From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
It is the biggest issue this government will face, as their every instinct is to increase the empire of what @Malmesbury called the "Enquiry Industrial Complex"
Kemi Badenoch is popular because she isn't Rishi Sunak, who was popular because he wasn't Boris Johnson. None of these people have any actual attributes.
It's more that they're popular with people who work or worked at The Spectator.
Johnson was their star. The embodiment of consequence-free columnist conservatism.
Sunak was the best mate of their longtime political editor who people couldn't stop telling us was incredibly bright.
Badenoch worked there and embodies its current strong focus on 'wokeness' as the topic that hits home with its readers, while taking a slightly more intellectual analysis of it than you'd find within the ranks of Reform or Braverman.
Talking of which, who is Starmer going to allow to buy the Telegraph/Spectator?
Last I heard, Fraser Nelson et al were still for sale.
Who currently publishes the Sunday Sport?
They've got their reputation to think of, the publishers of the Sunday Sport.
I was only thinking that these publications are already celebrated for promoting and publishing tits.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
It is the biggest issue this government will face, as their every instinct is to increase the empire of what @Malmesbury called the "Enquiry Industrial Complex"
It's been the instinct of the system of government since forever - government runs on lawyers and people who think more laws/rules are awesome.
They believe that if only they can create enough process, they can achieve Nirvana.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
Is there anything to stop a local council buying some land at non-building prices and then giving themselves planning permission?
I’ve no real insight into the complexities of the law around it, but “…the Land Compensation Act 1961 section 5 generally requires that the owner of an interest in land receives payment for the "value of the land ... if sold on an open market by a willing seller"..”
Also, I think local authority powers in respect CPOs for house building are currently quite constrained.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
Is there anything to stop a local council buying some land at non-building prices and then giving themselves planning permission?
I’ve no real insight into the complexities of the law around it, but “…the Land Compensation Act 1961 section 5 generally requires that the owner of an interest in land receives payment for the "value of the land ... if sold on an open market by a willing seller"..”
Also, I think local authority powers in respect CPOs for house building are currently quite constrained.
Woking seemed to be able to build like loonies....
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
Why? That’s completely crackers if it’s deliberate.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
Kemi Badenoch is popular because she isn't Rishi Sunak, who was popular because he wasn't Boris Johnson. None of these people have any actual attributes.
If looking for a potentially competent new leader, one could do worse than start by looking at all the surviving ex-ministers and identifying any that did a good job.
The question is, do any such paragons exist on the Tory benches?
I always rated Damian Hinds and Kevin Hollinrake. Neither were perfect but they had an air of competency and could speak in meaningful sentences.
Hollinrake navigated an extremely difficult issue with the Post Office/Horizon scandal and has emerged relatively unscathed. Always prepared to listen and to talk (which is more than can be said of his colleagues).
Hinds was always calm and competent. Mastered his brief as Education Secretary (as much as you can master the brief from hell).
If looking for sensible and stable, you could do a lot worse than either of these.
Kemi Badenoch is popular because she isn't Rishi Sunak, who was popular because he wasn't Boris Johnson. None of these people have any actual attributes.
It's more that they're popular with people who work or worked at The Spectator.
Johnson was their star. The embodiment of consequence-free columnist conservatism.
Sunak was the best mate of their longtime political editor who people couldn't stop telling us was incredibly bright.
Badenoch worked there and embodies its current strong focus on 'wokeness' as the topic that hits home with its readers, while taking a slightly more intellectual analysis of it than you'd find within the ranks of Reform or Braverman.
Talking of which, who is Starmer going to allow to buy the Telegraph/Spectator?
Last I heard, Fraser Nelson et al were still for sale.
Who currently publishes the Sunday Sport?
They've got their reputation to think of, the publishers of the Sunday Sport.
I was only thinking that these publications are already celebrated for promoting and publishing tits.
But they only publish the naked truth.
They should be clothes down.
These puns are un bare able.
(And did you mean the Spectator or the Sport?)
One of them publishes made-up nonsense designed to titilate the gullible.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
What's the reason though?
Who knows? That seems bonkers. I assumed it was just a flaw in the technology.
France didn’t really create many clear cut chances . They’ve been quite disappointing overall in the tournament . Spain deserved to win but England should beat them in the final .
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Not correct. Sky have been able to get the lag down to under 10 seconds, with an average of under 2 seconds (broadly what you would see on satellite) via Sky Q.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
Is there anything to stop a local council buying some land at non-building prices and then giving themselves planning permission?
I’ve no real insight into the complexities of the law around it, but “…the Land Compensation Act 1961 section 5 generally requires that the owner of an interest in land receives payment for the "value of the land ... if sold on an open market by a willing seller"..”
Also, I think local authority powers in respect CPOs for house building are currently quite constrained.
Woking seemed to be able to build like loonies....
For land for social and affordable housing purposes, or for educational or health uses, the council can apply to the Sec. Of State to reduce or eliminate that - which is the bit that means that compensation needs to take in the value after planning permission etc.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Not correct. Sky have been able to get the lag down to under 10 seconds, with an average of under 2 seconds (broadly what you would see on satellite) via Sky Q.
All the feeds (direct and otherwise) are lagged a bit - a few seconds - to allow someone to pull the plug if something "inappropriate" goes wrong.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
It is the biggest issue this government will face, as their every instinct is to increase the empire of what @Malmesbury called the "Enquiry Industrial Complex"
It's been the instinct of the system of government since forever - government runs on lawyers and people who think more laws/rules are awesome.
They believe that if only they can create enough process, they can achieve Nirvana.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
Kemi Badenoch is popular because she isn't Rishi Sunak, who was popular because he wasn't Boris Johnson. None of these people have any actual attributes.
It's more that they're popular with people who work or worked at The Spectator.
Johnson was their star. The embodiment of consequence-free columnist conservatism.
Sunak was the best mate of their longtime political editor who people couldn't stop telling us was incredibly bright.
Badenoch worked there and embodies its current strong focus on 'wokeness' as the topic that hits home with its readers, while taking a slightly more intellectual analysis of it than you'd find within the ranks of Reform or Braverman.
Reckon "slightly" in final sentence is doing heavy lifting.
"Hoc facere grave sublatione" as Boris Johnson might say. Or maybe not.
I mean it is. Even if you strongly disagree with it. Anderson, Farage, et al basically label anything they don't like - so anything that might be a modern and catering to them - as 'woke'. Braverman seems to have gone down the mad rabbithole whereby it isn't just wrong and bad thinking but an ever present 'Reds under the Bed'-style threat.
In contrast, agree or disagree, you'll generally find some much more nuanced critiques of 'wokeness' elsewhere. I wouldn't say Badenoch's or lots in The Speccie are the most compelling - they tend to come from wary liberals stating warnings - like Helen Lewis or Tomiwa Owolade. But they are substantial ones worth engaging with as opposed to the Daily Mail rubbish that thinks everything it doesn't like is 'woke'.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
What's the reason though?
Who knows? That seems bonkers. I assumed it was just a flaw in the technology.
The value of the feeds - more lag is less valuable.
Got to keep the subscriptions rolling.
By allowing severely lagged content out cheaply/free, the companies in question can defend themselves against charges of monopolising sport etc.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Not correct. Sky have been able to get the lag down to under 10 seconds, with an average of under 2 seconds (broadly what you would see on satellite) via Sky Q.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
It is the biggest issue this government will face, as their every instinct is to increase the empire of what @Malmesbury called the "Enquiry Industrial Complex"
It's been the instinct of the system of government since forever - government runs on lawyers and people who think more laws/rules are awesome.
They believe that if only they can create enough process, they can achieve Nirvana.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
AIUI the defence team had a number of medical experts and various reports they had prepared which they used to help them question the prosecution's experts. But they did not put them forward to give evidence for the defence. If they were not asked, why not?
Her defence counsel were pretty experienced barristers, though they could have made mistakes, of course. They also had - according to reports - firm of experienced statisticians and an experienced paediatrician. But neither gave evidence.
I have not seen any explanation of this and it seems odd to me. Perhaps I am missing something.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
Well, 61 is a majority of Tory MPs. You don't need to continue the voting: Blackman has won at that point.
My prediction is that they vote to take the leadership final say away from the party member vote. And some of those on the right flounce to RefUK as a result.
Does the party flounce too? Just leave a bunch of deeply shit fake zombie Tories in parliament with no activist base and a CCHQ formed of people who shouldn't be released into the community.
I thought you would favour care in the community? Archetypal Tory policy when Tories were Tories, as I recall.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
It is the biggest issue this government will face, as their every instinct is to increase the empire of what @Malmesbury called the "Enquiry Industrial Complex"
It's been the instinct of the system of government since forever - government runs on lawyers and people who think more laws/rules are awesome.
They believe that if only they can create enough process, they can achieve Nirvana.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
Yet another regulatory body to oversee the regulators and tell them off if they take what the regulator sees as too long.
So they start rushing things, making errors, then the whole project gets derailled when opponents notice the errors and trot off to the lawyers for judicial review.
No wonder Farage looks so smug as he contemplates building up his party structure for the 2029 election.
Meanwhile converting houses into houses of multiple ownership looks like a growth area as the increasing shortage forces more people into the same number of houses.
Oh hang on they have to be licenced from the council with a fat fee and huge amounts of regulatory paperwork.
Oh well, looks like Tents in Parks and Shanty Towns it is then.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
Bondegezou's or Tweedledee's?
Top tip: "I presume" is a useful clue in the hunt for basis free suppositions.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
AIUI the defence team had a number of medical experts and various reports they had prepared which they used to help them question the prosecution's experts. But they did not put them forward to give evidence for the defence. If they were not asked, why not?
Her defence counsel were pretty experienced barristers, though they could have made mistakes, of course. They also had - according to reports - firm of experienced statisticians and an experienced paediatrician. But neither gave evidence.
I have not seen any explanation of this and it seems odd to me. Perhaps I am missing something.
I don't know. The case is disturbing however you look at it, but the disturbing elements are not magically dissipated by harrumphing gammonry and quoting shit detective fiction. Look at the subpostmasters. They had competent barristers and the opportunity to adduce expert evidence, obviously guilty as sin despite the desperate conspiracy theories of the truthers.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
The defence case were able to call expert witnesses. The defence case in their appeal, when they made these particular points about air embolisms, were able to call expert witnesses. They never did. Even when they were talking about a topic where an expert witness would be useful.
Either they are the most incompetent defence lawyers in the history of lawyering, or they couldn't find any expert witnesses whose testimony they wanted to put in front of the court.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
The defence case were able to call expert witnesses. The defence case in their appeal, when they made these particular points about air embolisms, were able to call expert witnesses. They never did. Even when they were talking about a topic where an expert witness would be useful.
Either they are the most incompetent defence lawyers in the history of lawyering, or they couldn't find any expert witnesses whose testimony they wanted to put in front of the court.
And those arguments don't apply to the subpostmasters because...?
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Not correct. Sky have been able to get the lag down to under 10 seconds, with an average of under 2 seconds (broadly what you would see on satellite) via Sky Q.
Hmm. Not sure about that! Sky on my phone is a good 100 seconds behind Sky on my cable tellies.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
What's the reason though?
Who knows? That seems bonkers. I assumed it was just a flaw in the technology.
The value of the feeds - more lag is less valuable.
Got to keep the subscriptions rolling.
By allowing severely lagged content out cheaply/free, the companies in question can defend themselves against charges of monopolising sport etc.
Eh? The BBC and ITV broadcast it free on Freeview. Their streaming services (also free) have a two minute lag. What you are saying makes no sense.
Most interesting news if the day for me was the housing minister interview on R4. Seemed to confirm that they intend to legislate to reform the law around compulsory purchase of land for building. No detail, but promising.
It might be that they actually intend to deliver on housing.
The problem isn't compulsory purchase - it is actually getting things done with the land.
There was an example, mentioned in a previous thread of a requirement to do a study, generating a multi-thousand page report, before allowing a housing association to build social housing. A study on equality.....
There are dozens of these requirements - any attempt to trim them back will be met by fierce resistance from The Enquiry Industrial Complex.
Land input cost is definitely a problem. Addressing that is absolutely necessary if a major increase in LA house building is to be financed - though agreed, it’s not enough on its own.
But they do give some indication of actually having thought through some of the practicalities.
Anyway, it’s more interesting than which second rater* becomes the next Tory leader.
(*I’m a generous person.)
It is the biggest issue this government will face, as their every instinct is to increase the empire of what @Malmesbury called the "Enquiry Industrial Complex"
It's been the instinct of the system of government since forever - government runs on lawyers and people who think more laws/rules are awesome.
They believe that if only they can create enough process, they can achieve Nirvana.
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
"Random person on the internet" is from the same stable as truther and conspiracy theorist. Why not have a good long think about why in say 2014 you would not be saying exactly what you are saying now but about subpostmasters?
Incidentally in many cases the innocent subpostmasters pleaded guilty, for good reason. That seems a pretty clear case of prosecution and defence agreeing on something. So on your case we can presume they were guilty, yes?
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
The defence case were able to call expert witnesses. The defence case in their appeal, when they made these particular points about air embolisms, were able to call expert witnesses. They never did. Even when they were talking about a topic where an expert witness would be useful.
Either they are the most incompetent defence lawyers in the history of lawyering, or they couldn't find any expert witnesses whose testimony they wanted to put in front of the court.
And those arguments don't apply to the subpostmasters because...?
Miscarriages of justice can happen. They are not a reason to doubt every other conviction.
In the case of the subpostmasters, justice did win out, journalists and campaigners were able to find demonstrable flaws in the prosecution cases, and we now know that the Post Office's key expert witness at best did not understand what he was doing and at worst committed perjury. If there's evidence that expert witnesses for the prosecution in the Letby case were unaware of their duties as expert witnesses or perjuring themselves, let's see it. There are other specific issues around the subpostmasters' cases, like the PO's role as prosecutor, that contributed to the miscarriages of justice and which do not apply to the Letby case.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
The defence case were able to call expert witnesses. The defence case in their appeal, when they made these particular points about air embolisms, were able to call expert witnesses. They never did. Even when they were talking about a topic where an expert witness would be useful.
Either they are the most incompetent defence lawyers in the history of lawyering, or they couldn't find any expert witnesses whose testimony they wanted to put in front of the court.
And those arguments don't apply to the subpostmasters because...?
There is no conspiracy by expert witnesses to conceal evidence of computer software error?
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
AIUI the defence team had a number of medical experts and various reports they had prepared which they used to help them question the prosecution's experts. But they did not put them forward to give evidence for the defence. If they were not asked, why not?
Her defence counsel were pretty experienced barristers, though they could have made mistakes, of course. They also had - according to reports - firm of experienced statisticians and an experienced paediatrician. But neither gave evidence.
I have not seen any explanation of this and it seems odd to me. Perhaps I am missing something.
I don't know. The case is disturbing however you look at it, but the disturbing elements are not magically dissipated by harrumphing gammonry and quoting shit detective fiction. Look at the subpostmasters. They had competent barristers and the opportunity to adduce expert evidence, obviously guilty as sin despite the desperate conspiracy theories of the truthers.
Excuse me. What "harrumphing gammonry" have I been indulging in? Or "shit detective fiction" have I been quoting?
I've asked a polite and, I hope, sensible question and you answer with this load of insulting and empty-headed bollocks.
Perhaps a sensible poster on here may be able to answer. Or maybe no-one knows.
There is some truth in what Braverman is saying and her criticisms of the civil service. The 'progress' flag is not politically neutral. But for various reasons people don't necessarily see this issue, and they definitely don't want to hear about it all the time. So if Braverman goes on the warpath against it she just seems out of touch with popular opinion. She can represent a body of opinion within her party, but it isn't a good strategy for being a leader with broad appeal.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
It is apparently very difficult for defendents in the UK to get medical experts to testify for the defence as expert witnesses.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
"Random person on the internet" is from the same stable as truther and conspiracy theorist. Why not have a good long think about why in say 2014 you would not be saying exactly what you are saying now but about subpostmasters?
Incidentally in many cases the innocent subpostmasters pleaded guilty, for good reason. That seems a pretty clear case of prosecution and defence agreeing on something. So on your case we can presume they were guilty, yes?
In 2014, IIRC, I'd seen the Computer Weekly article that demonstrated flaws in the Horizon system. There was clear evidence that there may have been a miscarriage of justice. The Second Sight investigation was in 2012.
Many innocent subpostmasters did plead guilty. There was a particular issue around the PO acting as prosecutor and how they put pressure on subpostmasters. Those issues have no relevance to the Letby case.
What happened to the subpostmasters was horrendous, but you can't wheel it out as if it proves every other conviction in the British courts must be unsafe.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Not correct. Sky have been able to get the lag down to under 10 seconds, with an average of under 2 seconds (broadly what you would see on satellite) via Sky Q.
Hmm. Not sure about that! Sky on my phone is a good 100 seconds behind Sky on my cable tellies.
It's only on the Q platform, doesn't yet apply on phones.
Watching on Sky Stream and Sky Glass, sports fans will see "give or take" the same delay as satellite broadcasts on Sky Q or Sky+ HD, the company told GB News. The upgrade will only be available to Sky Sports Main Event viewers in the coming weeks.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
The defence case were able to call expert witnesses. The defence case in their appeal, when they made these particular points about air embolisms, were able to call expert witnesses. They never did. Even when they were talking about a topic where an expert witness would be useful.
Either they are the most incompetent defence lawyers in the history of lawyering, or they couldn't find any expert witnesses whose testimony they wanted to put in front of the court.
And those arguments don't apply to the subpostmasters because...?
Miscarriages of justice can happen. They are not a reason to doubt every other conviction.
In the case of the subpostmasters, justice did win out, journalists and campaigners were able to find demonstrable flaws in the prosecution cases, and we now know that the Post Office's key expert witness at best did not understand what he was doing and at worst committed perjury. If there's evidence that expert witnesses for the prosecution in the Letby case were unaware of their duties as expert witnesses or perjuring themselves, let's see it. There are other specific issues around the subpostmasters' cases, like the PO's role as prosecutor, that contributed to the miscarriages of justice and which do not apply to the Letby case.
Really? Personally I am horrified by the extent to which the de facto prosecutors in the letby case were the doctors who were in the frame themselves.
But this is not a winnable argument. It depends on facts, and examination of the facts is in your world view trutherism and conspiracy theory.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Because they were not asked.
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
I presume that when they're asked to be an expert witness, or were they to be asked, they start looking into the case in detail, as opposed to reacting to one thing presented out of context, and they come to conclusions that the defence don't want to use.
I don't see any basis for any of those suppositions.
The defence case were able to call expert witnesses. The defence case in their appeal, when they made these particular points about air embolisms, were able to call expert witnesses. They never did. Even when they were talking about a topic where an expert witness would be useful.
Either they are the most incompetent defence lawyers in the history of lawyering, or they couldn't find any expert witnesses whose testimony they wanted to put in front of the court.
And those arguments don't apply to the subpostmasters because...?
Miscarriages of justice can happen. They are not a reason to doubt every other conviction.
In the case of the subpostmasters, justice did win out, journalists and campaigners were able to find demonstrable flaws in the prosecution cases, and we now know that the Post Office's key expert witness at best did not understand what he was doing and at worst committed perjury. If there's evidence that expert witnesses for the prosecution in the Letby case were unaware of their duties as expert witnesses or perjuring themselves, let's see it. There are other specific issues around the subpostmasters' cases, like the PO's role as prosecutor, that contributed to the miscarriages of justice and which do not apply to the Letby case.
Really? Personally I am horrified by the extent to which the de facto prosecutors in the letby case were the doctors who were in the frame themselves.
But this is not a winnable argument. It depends on facts, and examination of the facts is in your world view trutherism and conspiracy theory.
The doctors were not "the de facto prosecutors in the letby case". That's just nonsense. You talk about facts and then come up with meaningless bullshit like that?
Michael Crick @MichaelLCrick Interesting that Starmer has appointed several new MPs as ministers straight away: Georgia Gould, Alistair Carns, Kirsty McNeill, Sarah Sackman and Miatta Fahnbulleh. I've never known this before. Normally people have to wait a year or two.
She is the daughter of Philip Gould, Baron Gould of Brookwood...attended a local comprehensive secondary school, Camden School for Girls. She has spoken of growing up in a "tribal Labour household"; holidays were spent with Alastair Campbell and his wife Fiona Millar, Tessa Jowell, and the family of Tony Blair.
She's certainly not the daughter of a tool maker.
She shouldn't really (and none of them should) be appointed to a ministerial position just yet. It's not like Labour don't have enough MPs.
Having said that, I recall a few people on this site suggesting in 2015 after Miliband's defeat that Starmer should throw his hat into the ring to become leader then. An interesting counterfactual with a Labour party led from September 2015 with new MP Sir Keir Starmer.......
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
People have a desperate need for certainty over the Letby case. They seem to have a hard time accepting that she was convicted, but over time reasonable doubt may come in to play.
There is some truth in what Braverman is saying and her criticisms of the civil service. The 'progress' flag is not politically neutral. But for various reasons people don't necessarily see this issue, and they definitely don't want to hear about it all the time. So if Braverman goes on the warpath against it she just seems out of touch with popular opinion. She can represent a body of opinion within her party, but it isn't a good strategy for being a leader with broad appeal.
The point is her tone. As you say, there are legitimate criticisms of stuff that's become received wisdom because it's 'inclusive' - when it may well not be when you drill down beyond bland acceptance and into who may have written policies and what their motivations are. But you don't address that by going on rants that make you seem like a latter-day Matthew Hopkins.
Not least because someone will represent that critical strand more articulately and effectively than you.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
"Random person on the internet" is from the same stable as truther and conspiracy theorist. Why not have a good long think about why in say 2014 you would not be saying exactly what you are saying now but about subpostmasters?
Incidentally in many cases the innocent subpostmasters pleaded guilty, for good reason. That seems a pretty clear case of prosecution and defence agreeing on something. So on your case we can presume they were guilty, yes?
In 2014, IIRC, I'd seen the Computer Weekly article that demonstrated flaws in the Horizon system. There was clear evidence that there may have been a miscarriage of justice. The Second Sight investigation was in 2012.
Many innocent subpostmasters did plead guilty. There was a particular issue around the PO acting as prosecutor and how they put pressure on subpostmasters. Those issues have no relevance to the Letby case.
What happened to the subpostmasters was horrendous, but you can't wheel it out as if it proves every other conviction in the British courts must be unsafe.
You can't distinguish ∃ from Ɐ, can you? That makes me feel much better.
If you don't see how the doctors were driving the case that is because you didn't follow it. Again, disregard the facts and conduct the argument with second order insults.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
What's the reason though?
Who knows? That seems bonkers. I assumed it was just a flaw in the technology.
Thinking about it, I assume it's so that watching it via traditional means maintains some type of "supremacy" in the sense that if you watch on TV you're really watching it live, (although there is of course a tiny delay even on there compared to analogue TV).
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
Natural insulin is produced alongside another peptide "c-peptide" which is not present in synthetic insulin, so generally quite a straightforward assay.
If there is a high level of insulin then it can only be conclusively proven to be synthetic by failing to find any c peptide. So the assay for c peptide is the decisive one, not the insulin assay.
Though one would have to come up with a pathophisiological reason for a neonate to suddenly produce an enormous quantity of endogenous insulin out of the blue.
Justine Greening: For now, the Conservatives are off the political pitch, leaderless, rudderless and most importantly, purposeless. Whether that absence becomes a more permanent one depends on following the playbook for the route back to success, demonstrated so powerfully last Thursday by Labour. Success comes from being in the mainstream of British politics, being competent and having a clear purpose. The Conservatives have been none of the above for some time. Its choice is simple now: do or die.
There is some truth in what Braverman is saying and her criticisms of the civil service. The 'progress' flag is not politically neutral. But for various reasons people don't necessarily see this issue, and they definitely don't want to hear about it all the time. So if Braverman goes on the warpath against it she just seems out of touch with popular opinion. She can represent a body of opinion within her party, but it isn't a good strategy for being a leader with broad appeal.
Yes, that and the eye-rolly thing. It is exceptionally irritating to see the flag updated every year, in ever more ludicrous ways, and then have it slapped around on every corporate homepage, product, and service for the whole month of June - sometimes slipping into July. It is OTT and puts people off Pride, because it starts to become a flag wave for being "up to date" with the latest in identity politics more widely.
I'd like it dialled down a bit, and Pride go back to just a weekend, but Braverman's megaphone approach just baffles me. It's not going to help deliver that, as both sides will just entrench.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Not correct. Sky have been able to get the lag down to under 10 seconds, with an average of under 2 seconds (broadly what you would see on satellite) via Sky Q.
Hmm. Not sure about that! Sky on my phone is a good 100 seconds behind Sky on my cable tellies.
It's only on the Q platform, doesn't yet apply on phones.
Watching on Sky Stream and Sky Glass, sports fans will see "give or take" the same delay as satellite broadcasts on Sky Q or Sky+ HD, the company told GB News. The upgrade will only be available to Sky Sports Main Event viewers in the coming weeks.
BT have a similar proposition via multicast for their own sports, I think it also works for Sky Sports on their platform too but I can't remember.
BBC are also working on it.
It will not be an issue within the next couple of years.
I’m sceptical. If you read on in that story it explains how sports streaming works. There is a lot that can delay it. And their claim that the average lag across the internet is 30 seconds doesn’t pass the sniff test: it’s more like 120 seconds in my experience. I’ll stick with cable until I’ve seen consistent real world evidence they can fix the issue.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
People have a desperate need for certainty over the Letby case. They seem to have a hard time accepting that she was convicted, but over time reasonable doubt may come in to play.
It’s the just world fallacy in action: Letby was convicted, so she must be guilty & the court case must have been fair and reasonable. After all, if it wasn’t that would have been unjust.
No-one in the UK was permitted to make any of these criticisms of the prosecution case from the moment Letby was arrested till the moment she was finally convicted, which is why they’re all coming out now. We’d all be better off if they’d been dealt with during the court case, but that’s just not possible the way UK law is structured right now.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
I’ve been rung up by newspapers and been asked things. I’ve given them an answer there and then. If I’d been paid to be an expert witness and sent away to carefully study the question, I can’t say, but I might have come up with a different answer.
At the end of the day, evidence before the courts goes through a more rigorous process than that used by journalists writing articles.
We’re talking about key parts of the case. These aren’t things the defence lawyers accidentally overlooked. And they weren’t public defenders: they were chosen by Letby.
I’m not taking the judgement at face value. The judgements are, of course, published. You can read them. If you’re interested in the case, I suggest starting there. The recent rejection of the appeal is perhaps the best to read.
Michael Crick @MichaelLCrick Interesting that Starmer has appointed several new MPs as ministers straight away: Georgia Gould, Alistair Carns, Kirsty McNeill, Sarah Sackman and Miatta Fahnbulleh. I've never known this before. Normally people have to wait a year or two.
She is the daughter of Philip Gould, Baron Gould of Brookwood...attended a local comprehensive secondary school, Camden School for Girls. She has spoken of growing up in a "tribal Labour household"; holidays were spent with Alastair Campbell and his wife Fiona Millar, Tessa Jowell, and the family of Tony Blair.
She's certainly not the daughter of a tool maker.
She shouldn't really (and none of them should) be appointed to a ministerial position just yet. It's not like Labour don't have enough MPs.
Having said that, I recall a few people on this site suggesting in 2015 after Miliband's defeat that Starmer should throw his hat into the ring to become leader then. An interesting counterfactual with a Labour party led from September 2015 with new MP Sir Keir Starmer.......
One of the problems for Labour is the possibility for unrest amongst its many MPs as there are so many of them, and so few opportunities for a ministerial career. When added to the general political volatility it could make splits possible, particularly given the Gaza factor.
Bloody hell Sunil! Just flicked onto PB to find your post and realise BBC iPlayer is a couple of minutes behind!
All the streaming services have an utterly shitty lag. It is their fatal flaw.
Flaw or opportunity? I can listen to the cricket tomorrow, hear a wicket, pop the kettle on, and some bread in the toaster, brew the tea, butter the toast wander into the lounge, sit down, and in a few more minutes I might see said wicket ‘live’…
It’s useful for cricket in that sense but utterly ruins major football matches with huge audiences. Cable and Freeview are live two minutes ahead of internet telly, so WhatsApp messages tell you that a goal has occurred an eternity before you see it. Ruins the experience.
It's a deliberate thing - mandated in the contracts for access to the basic feed.
What's the reason though?
Who knows? That seems bonkers. I assumed it was just a flaw in the technology.
Thinking about it, I assume it's so that watching it via traditional means maintains some type of "supremacy" in the sense that if you watch on TV you're really watching it live, (although there is of course a tiny delay even on there compared to analogue TV).
But why do the BBC care whether you watch the Euros on a proper telly via cable or Freeview or on a laptop/iPad? I think the OP might well be wrong: and it’s a flaw in the technology, nothing to do with contracts.
Kemi Badenoch used first meeting of shadow cabinet to criticise Rishi Sunak's election campaign amid concerns colleagues are failing to grasp enormity of defeat
* Badenoch said that Sunak's decision to call an early election without informing his Cabinet was a mistake and bordered on 'unconstitutional'
* Badenoch said that instead of telling Cabinet ministers first Sunak had opted to inform a small group of colleagues, including his PPS Craig Williams who subsequently admitted placing a bet on the election date. She described Williams as a 'buffoon'
* Badenoch said Sunak's decision to return early from D-Day commemorations was "disastrous" and had dominated the election campaign, adding that colleagues like Penny Mordaunt would still be MPs today if he had stayed longer in France.
* She said many Tories were clearly still traumatised. She said Suella Braverman, former home secretary, appears to be having a 'very public' nervous breakdown
* She said Sunak should stay on to ensure an orderly transition to his successor
* She was said to be speaking for colleagues, particularly former ministers who had lost their seats. She spoke of the importance of shadow cabinet discussions not being leaked.
And of course the bit in bold absolutely rules out kemi being the leaker because that would be just too unspeakably subtle for words. I just don't see why anyone else would be arsed to leak it.
She means it's OK for her to leak it, but not other people.
Michael Crick @MichaelLCrick Interesting that Starmer has appointed several new MPs as ministers straight away: Georgia Gould, Alistair Carns, Kirsty McNeill, Sarah Sackman and Miatta Fahnbulleh. I've never known this before. Normally people have to wait a year or two.
She is the daughter of Philip Gould, Baron Gould of Brookwood...attended a local comprehensive secondary school, Camden School for Girls. She has spoken of growing up in a "tribal Labour household"; holidays were spent with Alastair Campbell and his wife Fiona Millar, Tessa Jowell, and the family of Tony Blair.
We’re talking about key parts of the case. These aren’t things the defence lawyers accidentally overlooked. And they weren’t public defenders: they were chosen by Letby.
Whether she chose them or not, they were still being paid by the UK government I presume? I doubt a nurse could afford to pay for a full time KC plus their team for a 10 month case plus all the required prep time.
& the judgements may be fulsome. But they rely on medical evidence which has been challenged by a swathe of outside experts. Why those experts were not called by her KC I have no idea.
It is possible her KC was simply a poor choice for this defence. He certainly isn’t a specialist in medical evidence cases - his chambers claim him to be a financial / business crime specialist first and foremost.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
People have a desperate need for certainty over the Letby case. They seem to have a hard time accepting that she was convicted, but over time reasonable doubt may come in to play.
It’s the just world fallacy in action: Letby was convicted, so she must be guilty & the court case must have been fair and reasonable. After all, if it wasn’t that would have been unjust.
No-one in the UK was permitted to make any of these criticisms of the prosecution case from the moment Letby was arrested till the moment she was finally convicted, which is why they’re all coming out now. We’d all be better off if they’d been dealt with during the court case, but that’s just not possible the way UK law is structured right now.
Exactly. And thanks for the name which I had not encountered before. Every single verdict ever has been right and good, except for 700 odd postmasters but they were total exceptions do you hear, and put right anyway hurrah. No conclusions of any kind can be drawn from their case.
After a lifetime in the law I am particularly struck by the delusion that lawyers are magically exempt from stupidity, incompetence, laziness, corruption and all the other problems lesser people have. Not so.
From @Phil (I think) on the previous thread re the Letby case -
"The Guardian claims to have spoken to eight clinicians, seven of them specialising in neonatology who described Evans claims that an air embolism could be introduced in the way claimed during the trials as (I quote the article) nonsensical, “rubbish”, “ridiculous”, “implausible” and “fantastical” in half the cases & the other half relied on a research paper that the /authors/ of that paper said was completely inapplicable.
I am not an expert, but this seems ... concerning to me."
If so, it is odd, isn't it, as @Algakirk has repeatedly pointed out, that none of these clinicians was willing to give evidence for the defence during the trial - assuming any of them were asked.
Why not?
Indeed. And the Letby truthers keep going on about the air embolism deaths, but two (IIRC) babies were killed by insulin and the defence conceded that. They conceded that foul play had taken place, but just argued it must have been some unidentified other person.
"Truthers" is one of those really tiresome smears like "conspiracy theory." Letby conceded that there must have been foul play because lab tests showed that artificial insulin had been administered. The trouble is, the lab test used comes with a standard warning that it is not suitable for determining whether artificial insulin has been administered. See the issue?
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, one can generally presume it's fact.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
I don’t want to get into a back and forth on this topic because I’m not qualified to judge these questions, but both the Guardian & the Telegraph articles have quotes from named experts in the relevant fields saying that the evidence used to detect insulin in the children’s blood was a test that was not capable of reliably detecting injected insulin, for what sound like good biochemical reasons.
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
People have a desperate need for certainty over the Letby case. They seem to have a hard time accepting that she was convicted, but over time reasonable doubt may come in to play.
It’s the just world fallacy in action: Letby was convicted, so she must be guilty & the court case must have been fair and reasonable. After all, if it wasn’t that would have been unjust.
No-one in the UK was permitted to make any of these criticisms of the prosecution case from the moment Letby was arrested till the moment she was finally convicted, which is why they’re all coming out now. We’d all be better off if they’d been dealt with during the court case, but that’s just not possible the way UK law is structured right now.
On the contrary, after the prosecution put forward its case, the defence made an application that there was no case to answer. That does not happen as a matter of routine and it would have meant that many of the criticisms which are being aired now were presented and considered then. They were rejected.
They may have been rejected wrongly though that too was considered by the Court of Appeal and rejected.
And the defence also made all these arguments again at the end of the trial.
So it is not I think true to say that none of these issues were aired. They were - during the trial - and considered by the judge and the jury. Worth noting also that the jury acquitted on some charges or did not come to a verdict on others which does suggest that they did try to look carefully at each case.
What was not permitted was for lots of people who did not hear the evidence to make lots of comment, much of it uninformed. Not sure how great a loss that is TBH.
We’re talking about key parts of the case. These aren’t things the defence lawyers accidentally overlooked. And they weren’t public defenders: they were chosen by Letby.
Whether she chose them or not, they were still being paid by the UK government I presume? I doubt a nurse could afford to pay for a full time KC plus their team for a 10 month case plus all the required prep time.
They were paid by legal aid, to a total of over £1.3 million, including a top KC.
"According to an FOI request made by The Sun, Letby was handed £777,527.83 to pay for the three barristers, including top silk Ben Myers KC, who defended her during her ten-month trial at Manchester Crown Court.
A similar amount - £727,614.59 – was paid to her solicitors, Chester-based Russell and Russell.
However, the total spend on Letby's case could continue to rise once the Agency receives receipts of all claims associated with her original trial, they said. Because Letby has applied to appeal her convictions, and been ordered to stand trial again on one of the original attempted murder charges, costs will continue to be incurred by the taxpayer"
To suggest that these were inadequate or compromised by the government is an extraordinary allegation.
Incidentally, since Letby stopped working on the unit only one baby died in 7 years.
Kemi Badenoch used first meeting of shadow cabinet to criticise Rishi Sunak's election campaign amid concerns colleagues are failing to grasp enormity of defeat
* Badenoch said that Sunak's decision to call an early election without informing his Cabinet was a mistake and bordered on 'unconstitutional'
* Badenoch said that instead of telling Cabinet ministers first Sunak had opted to inform a small group of colleagues, including his PPS Craig Williams who subsequently admitted placing a bet on the election date. She described Williams as a 'buffoon'
* Badenoch said Sunak's decision to return early from D-Day commemorations was "disastrous" and had dominated the election campaign, adding that colleagues like Penny Mordaunt would still be MPs today if he had stayed longer in France.
* She said many Tories were clearly still traumatised. She said Suella Braverman, former home secretary, appears to be having a 'very public' nervous breakdown
* She said Sunak should stay on to ensure an orderly transition to his successor
* She was said to be speaking for colleagues, particularly former ministers who had lost their seats. She spoke of the importance of shadow cabinet discussions not being leaked.
And of course the bit in bold absolutely rules out kemi being the leaker because that would be just too unspeakably subtle for words. I just don't see why anyone else would be arsed to leak it.
She means it's OK for her to leak it, but not other people.
We’re talking about key parts of the case. These aren’t things the defence lawyers accidentally overlooked. And they weren’t public defenders: they were chosen by Letby.
Whether she chose them or not, they were still being paid by the UK government I presume? I doubt a nurse could afford to pay for a full time KC plus their team for a 10 month case plus all the required prep time.
They were paid by legal aid, to a total of over £1.3 million, including a top KC.
"According to an FOI request made by The Sun, Letby was handed £777,527.83 to pay for the three barristers, including top silk Ben Myers KC, who defended her during her ten-month trial at Manchester Crown Court.
A similar amount - £727,614.59 – was paid to her solicitors, Chester-based Russell and Russell.
However, the total spend on Letby's case could continue to rise once the Agency receives receipts of all claims associated with her original trial, they said. Because Letby has applied to appeal her convictions, and been ordered to stand trial again on one of the original attempted murder charges, costs will continue to be incurred by the taxpayer"
To suggest that these were inadequate or compromised by the government is an extraordinary allegation.
Incidentally, since Letby stopped working on the unit only one baby died in 7 years.
How many died in the time she was there, but not on duty?
We’re talking about key parts of the case. These aren’t things the defence lawyers accidentally overlooked. And they weren’t public defenders: they were chosen by Letby.
Whether she chose them or not, they were still being paid by the UK government I presume? I doubt a nurse could afford to pay for a full time KC plus their team for a 10 month case plus all the required prep time.
They were paid by legal aid, to a total of over £1.3 million, including a top KC.
"According to an FOI request made by The Sun, Letby was handed £777,527.83 to pay for the three barristers, including top silk Ben Myers KC, who defended her during her ten-month trial at Manchester Crown Court.
A similar amount - £727,614.59 – was paid to her solicitors, Chester-based Russell and Russell.
However, the total spend on Letby's case could continue to rise once the Agency receives receipts of all claims associated with her original trial, they said. Because Letby has applied to appeal her convictions, and been ordered to stand trial again on one of the original attempted murder charges, costs will continue to be incurred by the taxpayer"
To suggest that these were inadequate or compromised by the government is an extraordinary allegation.
Incidentally, since Letby stopped working on the unit only one baby died in 7 years.
Is that last fact admissible at trial, or would it be inadmissble since it relates to events afterward not involving the defendant?
We’re talking about key parts of the case. These aren’t things the defence lawyers accidentally overlooked. And they weren’t public defenders: they were chosen by Letby.
Whether she chose them or not, they were still being paid by the UK government I presume? I doubt a nurse could afford to pay for a full time KC plus their team for a 10 month case plus all the required prep time.
They were paid by legal aid, to a total of over £1.3 million, including a top KC.
"According to an FOI request made by The Sun, Letby was handed £777,527.83 to pay for the three barristers, including top silk Ben Myers KC, who defended her during her ten-month trial at Manchester Crown Court.
A similar amount - £727,614.59 – was paid to her solicitors, Chester-based Russell and Russell.
However, the total spend on Letby's case could continue to rise once the Agency receives receipts of all claims associated with her original trial, they said. Because Letby has applied to appeal her convictions, and been ordered to stand trial again on one of the original attempted murder charges, costs will continue to be incurred by the taxpayer"
To suggest that these were inadequate or compromised by the government is an extraordinary allegation.
Incidentally, since Letby stopped working on the unit only one baby died in 7 years.
Good grief. I’m not saying that the lawyers were compromised by the government. But how far does £700k in an enormously complex case like this, when it’s paying for enormously expensive KC time? Not very I suspect.
Incidentally, since Letby stopped working on the unit, I understand that the unit was downgraded & no longer permitted to take the sickest babies who are most likely to die. Which in turn means that it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from the pre / post Letby death rate. It would be lovely if we could do so and point to a nice clear statistical difference that decides the case once and for all, but we can’t.
Comments
It's difficult to see what point you are making. It's not like giving evidence at the trial would have been a sticking their head above the parapet thing to do. What makes you think saying things to the guardian is a markedly lower risk thing to do than saying things in court? It's much higher risk because if they were talking to the press prior to the latest judgment that leaves them exposed to contempt charges.
Can two views of the world be more out of line?
(And did you mean the Spectator or the Sport?)
They believe that if only they can create enough process, they can achieve Nirvana.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/02/04/the-state-of-process-the-process-state/
“..it is estimated that social workers spend between 12% and 20% of their time working directly with children and families, the remainder being spend on administrative tasks”
https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/JCO/Documents/FJC/Publications/Baby+P.pdf
“…the Land Compensation Act 1961 section 5 generally requires that the owner of an interest in land receives payment for the "value of the land ... if sold on an open market by a willing seller"..”
Also, I think local authority powers in respect CPOs for house building are currently quite constrained.
PB’ers 1 : Leon 0
Hollinrake navigated an extremely difficult issue with the Post Office/Horizon scandal and has emerged relatively unscathed. Always prepared to listen and to talk (which is more than can be said of his colleagues).
Hinds was always calm and competent. Mastered his brief as Education Secretary (as much as you can master the brief from hell).
If looking for sensible and stable, you could do a lot worse than either of these.
The other is [REDACTED FOR OBVIOUS REASONS].
# KeepTheFaith
For land for social and affordable housing purposes, or for educational or health uses, the council can apply to the Sec. Of State to reduce or eliminate that - which is the bit that means that compensation needs to take in the value after planning permission etc.
Either take an interest or don't, but don't take a lazy and essentially political view on a question of fact which you have not investigated.
In contrast, agree or disagree, you'll generally find some much more nuanced critiques of 'wokeness' elsewhere. I wouldn't say Badenoch's or lots in The Speccie are the most compelling - they tend to come from wary liberals stating warnings - like Helen Lewis or Tomiwa Owolade. But they are substantial ones worth engaging with as opposed to the Daily Mail rubbish that thinks everything it doesn't like is 'woke'.
Got to keep the subscriptions rolling.
By allowing severely lagged content out cheaply/free, the companies in question can defend themselves against charges of monopolising sport etc.
Nice little BF earner.
Her defence counsel were pretty experienced barristers, though they could have made mistakes, of course. They also had - according to reports - firm of experienced statisticians and an experienced paediatrician. But neither gave evidence.
I have not seen any explanation of this and it seems odd to me. Perhaps I am missing something.
https://x.com/thehistoryguy/status/1810780106312356352
So they start rushing things, making errors, then the whole project gets derailled when opponents notice the errors and trot off to the lawyers for judicial review.
No wonder Farage looks so smug as he contemplates building up his party structure for the 2029 election.
Meanwhile converting houses into houses of multiple ownership looks like a growth area as the increasing shortage forces more people into the same number of houses.
Oh hang on they have to be licenced from the council with a fat fee and huge amounts of regulatory paperwork.
Oh well, looks like Tents in Parks and Shanty Towns it is then.
When both prosecution and defence agree on something, but some random person on the Internet with no relevant qualifications questions it, one can still generally presume it's fact.
Either they are the most incompetent defence lawyers in the history of lawyering, or they couldn't find any expert witnesses whose testimony they wanted to put in front of the court.
Incidentally in many cases the innocent subpostmasters pleaded guilty, for good reason. That seems a pretty clear case of prosecution and defence agreeing on something. So on your case we can presume they were guilty, yes?
In the case of the subpostmasters, justice did win out, journalists and campaigners were able to find demonstrable flaws in the prosecution cases, and we now know that the Post Office's key expert witness at best did not understand what he was doing and at worst committed perjury. If there's evidence that expert witnesses for the prosecution in the Letby case were unaware of their duties as expert witnesses or perjuring themselves, let's see it. There are other specific issues around the subpostmasters' cases, like the PO's role as prosecutor, that contributed to the miscarriages of justice and which do not apply to the Letby case.
Is that what you are looking for?
I've asked a polite and, I hope, sensible question and you answer with this load of insulting and empty-headed bollocks.
Perhaps a sensible poster on here may be able to answer. Or maybe no-one knows.
This KC explains why at 9 minutes 40 seconds in.
https://youtu.be/ZproeC0SPa4?si=D7Gsygi6b5tRM0FX&t=9m40s
Why Letby’s defence decided to accept the insulin as fact I have no idea. As I keep repeating: it would not be the first time that someone was convicted of flawed medical evidence that a poor defence was unable to rebut in court.
Everyone here who keeps taking the judgement at face value has to also acknowledge that the UK courts have made terrible errors in the past. Those people had defence lawyers too, who no doubt did their best at the time. But defence lawyer time is finite & public defenders do not get unlimited budgets to chase down every avenue to look for ways in which the prosecution might be wrong.
Many innocent subpostmasters did plead guilty. There was a particular issue around the PO acting as prosecutor and how they put pressure on subpostmasters. Those issues have no relevance to the Letby case.
What happened to the subpostmasters was horrendous, but you can't wheel it out as if it proves every other conviction in the British courts must be unsafe.
Watching on Sky Stream and Sky Glass, sports fans will see "give or take" the same delay as satellite broadcasts on Sky Q or Sky+ HD, the company told GB News. The upgrade will only be available to Sky Sports Main Event viewers in the coming weeks.
https://www.gbnews.com/tech/sky-sports-streaming-latency
BT have a similar proposition via multicast for their own sports, I think it also works for Sky Sports on their platform too but I can't remember.
BBC are also working on it.
It will not be an issue within the next couple of years.
But this is not a winnable argument. It depends on facts, and examination of the facts is in your world view trutherism and conspiracy theory.
Having said that, I recall a few people on this site suggesting in 2015 after Miliband's defeat that Starmer should throw his hat into the ring to become leader then. An interesting counterfactual with a Labour party led from September 2015 with new MP Sir Keir Starmer.......
Not least because someone will represent that critical strand more articulately and effectively than you.
If you don't see how the doctors were driving the case that is because you didn't follow it. Again, disregard the facts and conduct the argument with second order insults.
If there is a high level of insulin then it can only be conclusively proven to be synthetic by failing to find any c peptide. So the assay for c peptide is the decisive one, not the insulin assay.
Though one would have to come up with a pathophisiological reason for a neonate to suddenly produce an enormous quantity of endogenous insulin out of the blue.
I'd like it dialled down a bit, and Pride go back to just a weekend, but Braverman's megaphone approach just baffles me. It's not going to help deliver that, as both sides will just entrench.
No-one in the UK was permitted to make any of these criticisms of the prosecution case from the moment Letby was arrested till the moment she was finally convicted, which is why they’re all coming out now. We’d all be better off if they’d been dealt with during the court case, but that’s just not possible the way UK law is structured right now.
At the end of the day, evidence before the courts goes through a more rigorous process than that used by journalists writing articles.
We’re talking about key parts of the case. These aren’t things the defence lawyers accidentally overlooked. And they weren’t public defenders: they were chosen by Letby.
I’m not taking the judgement at face value. The judgements are, of course, published. You can read them. If you’re interested in the case, I suggest starting there. The recent rejection of the appeal is perhaps the best to read.
Lord Mandelbrot is dubbing the Labour backbenchers as "Starmtroopers".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3Jpz8rP0Q
Ben Walker
@BNHWalker
·
1h
I will have my ward-by-ward breakdown of how Britain voted by week's end. Hopefully.
https://x.com/BNHWalker/status/1810767233200935241
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCW-J-a5TY8
& the judgements may be fulsome. But they rely on medical evidence which has been challenged by a swathe of outside experts. Why those experts were not called by her KC I have no idea.
It is possible her KC was simply a poor choice for this defence. He certainly isn’t a specialist in medical evidence cases - his chambers claim him to be a financial / business crime specialist first and foremost.
After a lifetime in the law I am particularly struck by the delusion that lawyers are magically exempt from stupidity, incompetence, laziness, corruption and all the other problems lesser people have. Not so.
They may have been rejected wrongly though that too was considered by the Court of Appeal and rejected.
And the defence also made all these arguments again at the end of the trial.
So it is not I think true to say that none of these issues were aired. They were - during the trial - and considered by the judge and the jury. Worth noting also that the jury acquitted on some charges or did not come to a verdict on others which does suggest that they did try to look carefully at each case.
What was not permitted was for lots of people who did not hear the evidence to make lots of comment, much of it uninformed. Not sure how great a loss that is TBH.
"According to an FOI request made by The Sun, Letby was handed £777,527.83 to pay for the three barristers, including top silk Ben Myers KC, who defended her during her ten-month trial at Manchester Crown Court.
A similar amount - £727,614.59 – was paid to her solicitors, Chester-based Russell and Russell.
However, the total spend on Letby's case could continue to rise once the Agency receives receipts of all claims associated with her original trial, they said. Because Letby has applied to appeal her convictions, and been ordered to stand trial again on one of the original attempted murder charges, costs will continue to be incurred by the taxpayer"
To suggest that these were inadequate or compromised by the government is an extraordinary allegation.
Incidentally, since Letby stopped working on the unit only one baby died in 7 years.
Incidentally, since Letby stopped working on the unit, I understand that the unit was downgraded & no longer permitted to take the sickest babies who are most likely to die. Which in turn means that it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from the pre / post Letby death rate. It would be lovely if we could do so and point to a nice clear statistical difference that decides the case once and for all, but we can’t.