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Why the flights to Rwanda will not help Sunak – politicalbetting.com
Why the flights to Rwanda will not help Sunak – politicalbetting.com
Start the flights.Stop the boats.That's what this bill delivers. pic.twitter.com/y93Ti3qe2k
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Amnesia is a terrible thing. Must be something in the water at the Post Office as so many of its senior employers have been affected.
BTW - FIRST !!!!
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/guardian-editor-kept-quiet-about-labour-s-1997-raid-on-pensions/ar-AA1nwInh?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=f5da48626b1d4c2cfc7f813e42f60231&ei=10
It is not their home, they are renting it.
The contract has ended. So be it. Or should the renter be compelled to remain if they want to leave ?
This programme really boils down to Go Big Or Go Home.
There's definitely a place for people (mostly young, mostly mobile) who need a home on a timescale of months to a couple of years. And the current tenancy model serves that fairly well.
Trouble is that the same private rental sector is now having to provide people with homes where it's reasonable to want to stay for longer, and it does that very badly. A society where people who want to put down roots in a place but can't is a worse society.
Probably the answer is that there are nowhere near enough homes, so the landlord-tenant power balance is out of whack. Just build more homes where people want to live and all that.
Bates and Arbuthnot, for examle, were clear, concise, and strightforward in their answers. They were also perfectly fair and reasonable. The PO representatives have been, almost to a man and woman, evasive, vague, unhelpful and preoccupied solely, it would appear, with saving their own sorry arses.
Good post; when my wife and I got married, we wanted to be together for life, but we didn’t know where that life was going to be. So we rented somewhere until circumstances determined where we would be.
Same applied to my sister and her husband; however my wife’s brother and his wife knew they weren’t going to move far from their hometown, or at least were pretty certain of it, so bought somewhere straight away.
And in fact, that’s how things turned out.
My Mum didn't find that at all funny!
Glad to hear you're still in good form, and I'm enjoying the travelogue.
This is a remarkable exchange between two senior American and Vietnamese officials in 1997, particularly remarkable because even the interpreters broke protocol and chimed in. There's a big lesson for Israel here: "The more you bombed, the more the people wanted to fight you”..
https://twitter.com/curiouswavefn/status/1782995944432361777
Came across this (when checking the news re BR Birmingham New Street shutdown this morning). Anti-LTN thugs systematically stealing bollards and threatening the locals who complain - the locals like their LTN.
Is that Postman Pat's cat by the side of the sign? He's been looking everywhere for her.
By his definition there must be more than 25 million homeless in the UK.
For this nonsense we have broken international law and frankly made ourselves look ridiculous. A very high percentage, I believe currently around 80%, of those arriving qualify for refugee status. Describing these people as "illegal refugees" contradicts the entire ethos of asylum. These people are fleeing persecution and are looking for a safe place to stay. That is what asylum is about. Moaning about people smugglers completely misses the point. This is how refugees have moved about from time immemorial.
I have previously expressed reservations about the viability of asylum in a world full of hell holes where international movement is so easy. I think we should be clear that such refugees are only welcome in the UK if we choose to take them and this is no longer a question of rights. But, whatever your views on asylum, this is not the answer.
Edit: come to think of it, it mentions bollards so @MattW might be interested.
The politics within the PO were poisonous and she was not very good at them so was outmanoeuvred. But had she been treated more gently by the Board I reckon she'd have continued and done what they wanted. Her explanations for what she actually wrote and her actions at the time were not really convincing.
Big news.
The Inquiry is looking for structural problems and principles rather than individual culpability, although in seeking the former it has to examine the latter. The blame business will start if and when we see prosecutions.
Those of us following the saga know perfectly well by now what the problem was. The PO is a thoroughly dysfunctional organisation in which incompetence and dishonesty had become the norm. This involved widespread illegal behaviour by numerous individuals, notably amongst the lawyers. One would hope to see prosecutions in due course.
It also housed some of the most incompetent executives you could ever expect to meet in a business orgaisation, notably amongst its Board members. Some may be done in a court of law, but you would certainly expect them to be without gainful employment ever again. That at least would be something.
The biggest lesson to be learned however concerns the relationship between the PO and Government. Agian, this was a dysfunctional one. We can expect to hear more of this in the next few weeks, but even now we know - if we never did before - that a passive and incurious Government that just leaves the businesses it owns to run themselves without proper scrutiny is asking for disaster.
That at least is something.
This is, IMO, as bad for the legal profession as the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards was for the City.
You cannot vote for them, surely?
Some are trying to adopt the aviation "no blame" culture as a way of avoiding all responsibility. They should look again. Plenty of people in aviation have been convicted in court over things they did by/with/from/to/for/at/near planes. Just Culture doesn't mean "Shrug your shoulders - shame about 400 people. Lessons Will Be Learned. Where's my knighthood?"
On topic - only time will tell but everyone should be united in stopping the boats
And RIP Frank Field
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/news-centre/2024/broadcasters-put-on-notice-to-maintain-due-impartiality-ahead-of-general-election
Alastair Meeks thinks (and I agree) that this will allow Nigel Farage to keep his nightly show on GB News going
https://bsky.app/profile/alastairmeeks.bsky.social/post/3kqueagi3we2c
Which means he won’t be returning to lead the party and will be able to do a lot more harm to the Tory party there than to Labour.
Personally I’m going to be looking at the type of result @Peter_the_Punter is thinking about with the Tory party getting few seats
In addition to a charge of rape, Jeffrey Donaldson faces nine charges of indecent assault against a female and one of gross indecency against a child.
The offences are alleged to have taken place over a 21-year period between January 1985 and December 2006.
Come on, you can’t vote for that. Surely.
All this government time, money and energy, all limited resources, pumped into a scheme that is so unlikely to stop the boats.
Conservatives used to understand that sort of thing.
Offensively and aggressively learning what the organisation was doing would have meant violently pushing knowledge onto people. Savagely ruining their ability to deny knowledge of what their own organisation was doing.
Why do you expect a senior executive to behave in a such a nasty, thuggish manner?
It's goal, at which it has been largely succesful, is to focus attention on the relatively small number irregular maritime arrivals and away from the several million completely legal arrivals that the tories have had to sanction in order to ameliorate the completely forseeable economic consequences of Brexit. Looked at on those terms, it is succeeding and will save the tories some seats.
It's a cynical policy aimed to diguise previous catastrophic misjudgments, aimed at the elderly, racist and stupid. Those policies remain the singular political niche at which the tories excel.
I've worked for poisonous organisations and noted that some did stand their ground, or leave when the pressures became intolerable. The PO however seems to have cornered the market in weak and duplicitous individuals however.
Maybe it had been going on for so long, nobody cared or noticed any more.
I have a lot of thoughts swirling in my head about what the evidence is showing, what this is telling us about how lawyers need to approach their role and what needs to change. But I have a lot of work on - ironically I am currently running an independent investigation & having to deliver bad news, there is this to watch, the sun is out & there is gardening to be done.
So I need to get my thoughts into some sort of coherent order first.
How do we do this? One of the failures of the inquiries into banking standards following the GFC was how so much illegal and immoral behaviour was swept under the carpet and personal responsibility was not enforced. We need to avoid this error. This involves prosecutions and disbarments for those who failed. Not because this makes it right or out of some form of vengeance, but because it is important to change the culture of those in such positions. They have to realise that they are personally accountable for their actions. It is long past time the prosecutions started and the Law Society really needs to look at itself as well. We need to change the way inhouse lawyers think (not just them in fairness but that seems to be the main problem here).
If you assume that in fact it cannot work with regard to stopping the boats, then the GE has to be held at a point before that becomes obvious, and where the government still has a plausible (to populist voters) account of the way it's all going to work very soon unless you let Labour wreck the wonderful plan.
Which, probably, means sooner rather than later, depending on the timescale of legal challenges, if they get that far. July?
You are certainly right that organisations can easily develop a sort of ethical blindness so that people within it do not even realise that what they are doing is wrong. But that is why professionals like lawyers need to have that professional conscience.
It was telling that when counsel for the inquiry put the note to her in which Vennells wrote about Crichton putting her professional integrity above the interests of the firm, Crichton barely reacted or even agreed to it. It was almost as if she didn't realise that it was a compliment, even if Vennells didn't intend it as such.
And what the hell does that say about Vennells, a priest, that she thought having personal integrity was a criticism?! And the CoE wanted to make her a Bishop?!?
In fact why not declare every country in the world safe then we can reject all asylum seekers without breaking any international obligations.
Give them a parachute of course. We're not heartless.
I think we should declare the moon safe and send them there using all the spaceports we built.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/brochure-a-guide-to-the-uks-commercial-spaceports/a-guide-to-the-uks-commercial-spaceports#spaceports-detail
Cynically, from Labour's viewpoint it would be best for the flights to start unfettered by legal challenges. By late summer and probably into any election campaign continued high boat numbers will show what a pointless distraction the scheme has been.
Conversely, the Tories must hope the courts delay any flights indefinitely so that they can run out the 'Enemies of the People!' line.
You believe this woman is genuinely Christian? Really?
Now where is that bridge I was looking to sell.....?
The external lawyers too. It was an external law firm which wrote the astonishing advice about not disclosing relevant material and doing it in a way which would hide what they were doing.
The Law Society and SRA are however chocolate teapots.
And the Met (groan!) has announced it won't even start looking at the evidence until after the inquiry and oh there are lots of documents and it will all take too long and we need more money and blah blah. So they need a solid poker waved around their heads and told to get on with it now. They can be doing all the preparatory work right now instead of their usual bleating and uselessness.
Back when I was involved in legal services stuff he was quite an influential person. I assume he still is.
However, the law profession tends to be pretty good at sweeping stuff under the carpet, and the SRA has its own problems at the moment (Axiom, SSB, etc) so I fear they’ll learn nowt. But, if professionalism matters in law and if ethics is more than a county north east of London then the profession should spend a bit of time thinking about what went wrong here.
We're watching, guys!
1) Increase the profits in the short term
2) Avoid knowing anything dangerous
3) Knowledge/skill is just another piece of property. To be bought and sold as required.
4) Be a team player
Personal Integrity would conflict with 4), 2) and probably 1)
The proportion of those willing to contradict a corporate consensus - even when it's blatantly wrong - is relatively small, in my experience.
Possibly the only way effectively to address that is to inculcate stronger cultural norms in the professions ?
That ought to be a matter of course in the training of lawyers, but clearly it isn't.
Talking of priests, Julius Caesar held that job (Pontifex Maximus). It's hard to imagine him as an especially god fearing man.
On the evidence of the Inquiry interviews I have watched I should say the easiest prosecutions will be those involving the lawyers who palpably ignored disclosure rules when preparing prosecution cases. I think they can be banged up swiftly, by the busload. Others are trickier, but if there is a will....
Btw, I am intigued by your Username. You are not perchance related to the former Surrey cricketer who once took 19 wickets in a Test Match against Australia?
(but I think it'll be bigger than that)
If you have a chocolate teapot, you have chocolate. If you give one to an 8 year old, they will crow with delight and consume it.
If you gave the Law Society to an 8 year old, they would probably cry.
(((Dan Hodges)))
@DPJHodges
I don’t understand the politics of the ECHR debate now. The only rationale for the Tories putting withdrawal in their manifesto would be if the flights were blocked. And if they’re blocked - after Sunak said they wouldn’t be blocked - there’s no point even printing a manifesto, because they’d be utterly annihilated whatever’s in it.
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1783019583751737495
It is not their property, they do not own it, it is someone else's property. They merely enter a contract to live there for a set period of time and once that is up there should be a choice to renew or not for both parties.
They cannot just make changes to it without the landlords permission.
I am still correct about so-called no fault evictions. People who rent homes do not own them and once the contract ends then either party should be free not to renew rather than the landlord be compelled to.