would anyone seriously have condemned me for putting the crimes of the Holocaust at the centre of my election campaign?” he said.
He later responded to questions about Israel, saying “Israel exists, it’s not up to me,” but repeating his claim that “no state has the right to exist — not the Soviet Union, not Czechoslovakia, not the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.
Galloway called on Labour voters to oust Angela Rayner, the deputy Labour leader, as an MP and declared that his Workers Party would “make sure that Keir Starmer doesn’t win” the next election.
Rayner has a majority of 4,263 and Galloway said that could be easily overturned if traditional Labour voters deserted her.
“Angela Rayner has a parliamentary majority of around 3,000,” he told journalists outside Westminster. “There are around 15,000 supporters of my view in her constituency so we’ll be putting a candidate up against her, either a Workers Party candidate or more likely an independent candidate that we support, and that will vitally affect the election of the Labour deputy leader.”
Galloway also called on the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn to “launch and lead” a coalition of “socialist progressive” campaigners to contest seats at the general election. In a video released on Monday he urged Corbyn to stop “procrastinating” and join with his party, claiming that “time was running out”.
“I don’t know why he has procrastinated so long in making a final total break with Labour and leading something himself,” Galloway told the left-wing YouTube channel Not the Andrew Marr Show.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/george-galloway-mp-commons-jeremy-corbyn-dg9gd9j2f
Has this been noted here? HMG want AI [sic} to be given access to claimants' bank accounts etc. to see if anything looks dodgy.
"Computer Says Dodgy" combined with a preconception on the commissioning powers' part that half of the population under scrutiny is bent, only they haven't been able to prove it till now ... sounds familiar.
Great
All I want is a MASSIVE gin and tonic to calm me down. Not allowed
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1764720374107767190
Seems to have started out as a dissent.
What to make of the latest Delta (data gathered 1–4 March)?
Their previous three polls had Labour leads of 18, 21, 21, and now this one shows 14. Quite a change. Are Labour suffering from the fallout from Rochdale? Did Sunak's Friday speech go down better than most pundits thought?
The next polls will be interesting.
I remember GBPUSD at more than $2, and I remember it briefly touching $1.05 when I was a kid. There are times when your country is going through a cyclical upswing, and there are times when the reverse is true.
That doesn't mean there aren't secular themes - like ageing populations - but over medium time frames, great things can look pretty shit, and shit things can look pretty great. And many of the policies, of course, that are most painful in the short-term are great for the long-term, and vice versa.
Utterly barking.
(Genuine question.)
I was thinking about S Korea’s difficulties, and wondered if they might be in a sweet spot where AI/automation bails them out of the demographic crisis.
That would work particularly well for an economy highly engaged in manufacturing.
What’s the upside case for us ?
Rishi has similar problems, only without the dull, genial everyman persona or sound economy. Its beginning to look like a 1997 style result would be a success for the Tories.
Rightly so, I think. He had a very difficult hand to play and did fairly well.
Best bit:
'The Met, facing claims about its performance on more humdrum crimes, was at pains to point out officers worked on this particular case for no more than four days.'
That may be a sensible way for a more-ideological leadership candidate to separate themselves from a less-ideological one - you can see how Boris made it work for him against Hunt in 2019, and to a lesser extent Truss vs Sunak in 2022.
But in the situation the party finds themselves in now, with a number of extremely ideological factions jostling amongst themselves for pre-eminence, the wedges are having to be positioned further and further towards the fringes of political opinion.
Whoever comes out on top after the GE will have done so only by entirely cutting themselves off from the common ground.
There are some oddities in the Delta when you drill down. Compared to their previous poll a week ago the lead reduction seems to be nearly entirely due to changes in the female vote and 18-24 vote.
The latter went from a 3/46/18 split (C/L/LD) to 19/58/4. In one week. We're only talking small numbers of respondents in that subsample though.
Maybe but where are they going to get better salaries other in the middle east
(Also would like to avoid futile arguments.)
That would imply NICs, not income, because NICs requires separate legislation.
https://twitter.com/SamCoatesSky/status/1764735948305096744
So a May election is still possible if things are being done quickly
Unpopular Opinion:
The US is woefully unprotected and ill-prepared for drones in combat & at a national security level.
If an organization or country wanted to reek havoc on the US. It could be done with 3-4 people and a bunch of small quad copters with explosives built from Amazon and a few hardware stores and decent IMUs/gsm/pi boards with a shit tercom uploaded into it.
Airports=vulnerable
Ports=vulnerable
Stadiums=vulnerable
Subway/rail=vulnerable
Chemical storage areas=vulnerable
Oil storage=vulnerable
The pure threat/fear alone after a drone hits a passenger plane full of people & fuel about to take off would have disastrous consequences on our economy. Now think of 3 or 4 attacks across the country simultaneously. ..
https://twitter.com/IhateTrenches/status/1764723309063671843
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68467359
We have fantastic untapped green energy resources (tidal, wind).
We still have a massive cultural advantage via English as the global language which we fail to exploit fully. Strength in culture (film, theatre, books, music) and further education that we could exploit more.
Also our cultural diversity is a big advantage and long has been.
We could and should have world-leading infrastructure - HMG needs to lead on the investment strategy to make that happen. (Oops sorry, that a policy point.)
Our geographic location might be an advantage against (offer some protection from) global warming.
Still thinking...
Manufacturing lends itself to automation.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/17/how-is-boris-johnson-brexit-deal-different-from-theresa-may
Then downhill.
But if we keep them, one easy way of saving much hassle is by making them automatically portable rather than having to pay a fee for update.
*giggles*
I do know one GenZ who is, though, but she’s incredibly left wing and too young to be a proper “bien pensant”.
Seriously, merging them is the right long-term goal but it cannot be done in one move - that would imply a 12% tax rise for a lot of pensioners. Impact would dwarf removing the triple-lock. DM and Express would self-combust.
However, in such a system, it's very difficult to make an opposing argument without being ostracised: I'm trying to do it at the moment on a "sustainability committee" for a major organisation that has loud, voluble and rather dominant people who want to advocate for banning private car ownership and enforce vegan-only diets at all events.
Not so great for those who wanted to export to the USA.
The UK's balance of payments went from a deficit of £3bn in 1998 to a deficit of £62bn in 2008.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpayments/timeseries/hbop/pnbp
Anyone know how much it would raise? Enough to cut a few pence off the consequent standard ICT rate (of 32%) I'd warrant.
So, playing on Britain's strengths:
* Pioneer the use of AI in our legal system - become the global venue of choice for cheaper, faster legal action
* Extend / improve copyright to better protect the output of AI, at the expense of traditional media if necessary
* Lower compliance costs for those who want to store and process large data sets
* Get the FCA to approve and encourage AI finance products.
(not entirely serious about all of these...)