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The Past Is Not Another Country – politicalbetting.com
The Past Is Not Another Country – politicalbetting.com
9 September 2013: there is a meeting between Brian Altman KC and the Post Office’s in-house and external lawyers. A key witness, Gareth Jenkins of Fujitsu, who gave oral evidence at Seema Misra’s 2010 trial, was tainted. Following advice from Simon Clarke, a barrister with Cartwright King, the Post Office had asked them to review its prosecutions since 2010. Its GC had agreed to this as the cut off date even though it excluded the Misra case. What should the Post Office do, however, if she came forward? As recorded by another Cartwright King lawyer, Martin Smith, nothing. The Post Office did not want to give her “a ticket to the Court of Appeal.”
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Clearly lots of these lawyers should be facing not merely being struck off but criminal charges. But I'm betting it won't. Too many awkward questions for others who don't want that can of worms opened.
Second like Max Verstappen.
Yes, we should be seeing Post Office lawyers struck off and prosecuted for perjury. Total dereliction of duty and a disgrace to the ethics of their profession.
Public relations disaster out of what should have been a terrific triumph.
But your spoiler seems so unlikely to be true in the tedious predictability of this season, that reading it has the race more unpredictable for me, not less. I'll be watching it thinking 'Surely Sandpit was making a wry joke about how dull dominance is in F1?' Even down to the last lap it'll make for a nailbiting finish. I salute you, good sir.
And now I shall disappear before someone spoils the spoiler.
Energy required to accelerate a 1200kg car to 9m/s (20 mph) ~48,600 J
*Depending on any regenerative braking, but heat and friction also apply here.
Fuel consumption indicators are usually just a proxy for inlet manifold vacuum, they are not very accurate for calculating actual fuel consumption. It's actually quite complicated for the ECU to calculate, definitively, the instantaneous fuel consumption because not all of the fuel that is uplifted from the tank is used. Depending on the injector duty cycle and rail pressure some fuel will be returned to the tank unused. Hence the inlet manifold pressure gambit which is generally good enough for a very rough guide.
This is almost certainly easier on a BEV (as the BCS logs current draw at all times) but the internal network on our iX is locked down tighter than Rishi's ringpiece so my expolatory probing has yeilded little hard information.
Highlights include a server investigators were wanting access for months but the Special Forces Directorate kept on delaying access
Eventually special forces relented but the investigators were furious when they turned up to copy the server in December. All the previously deleted data, which would have been accessible on the server, had been permanently expunged when contractors installed a new system that summer.
The contractors say they warned special forces they were destroying the deleted data but there were no objections or attempts to prevent them....
..The SAS then reneged on its agreement to provide access to the remaining data on the server....
...Meanwhile, a US-based defence contractor, UTC Aerospace, offered to help recover video footage of the raids which the SAS said it no longer possessed. This would have been critically important evidence. However, the offer was declined by the RMP.
Then the RMP investigators were ordered to cut ties with advisers from the National Crime Agency and Greater Manchester police whose greater experience in killings had helped to guide their previous inquiries.
As a replacement, the MoD appointed an advisory group, consisting of a former chief constable and a criminal barrister, who enlisted two former police detectives to do a paper review of the state of the investigation in January 2017.
The inquiry now involved at least 50 murders but the former detectives were given only eight days for their review. They could not examine all the material but concluded nonetheless that the evidence was “untested, untried and without provenance”.
Crucially, they decided that the chief suspects — the SAS soldier who made the confession and his commander — should not be arrested because it would be “profoundly unhelpful” to the investigation.
There's other shocking things this story has thrown up.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sas-murders-war-crime-british-special-forces-vbcnmpkm8
But the explanations for the killings did not ring true to Johnny Mercer.
“To suggest that an individual, who knows the game is up, then pulls out a grenade or steps behind a curtain and pulls out a weapon and starts taking on an entire sub-unit 14 times is not plausible,” he later told the Afghan war crimes inquiry. “I’ve never seen that behaviour myself, I’ve never heard of that behaviour myself, and to be asked to believe it time and again is, frankly, a bit of an insult to those of us who operated in the same way.”
He found the lack of footage from the missions particularly suspicious. Filming the night raids, he said, was a statutory requirement and the operations would not be given approval if video was unavailable.
It was a major failing in the training of my generation of lawyers and, so far as I am aware, every generation since.
I tend not to accelerate hard once I've got the car moving. I prefer to wait for favouring gradients where possible. Where not possible, I just tend to use the throttle gently.
By your own account...
Some humility from the lawyers would go a long way - but lawyers don’t seem to do humility, certainly not any of those who worked for the Post Office.
Tactical voting - complicated this time due to boundary changes and imo likely to favour Labour not the LDs as the spectacular opinion poll leads and the seat forecast polls are making Labour look competitive everywhere. Thus we might end up with some (not by any means loads though) seats looking like 1983 - with a big third place vote because the 'tactical' shot was the wrong one
Flixborough
Bhopal
Texas City
The serious point being that the students are fully aware of these disasters in the industry.
What you designed as a static structure will have dynamic loads
Your roof might end up 3x heavier if it snows
Brittle things eventually fail way below their nominal strength
Check what is on paper is what was built
etc etc
There must be an equivalent for miscarriages of justice.
Surely 'should'?
But since you (almost) ask me...
We notice the engine effort to get the car moving from rest to slowly- engine goes vroom and all that. But only for a fairly short time. The ongoing engine effort to maintain speed much less so, even though it's continuous and adds up to more.
Which, in the context of the Drakeford Memorial Speed Limit, is why 'only slow just outside schools' isn't a great plan efficiency-wise. It's the repeated speeding up and slowing down that burns fuel.
Intuitions, however intuitive, can be wrong. Which is fine, as long as it's OK to correct them and not to much shame in making a mistake. Maybe the important bit of democratic politics isn't making the initial decision to raise someone or something up, but the subsequent opportunity to chuck them out, or change our collective mind.
And, to loop back to the header, what went wrong with the Post Office. Intuition said that the SPMs were on the fiddle because the computer said so and it's what people expected. If the lawyers kept pushing that line when they had evidence that it wasn't watertight, something ethical has gone wrong.
Where do lawyers put the line between 'trying to win' and 'trying to get at the truth'? Especially when defending the fox in the henhouse?
It is also producing correspondingly more air pollution through that 20 mph zone.
Sure, m omentum is a linear function of velocity, but energy is a non-unit power function, a square.
Energy conferred on a moving object: = 0.5 x mass x (velocity squared).
So it costs 9/4 x as much to go to 3/2 the speed.
It ignores wind resistance which will exacerbate the effect even more and also increases with the square of velocity.
We're getting down to crunch time in The Inquiry. The lawyers have been very much under scrutiny recently and this week it should become more intense. As you indicate, they have not come out of it well so far, and one may expect the pattern to continue. Clark will be especially interesting.
Many of them should of course be prosecuted. Will they be? History suggests otherwise, as your Denning quote indicates. Perhaps rather than LP Hartley we should be quoting Douglas Adams' witty twist on it.
The past is indeed just like another Country. They do things exactly the same there.
Redditch has a 16K tory majority. It's council went Labour massively on Thursday.
Middle England.
It is not even on the target list of seats as far as I can see.
Otherwise, thank you @Cyclefree for all your work on this appalling business
But it’s a shame that his analysis seems to have compounded a number of errors. Firstly, assuming no change in Scotland and Wales, when in the former at least all the evidence points to significant change. Secondly, by what they’ve done with the ‘others’ - seven other gains doesn’t seem credibly the result of any UNS model unless it’s a simplistic one that treats voters for the disparate range of other parties as one bloc backing a single candidate, which is obvious nonsense. Otherwise where are these seven other gains in England? Thirdly, by dropping local voters into a national model without any adjustment, when we all know people vote differently in local elections and the LDs in particular pick up local votes thay they never get in a GE.
And the gross error is that, while the national government and national Tory politicians are widely despised, not all voters punish their local councils and councillors accordingly, especially where they’re doing a reasonable job.
The only counter-argument is that Reform didn’t put up many LE candidates but presumably in the Genny Lec will stand everywhere? Thus potentially syphoning off more unhappy Tories. But that could be balanced off by some who are telling pollsters they are Reform voters as a protest but won’t actually carry through.
No one in the News likes to know that they are no longer newsworthy.
Never seen it stacked up against the increased air pollution point though.
"Air pollution is harmful to human health and damages the environment. The researchers estimated that 48,625 adults die prematurely each year in the UK due to particulate matter pollution."
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2023/oct/uk-air-pollution-regulations-will-reduce-deaths-do-little-protect-ecosystems
More of that whiny, tetchy homunculus explaining that the voters got it wrong last week is just what Labour needs now
Same with low temperatures making materials brittle and more prone to failure - ask the crew of the Challenger space shuttle about that one, that was a great case study in institutional failings and what pilots now call get-there-itis, where the pressure to conduct an activity becomes overwhelming, long after the common sense decision to avoid it departed the room. Definitely some equivalents there to the Post Office, as they kept up the prosecutions long after they knew the Horizon system was faulty.
There is a howling at the moon element at this. The ULEZ formers want to impose their rights to kill people with toxic air - what about the rights of the people being killed or damaged? The 20 mph formers want to kill more pedestrians - what about the rights of the people who don’t want to be killed?
This is the issue. Are your personal rights, personal freedoms really rights and freedoms when they take away the rights and freedoms of Other People? Are you automatically worth more because you are you and they are other people?
That is the political battle. Self vs society. And looking at the polls and results, society is heading for a landslide.
"There is a howling at the moon element at this. The ULEZ formers want to impose their rights to kill people with toxic air - what about the rights of the people being killed or damaged? The 20 mph formers want to kill more pedestrians - what about the rights of the people who don’t want to be killed?"
By that rationale any train or car should be motionless lest they crush someone's foot.
It's perfectly legitimate to advocate a lower speed limit in the name of safety, and equally valid to comment on the economic/personal cost of slower travel times. One side isn't devilish, and the other is most certainly not holy.
Someone tried to tell me that it’s not evil, but that’s precisely what it is.
Warmongering the disabled so that you inject that into the already vile culture wars is despicable and will take years to repair.
I don't think it's our edge to have posts about it on here in particular.
There's a general consensus that the council results were middling to bad for the Tories. The Mayoral elections were worse. Another opportunity to reset has passed the Tories by. The clock has run down a bit more. I suspect a lot of Billy Bunters are reading more into Thrasher and Mike Harper's stoical defence than is warranted by the facts on the ground.
You are right, Southam. I guess that like me you have been selling Tory seats for a while now. Personally I'm not minded to trade out yet.
b) Local elections sometimes have opposite results to general elections.
But Hung Parliament is stretching it, yes.
If Reform are being overstated in polling as seems likely then we are not a million miles away from a low 40s high 20s scenario perhaps. Something in the 10 to 14 point lead range - enough for a pretty comprehensive win through to Blair styley. I still fancy about a 90 seat majority.
One other factor - Galloway standing everywhere (he says, he's already got 150 in place though). As we saw with Yakoob in West Midlands, he picked up 60,000 votes and only announced five weeks ago standing on a gaza ticket. They need to start prompting WPB in polling, if he's at 1% or no show then forget it, but if they start hitting 3% then he becomes a complicating factor. Where they stood Thursday they generally did pretty well. Blackburn, Rochdale, Halifax, Oldham, Birmingham etc could be interesting.
Don't be a twat you already have us in stitches with "Richi".
It’s a political betting site first and foremost.
I equally, as many of you know, don’t think it’s our place to pitch in on the (frankly tedious and largely irrelevant) trans debate, to which we can add other culture war guff.
There’s a time and a place and this isn’t it.
They've voted in a load of councillors who, in previous times, would have had their words spoken by an actor.
Didn't get your bin emptied? Blame Netanyahu.
TBF, Team Rishi have turned (with the assistance of Thrasher) a thumping loss into a reasonably solid performance. Perhaps Jess Phillips is right after all about some remaining Conservatives.
When the individual seat markets go up, back Labour.
The ineffable ineptitude of Rishi & co since then - a trend which common sense tells us is not about to reverse - has set Labour on a fairly smooth course to victory; I’d guess 50-100 seat majority. I also expect the Lib Dems to run a considerably more astute campaign and make the 40-50 seat mark.
The country is done with the Tories. They’re not busted flush, or even a busted low two-pair. They’re a rainbow of rags on the river, and everyone can see it.
The essence of her argument was that the Tories would have won Blackpool South if they'd got more people out to vote for them.
"we tilt to more attractive mainstream conservative policies – tougher on migration and the ECHR, more tax cuts, more spending cuts, deregulation, proper planning reform, fracking and a serious assault on the burden of net zero, rolling back diversity and inclusion..."
P.S. Autocorrect suggested HAZING in place of HAZID. Judging by some of the videos that are, er, apparently available online, this would make for a more entertaining meeting, although to the detriment of process safety.
Where is BF and its seat market? There's only two/three/eight months to go!!!
You should be free to do what you want to do, as long as it doesn't negatively impact others.
Disabled protesters have thrown red paint over Downing Street's gates during a protest against the Government's welfare reforms.
The group chanted slogans against the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, outside his official residence, Number 10 Downing Street.
The paint was thrown at the gate blocking public access to the street from Whitehall.
"Blair's Blood" was daubed on the pavement nearby.
Four protesters got out of their wheelchairs to smear the red paint on the road.
Kevin Donnellon, 35, a thalidomide victim, said the Government's intention to reform the benefits system would lead him to lose his invalidity benefit and mobility allowance.
He said: "I will not be able to run my car without my benefit and allowance money.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/41746.stm
Because even a guilty criminal should have legal representation there's an acceptance of being on the "wrong" side of a case, and this necessarily blurs the moral boundaries when it comes to breaking rules on things like disclosure in pursuit of the imperative to win the case.
If lawyer training went too hard into questions of the morally of what they should do, then you'd find it a lot harder to find legal representation for murderers, rapists and the like.
@patmcfaddenmp
Labour’s progress in the south of England. The amount of the blue wall turning red is an under noticed and underwritten story.
https://twitter.com/patmcfaddenmp/status/1787214215498850371
@GdnPolitics
John Swinney set to be confirmed as new SNP leader and Scotland’s first minister – UK politics live
Which is great! But the extra-Tories are determined to kick the Tories, and the non-voters have no issue to pull them out to vote
The Horizon system was apparently fixable and at not incredible cost (despite the incompetence of the project as a whole) - according the IT expert who reviewed the project and raised an early alarm. A few bits needed re-writing. But.
Face. The Horizon system had been sold, inside the Post Office, as the Big Leap. Bonuses conferred, promotions made. Too many Proper People would be made to look ridiculous. And Proper People can never be made to look ridiculous.
So instead of quietly fixing the problem, a spiral of coverup and failure.
Among other things, the Proper People made this hundreds of times worse *for themselves*
Says it all.
Fear not, there’s a fair chance he’s producing equivocating waffle.
https://www.itv.com/news/2024-05-05/starmer-says-he-is-determined-to-win-back-voters-who-snubbed-labour-over-gaza
The decision to launch Challenger on that very cold morning being one of those, against the advice of key suppliers, with previous delays mounting up, threatening to derail the whole Shuttle programme if they didn’t get on and launch her quickly. Of course, the end result was a very much derailed Shuttle programme, and seven dead astronauts.
They knew in a strange way. The moment that evidence was bought to them, they brushed it aside. Tried not to know it officially. To Know it in the sense of admitting they’d read one of the millions of pieces of paper they love so deeply, would have been to break The Veil Of Ignorance. But the Veil was pretty see through.
They cared, alright. To manage and curate the knowledge of the problem. To delicately create channels for the knowledge to flow away from them, or inconvenient people. They worked jolly hard to manage not knowing there was a problem and for all the Right People to not know there was a problem.
I wonder what every sensible person in the land would say to Lord Denning today ?
The arrogant old pillock.
There is a lot of learning to be had from what goes wrong in any trade or profession. But some are better than others at learning from this and embedding it in their training than others. I have written about the law but I would also teach everyone in finance about all the previous disasters because having lived through several cycles of the, and having helped clean up some of them, the same issues / bad behaviour keep on happening.
It is an important lesson to learn and the sooner you learn it the more likely you are to avoid falling into the same traps.