"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
Yes, the story is Zelenskyy didn't know about it in advance, but it came from Zaluzhnyi who was commander in chief at the time. All speculative, but the AfD are bound to have a field day with this story.
Why, because the AfD are against Ukraine defending themselves?
If Russian pipelines don't want to be blown up, perhaps Russia shouldn't go invading other countries with a populace willing and able to defend themselves.
Whoever blew it up should get a medal, not an arrest warrant.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
Yes, the story is Zelenskyy didn't know about it in advance, but it came from Zaluzhnyi who was commander in chief at the time. All speculative, but the AfD are bound to have a field day with this story.
Why, because the AfD are against Ukraine defending themselves?
If Russian pipelines don't want to be blown up, perhaps Russia shouldn't go invading other countries with a populace willing and able to defend themselves.
Whoever blew it up should get a medal, not an arrest warrant.
Yes the AfD are fairly pro-Putin. Try to keep up.
I know they're pro-Putin and shame on them for that.
The electorate should not be and should be punishing them for their pro-Putinism, not letting them "have a field day".
Nor should the prosecution service be pandering to them by issuing arrest warrants for Ukrainians defending their country by destroying the invaders infrastructure.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
There's almost a Marxist twinge to all of this - "elite class" ? It's a popular meme among some it would seem - blame everything on the "metropolitan liberal elite", as distinct from, what, the rural landowning conservative elite?
It's all about class - even @HYUFD bangs on about it at times. Given I thought we'd moved into the classless society, it seems some still obsess about it.
Goodwin's a radical Marxist - who'd have thunk it?
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
Yes, the story is Zelenskyy didn't know about it in advance, but it came from Zaluzhnyi who was commander in chief at the time. All speculative, but the AfD are bound to have a field day with this story.
Why, because the AfD are against Ukraine defending themselves?
If Russian pipelines don't want to be blown up, perhaps Russia shouldn't go invading other countries with a populace willing and able to defend themselves.
Whoever blew it up should get a medal, not an arrest warrant.
Yes.
And No.
They should get a medal. But they also destroyed German property. So, they will have committed a criminal offence, no matter how positive their actions were.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No, he's not. The rioting was not caused by "globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation". It was caused by racism, Islamophobia and disinformation, which Farage, and indeed Goodwin, contributed to.
I don’t really get why people seem to think Jenrick would be a disaster. He is quite effective.
I personally can’t stand him but divorcing my views from the situation they can surely do far worse.
I don't think he'll last until the next GE as leader if he wins in autumn.
He will do nothing to shift the polls and will prove unpopular with public because he's just another public school over promoted oxbridge lawyer who owns about five huge houses.
The gammons and chavs don't mind a bit of posh as long as they are transgressive or what passes for funny in right wing circles. Johnson, Farage, etc.
As Jenrick is as funny as having piles and the flu at the same he'll have to rely on being an outspoken populist delivering thick ropes of common sense jizz into the screaming faces of the wokerati. He'd probably be at least ok at that. If he makes it to LotO his big challenge will maintaining coherence and discipline over the knot of elapids that is the tory party. Nothing we have seen from him to date suggests he'd be any use at that at all.
He's short on the 'likeability' factor though. That's my take anyway. When I spent some time listening to him recently (for betting purposes) I thought, "this man is very hard to like, and I'm not sure people are going to manage it."
The next Tory leader has to survive the locals next May. It is County and Unitary. Unless something significant happens the Tories are going to get an absolute hammering. Beyond any shadow of a doubt they are going to lose Surrey County Council. They have only lost it once, in 1993, and then they were still the largest party. I think there is a possibility the LDs might take control, which they have never done.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
I don't like Big Brother automatic pinging in most things in general but we're already required to have insurance etc by law and in the event I'm hit by another vehicle I want their insurance to put it right and they can't if they don't have any.
That was my gut reaction. Glad to have the PB libertarian on board with that.
Boring but important: you are ok in those circs. The victims of uninsured drivers scheme pays out and pursued the perp for recovery. This does impact you indirectly presumably because the scheme is funded by motor insurers so it puts everyone's premium up.
Some numbers on that - 8% of your premium.
The cost of the average motor insurance premium is increased by £53 a year to cover claims for crashes caused by uninsured drivers, according to the Association for British Insurers (ABI) trade body.
For law-abiding drivers this issue is worsened by record high car insurance premiums, with the typical driver paying £627 a year for cover by the end of 2023, the ABI said.
More drivers are considering driving uninsured due to the high cost of living, according to research from The Green Insurer, a broker, in December 2023.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
Yes, the story is Zelenskyy didn't know about it in advance, but it came from Zaluzhnyi who was commander in chief at the time. All speculative, but the AfD are bound to have a field day with this story.
Why, because the AfD are against Ukraine defending themselves?
If Russian pipelines don't want to be blown up, perhaps Russia shouldn't go invading other countries with a populace willing and able to defend themselves.
Whoever blew it up should get a medal, not an arrest warrant.
Yes.
And No.
They should get a medal. But they also destroyed German property. So, they will have committed a criminal offence, no matter how positive their actions were.
This might be relevant from the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea
"It is doubtful that the Nord Stream pipelines could have served as a military objective even in the context of the armed conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The Nord Stream pipelines likely did not serve as a civilian object that contributed to a belligerent State’s war-sustaining effort from the perspective of the ongoing international armed conflict in Europe, given that the flow of natural gas from the Russian Federation to Germany had stopped by the time the attacks were launched against the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022. Nor did the perpetrators of the attack give due regard for the protection and preservation of the Baltic Sea marine environment. Based on these reasons, it appears that an attack allegedly attributable to Ukraine against the Nord Stream pipelines was not in conformity with the law of armed conflict."
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
There's almost a Marxist twinge to all of this - "elite class" ? It's a popular meme among some it would seem - blame everything on the "metropolitan liberal elite", as distinct from, what, the rural landowning conservative elite?
It's all about class - even @HYUFD bangs on about it at times. Given I thought we'd moved into the classless society, it seems some still obsess about it.
Goodwin's a radical Marxist - who'd have thunk it?
Yes, I tend to agree. And from the standpoint of someone who agrees with a lot of what Goodwin says, I think it also lets a lot of real organisations and people off the hook. However, it does fit better in a Tweet.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
A handful of people - with access to several tonnes of high explosive!
If it was the Ukrainian equivalent of the SOE, is anybody outside Moscow going to get too bent out of shape? It all acted as a spur for Germany to move away from hydrocarbons so the planet says "Yay!"
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
Yes, the story is Zelenskyy didn't know about it in advance, but it came from Zaluzhnyi who was commander in chief at the time. All speculative, but the AfD are bound to have a field day with this story.
Why, because the AfD are against Ukraine defending themselves?
If Russian pipelines don't want to be blown up, perhaps Russia shouldn't go invading other countries with a populace willing and able to defend themselves.
Whoever blew it up should get a medal, not an arrest warrant.
Yes the AfD are fairly pro-Putin. Try to keep up.
I know they're pro-Putin and shame on them for that.
The electorate should not be and should be punishing them for their pro-Putinism, not letting them "have a field day".
Nor should the prosecution service be pandering to them by issuing arrest warrants for Ukrainians defending their country by destroying the invaders infrastructure.
Well done to the attackers.
Shame on Germany.
Germany has been trying to pretend they have no idea who did the attack for quite some time, but it's not sustainable. The government could have put an end to the investigation and tried to suppress the truth I guess, but probably would have only fuelled conspiracy theories.
Blowing up a pipeline that wasn't being used was a fucking stupid thing to do. The attackers were morons.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
A handful of people - with access to several tonnes of high explosive!
If it was the Ukrainian equivalent of the SOE, is anybody outside Moscow going to get too bent out of shape? It all acted as a spur for Germany to move away from hydrocarbons so the planet says "Yay!"
It was a couple of hundred kilos.
In some parts of the world you can buy explosives over the counter in considerable quantities.
Every moderate sized quarry has an explosives shed.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
Yes, the story is Zelenskyy didn't know about it in advance, but it came from Zaluzhnyi who was commander in chief at the time. All speculative, but the AfD are bound to have a field day with this story.
Why, because the AfD are against Ukraine defending themselves?
If Russian pipelines don't want to be blown up, perhaps Russia shouldn't go invading other countries with a populace willing and able to defend themselves.
Whoever blew it up should get a medal, not an arrest warrant.
Yes the AfD are fairly pro-Putin. Try to keep up.
I know they're pro-Putin and shame on them for that.
The electorate should not be and should be punishing them for their pro-Putinism, not letting them "have a field day".
Nor should the prosecution service be pandering to them by issuing arrest warrants for Ukrainians defending their country by destroying the invaders infrastructure.
Well done to the attackers.
Shame on Germany.
Germany has been trying to pretend they have no idea who did the attack for quite some time, but it's not sustainable. The government could have put an end to the investigation and tried to suppress the truth I guess, but probably would have only fuelled conspiracy theories.
Blowing up a pipeline that wasn't being used was a fucking stupid thing to do. The attackers were morons.
You've been an apologist for Germany and pro-Russian antics since the war began so I'm not surprised at you being on the wrong side of history here today either.
There are 3 local by-elections tomorrow. They are in Caerphilly, Islington, and Sterling and are all Lab defences.
I wonder what the sense is out there outside of the absolute madness of social media. Quashing a riot by locking up everyone, has an audience, and a very big one. Normally something like that would have a very positive impact on approval ratings. But is that the case this time? Is Nigel going to get the blame for the protests kicking off into riots? If so will that melt away soft conservative support that went to Reform? Seen lots of comments on line in response to the rumours of a clamp down on gifting to avoid inheritance tax, much of it along the lines "hardly anyone pays it anyways, and only rich toffos".
Not sure if that is the case with inheritance tax, the threshold been £325,000, with options to avoid tax by going to spouse. £325,000 is a little above the average house price, with a good number of old people owning their house outright. Lots of people dont talk about wealth openly, but they'll be doing the sums on their Gran's nice little house in Harrogate.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
Indeed, he was quite explicit on this matter, though some did not want to listen to that.
He also dropped the "bringing immigration down to the tens of thousands" pledge that Cameron and May had run on too.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
There has to be a name for a true statement that everyone ignores because the person saying it is such a well-known and fluent liar.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
I searched for that quote on Google, but the only result is you quoting the same thing in April this year. I assume it's paraphrased?
I don’t really get why people seem to think Jenrick would be a disaster. He is quite effective.
I personally can’t stand him but divorcing my views from the situation they can surely do far worse.
I don't think he'll last until the next GE as leader if he wins in autumn.
He will do nothing to shift the polls and will prove unpopular with public because he's just another public school over promoted oxbridge lawyer who owns about five huge houses.
The gammons and chavs don't mind a bit of posh as long as they are transgressive or what passes for funny in right wing circles. Johnson, Farage, etc.
As Jenrick is as funny as having piles and the flu at the same he'll have to rely on being an outspoken populist delivering thick ropes of common sense jizz into the screaming faces of the wokerati. He'd probably be at least ok at that. If he makes it to LotO his big challenge will maintaining coherence and discipline over the knot of elapids that is the tory party. Nothing we have seen from him to date suggests he'd be any use at that at all.
He's short on the 'likeability' factor though. That's my take anyway. When I spent some time listening to him recently (for betting purposes) I thought, "this man is very hard to like, and I'm not sure people are going to manage it."
The next Tory leader has to survive the locals next May. It is County and Unitary. Unless something significant happens the Tories are going to get an absolute hammering. Beyond any shadow of a doubt they are going to lose Surrey County Council. They have only lost it once, in 1993, and then they were still the largest party. I think there is a possibility the LDs might take control, which they have never done.
Within two years they'll be smashing council elections. Both Hague and IDS had really good council election results.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
There has to be a name for a true statement that everyone ignores because the person saying it is such a well-known and fluent liar.
Immigration policy was one of the dividing lines between Johnson and Hunt in the leadership election. Hunt said it would be a betrayal if they didn’t cut immigration and Johnson just talked about control but wouldn’t commit to reducing it. Hunt was right.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
I am not particularly pro Goodwin, but this is unfair. His academic stuff is his published academic work. Feel free to review it critically. He is also a polemicist and politically engaged, as are many academics, mostly on the left. Nearly all politicking is polemic, distorted, one sided, limited. Gosh. Who knew?
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
You also have to mentally construct ab elite so all encompassing as to be 75% or more of the British population.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
I searched for that quote on Google, but the only result is you quoting the same thing in April this year. I assume it's paraphrased?
Yes it's paraphrased, although that is more or less what he said even down to "our friends".
I'm old, unlike you youngsters I can't quote the great man's every utterance verbatim.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
I am not particularly pro Goodwin, but this is unfair. His academic stuff is his published academic work. Feel free to review it critically. He is also a polemicist and politically engaged, as are many academics, mostly on the left. Nearly all politicking is polemic, distorted, one sided, limited. Gosh. Who knew?
His academic stuff may be academic and peer reviewed etc but his Tweets etc are not.
And like many people who spend their lives in the swamp that is Twitter he seems to have been driven mad by it and has become more and more extreme as time goes on.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
If Goodwin could perhaps demonstrate somewhere else that followed alternative policies, and which was thriving, then I would take his prognostications a lot more seriously.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
There has to be a name for a true statement that everyone ignores because the person saying it is such a well-known and fluent liar.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
If Goodwin could perhaps demonstrate somewhere else that followed alternative policies, and which was thriving, then I would take his prognostications a lot more seriously.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
To be fair he is partially right in pointing out that the Conservative party have promised low immigration but facilitated and legislated for high immigration whilst at the same time not just failing to build infrastructure and housing but also massively cutting budgets from councils and public services.
He just doesn't like calling the elite the Conservative party and comes to the wrong conclusions. The answer is build infrastructure, housing and decent public services.
I don’t really get why people seem to think Jenrick would be a disaster. He is quite effective.
I personally can’t stand him but divorcing my views from the situation they can surely do far worse.
I don't think he'll last until the next GE as leader if he wins in autumn.
He will do nothing to shift the polls and will prove unpopular with public because he's just another public school over promoted oxbridge lawyer who owns about five huge houses.
The gammons and chavs don't mind a bit of posh as long as they are transgressive or what passes for funny in right wing circles. Johnson, Farage, etc.
As Jenrick is as funny as having piles and the flu at the same he'll have to rely on being an outspoken populist delivering thick ropes of common sense jizz into the screaming faces of the wokerati. He'd probably be at least ok at that. If he makes it to LotO his big challenge will maintaining coherence and discipline over the knot of elapids that is the tory party. Nothing we have seen from him to date suggests he'd be any use at that at all.
He's short on the 'likeability' factor though. That's my take anyway. When I spent some time listening to him recently (for betting purposes) I thought, "this man is very hard to like, and I'm not sure people are going to manage it."
The next Tory leader has to survive the locals next May. It is County and Unitary. Unless something significant happens the Tories are going to get an absolute hammering. Beyond any shadow of a doubt they are going to lose Surrey County Council. They have only lost it once, in 1993, and then they were still the largest party. I think there is a possibility the LDs might take control, which they have never done.
Yes they're in a deep hole. And remembering how irritated I used to get when Tories would spray around advice to Labour when the situation was reversed I think I'll be a good citizen and refrain from doing too much of that now.
But if pushed ... I think they should pick Cleverly with a mandate of just stopping the rot.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
I am not particularly pro Goodwin, but this is unfair. His academic stuff is his published academic work. Feel free to review it critically. He is also a polemicist and politically engaged, as are many academics, mostly on the left. Nearly all politicking is polemic, distorted, one sided, limited. Gosh. Who knew?
He no longer seems to feel the need to reference his hypotheses with any level of rigour.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
A handful of people - with access to several tonnes of high explosive!
If it was the Ukrainian equivalent of the SOE, is anybody outside Moscow going to get too bent out of shape? It all acted as a spur for Germany to move away from hydrocarbons so the planet says "Yay!"
It was a couple of hundred kilos.
In some parts of the world you can buy explosives over the counter in considerable quantities.
Every moderate sized quarry has an explosives shed.
Except, it was "more than" 450 kgs of military-grade explosives....
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
Plenty of people want the Orwellian. The accidental crushing of a percentage of people under the State's wheels is perfectly acceptable to quite a few at the Home Office. Or in the police.
See people dragged through the courts over cloned number plates. The attitude seems to be "We have evidence that *could* connect you to a crime. Therefore we will go after you as if we have proved it beyond all doubt."
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
There are places, lots of them, that have lost their original purpose. Faded seaside resorts, military bases, towns based on one industry that we don't need so much any more, market towns where the market has moved online or elsewhere. The place I grew up is struggling with the first two, and the place I live now has aspects of the last one.
And transitioning to something else is painful. Especially for older dogs who don't particularly want to learn new tricks. That's your core RefUK demographic, both geographically and socially.
So yes, there's a real problem, probably made worse by austerity reducing the money that can cushion the blow. But where Goodwin is utterly wrong is seeing an elite conspiracy.
Take seaside resorts. They're not struggling because of schemes in sinister offices. Their problem is that abroad is nicer for holidays; more interesting, better weather, better value. If people can go to Corfu easily, why the hell would they want to go to Clacton? And that's globalisation in a nutshell.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
If Goodwin could perhaps demonstrate somewhere else that followed alternative policies, and which was thriving, then I would take his prognostications a lot more seriously.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
but the money is in providing a platform of half brained, quarter baked theories pandering to uncritical thinkers who want their thinking done for them..
And he's found a very profitable (for the moment) niche doing just that.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
I always thought it somewhat likely a rogue element associated with Ukrainian security services was responsible for blowing up the Nordstream pipeline. But if so they acted against Ukraine's interest. The attack sent a message to Russia, but even more so to Germany, at a time when Ukraine was dependent on German support, when that support wasn't necessarily forthcoming.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
You're assuming national level involvement. Mind you, everyone seems to.
The pipelines were marked on standard navigation charts. The water isn't that deep. A handful of people could have done this quite easily.
A handful of people - with access to several tonnes of high explosive!
If it was the Ukrainian equivalent of the SOE, is anybody outside Moscow going to get too bent out of shape? It all acted as a spur for Germany to move away from hydrocarbons so the planet says "Yay!"
It was a couple of hundred kilos.
In some parts of the world you can buy explosives over the counter in considerable quantities.
Every moderate sized quarry has an explosives shed.
Except, it was "more than" 450 kgs of military-grade explosives....
Military grade doesn't mean much. Bit like "military grade encryption". They probably meant "Not fertilisers and diesel".
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
There are places, lots of them, that have lost their original purpose. Faded seaside resorts, military bases, towns based on one industry that we don't need so much any more, market towns where the market has moved online or elsewhere. The place I grew up is struggling with the first two, and the place I live now has aspects of the last one.
And transitioning to something else is painful. Especially for older dogs who don't particularly want to learn new tricks. That's your core RefUK demographic, both geographically and socially.
So yes, there's a real problem, probably made worse by austerity reducing the money that can cushion the blow. But where Goodwin is utterly wrong is seeing an elite conspiracy.
Take seaside resorts. They're not struggling because of schemes in sinister offices. Their problem is that abroad is nicer for holidays; more interesting, better weather, better value. If people can go to Corfu easily, why the hell would they want to go to Clacton? And that's globalisation in a nutshell.
Global warming - July/August 40-45 degrees Corfu, 20-30 degrees Clacton. I'll take Clacton.....and walk up to Frinton.....
She would be better advised to see the funny side, laugh it off, make a joke about herself and so on.
"I'm here, where is this mythical lettuce?" or something like that.
Storming off just gives people an incentive to do it again.
Letting it go water off a duck's back means it stops being funny.
A major problem for Truss was and is that she has literally no sense of humour.
Humour. Really.
Led By Donkeys are tedious wankers just going after a political irrelevance. She was a useless PM promoted way in excess of her abilities but this is verging on the bullying now.
Considering she's speaking about politics, no its not, its fair game.
If this was happening at a social/family event then that'd be a different matter.
Free speech cuts both ways.
I am generally uncomfortable with humour which is designed to embarrass. So I'm a little squeamish about these banners - even the Farage one.
Context as always is key. What is this event they have hijacked? Its Truss, addressing a very small group of Trump supporters, championing both the crook and the "free speech" nonsense where freedom is supporting Yaxley-Lennon.
Reminding her micro audience that she has zero credibility is absolutely free speech. Not bullying as she is sat there claiming some kind of relevant experience which puts her on the stage.
The post on social media afterwards is getting closer to the line though.
"Look at us, aren't we clever. Let's all point and laugh at this broken non-entity trying to rebuild her life after a very public failure".
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
There are places, lots of them, that have lost their original purpose. Faded seaside resorts, military bases, towns based on one industry that we don't need so much any more, market towns where the market has moved online or elsewhere. The place I grew up is struggling with the first two, and the place I live now has aspects of the last one.
And transitioning to something else is painful. Especially for older dogs who don't particularly want to learn new tricks. That's your core RefUK demographic, both geographically and socially.
So yes, there's a real problem, probably made worse by austerity reducing the money that can cushion the blow. But where Goodwin is utterly wrong is seeing an elite conspiracy.
Take seaside resorts. They're not struggling because of schemes in sinister offices. Their problem is that abroad is nicer for holidays; more interesting, better weather, better value. If people can go to Corfu easily, why the hell would they want to go to Clacton? And that's globalisation in a nutshell.
What's worse for the seaside resorts is that there isn't a critical mass of skilled working people to encourage replacement businesses to go there. Take Redcar or Blackpool as examples, what type of business / manufacturing anything wants to be an extra 40 minutes away from the main roads. You aren't going to get distribution centres there and even manufacturers will pause for thought...
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
If Goodwin could perhaps demonstrate somewhere else that followed alternative policies, and which was thriving, then I would take his prognostications a lot more seriously.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
but the money is in providing a platform of half brained, quarter baked theories pandering to uncritical thinkers who want their thinking done for them..
And he's found a very profitable (for the moment) niche doing just that.
"half brained, quarter baked theories pandering to uncritical thinkers who want their thinking done for them"
Is this a reference to the Tory leadership contest?
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
There are places, lots of them, that have lost their original purpose. Faded seaside resorts, military bases, towns based on one industry that we don't need so much any more, market towns where the market has moved online or elsewhere. The place I grew up is struggling with the first two, and the place I live now has aspects of the last one.
And transitioning to something else is painful. Especially for older dogs who don't particularly want to learn new tricks. That's your core RefUK demographic, both geographically and socially.
So yes, there's a real problem, probably made worse by austerity reducing the money that can cushion the blow. But where Goodwin is utterly wrong is seeing an elite conspiracy.
Take seaside resorts. They're not struggling because of schemes in sinister offices. Their problem is that abroad is nicer for holidays; more interesting, better weather, better value. If people can go to Corfu easily, why the hell would they want to go to Clacton? And that's globalisation in a nutshell.
I wouldn't call that globalisation, I'd say that's technological progress.
We not only can't but shouldn't uninvent the wheel. Holidays being affordable is a good thing, places that are struggling need to adapt.
Seaside towns have an opportunity to adapt if they want as many people will pay good money to live by the beach, they don't need to be cheap tat holiday resorts.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
There are places, lots of them, that have lost their original purpose. Faded seaside resorts, military bases, towns based on one industry that we don't need so much any more, market towns where the market has moved online or elsewhere. The place I grew up is struggling with the first two, and the place I live now has aspects of the last one.
And transitioning to something else is painful. Especially for older dogs who don't particularly want to learn new tricks. That's your core RefUK demographic, both geographically and socially.
So yes, there's a real problem, probably made worse by austerity reducing the money that can cushion the blow. But where Goodwin is utterly wrong is seeing an elite conspiracy.
Take seaside resorts. They're not struggling because of schemes in sinister offices. Their problem is that abroad is nicer for holidays; more interesting, better weather, better value. If people can go to Corfu easily, why the hell would they want to go to Clacton? And that's globalisation in a nutshell.
Is that the core RefUK vote? What do we know... the Reform UK was more male, it was older, it was more C2DE. It was very strongly associated with less education. It was slightly associated with lower income. More social renters. It was very White and very Leave voter. Geographically, it was strongest on the east coast, but not other faded seaside resorts.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
If Goodwin could perhaps demonstrate somewhere else that followed alternative policies, and which was thriving, then I would take his prognostications a lot more seriously.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
To be fair he is partially right in pointing out that the Conservative party have promised low immigration but facilitated and legislated for high immigration whilst at the same time not just failing to build infrastructure and housing but also massively cutting budgets from councils and public services.
He just doesn't like calling the elite the Conservative party and comes to the wrong conclusions. The answer is build infrastructure, housing and decent public services.
She would be better advised to see the funny side, laugh it off, make a joke about herself and so on.
"I'm here, where is this mythical lettuce?" or something like that.
Storming off just gives people an incentive to do it again.
Letting it go water off a duck's back means it stops being funny.
A major problem for Truss was and is that she has literally no sense of humour.
Humour. Really.
Led By Donkeys are tedious wankers just going after a political irrelevance. She was a useless PM promoted way in excess of her abilities but this is verging on the bullying now.
Considering she's speaking about politics, no its not, its fair game.
If this was happening at a social/family event then that'd be a different matter.
Free speech cuts both ways.
I am generally uncomfortable with humour which is designed to embarrass. So I'm a little squeamish about these banners - even the Farage one.
Context as always is key. What is this event they have hijacked? Its Truss, addressing a very small group of Trump supporters, championing both the crook and the "free speech" nonsense where freedom is supporting Yaxley-Lennon.
Reminding her micro audience that she has zero credibility is absolutely free speech. Not bullying as she is sat there claiming some kind of relevant experience which puts her on the stage.
The post on social media afterwards is getting closer to the line though.
"Look at us, aren't we clever. Let's all point and laugh at this broken non-entity trying to rebuild her life after a very public failure".
Not nice at all.
I think private citizens have a right not to be harassed, so I'm sympathetic to Truss on this one.
My irritation is with her insistence on being given the normal respect accorded to former prime ministers when she never made it through probation. So she will be attending state occasions in that capacity for decades. And will be encouraged to pontificate on every topic she has no expertise in.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
I always thought it somewhat likely a rogue element associated with Ukrainian security services was responsible for blowing up the Nordstream pipeline. But if so they acted against Ukraine's interest. The attack sent a message to Russia, but even more so to Germany, at a time when Ukraine was dependent on German support, when that support wasn't necessarily forthcoming.
That sounds plausible. but naming him as Volodymyr Z for privacy reasons is peculiar. Sounds almost farcical......... Serbia was blamed for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand with all the subsequent consequences but I don't think that's ever been proven as state sponsored.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
A free country is one where a person is free to do crime but not free to avoid the sentence. The state should serve its people, not domesticate them.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
I am not particularly pro Goodwin, but this is unfair. His academic stuff is his published academic work. Feel free to review it critically. He is also a polemicist and politically engaged, as are many academics, mostly on the left. Nearly all politicking is polemic, distorted, one sided, limited. Gosh. Who knew?
You're saying it's unfair to him to expect some semblance of intellectual heft in his musings ?
Regarding seaside towns, its quite possible to have both successful and unsuccessful seaside towns just a few miles apart.
In the Northwest I'd say Blackpool fits within the Clacton stereotype of a struggling seaside resort that is no longer as attractive as it was to British tourists, though it still gets a lot of tourist income its quite run down in places.
Just a few miles down the road though in Lytham it is clean, busy still at the beach but not run down or tatty and with lots of well off homes and businesses in the area. Fylde was narrowly held by the Tories even in 2024. Quite a bit of construction going on in Lytham too as people want to move there, which is a good thing in my view, you know what I think about construction, but its certainly not blighted.
Clacton should have better weather than Lytham and quite a few opportunities, how you get it to go from failing to successful I'm not entirely certain but its not impossible and there's no reason for seaside to be blighted by nature, quite the opposite.
One of the bigger issues is that success breeds success and failure breeds failure.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
No, let's not.
Your attitude is disappointing but it doesn't matter since we don't have the tech yet. It's years away. Hopefully you'll be less knee-jerk hostile by then.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
Indeed, Johnson explained that when the Eastern Europeans returned home after Brexit we could fill vacancies with "our friends from the Indian Subcontinent". Johnson, for once, told the truth.
There has to be a name for a true statement that everyone ignores because the person saying it is such a well-known and fluent liar.
For the statement maker there's Matilda and the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
I always thought it somewhat likely a rogue element associated with Ukrainian security services was responsible for blowing up the Nordstream pipeline. But if so they acted against Ukraine's interest. The attack sent a message to Russia, but even more so to Germany, at a time when Ukraine was dependent on German support, when that support wasn't necessarily forthcoming.
That sounds plausible. but naming him as Volodymyr Z for privacy reasons is peculiar. Sounds almost farcical......... Serbia was blamed for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand with all the subsequent consequences but I don't think that's ever been proven as state sponsored.
That's just how the German legal system works. Reporting of surnames is verboten.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
A free country is one where a person is free to do crime but not free to avoid the sentence. The state should serve its people, not domesticate them.
As described up thread number plate recognition would be used to pick up actual crimes previously committed - driving without insurance, swapping number plates. That these infractions may indicate more serious crimes doesn't change that.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
No, let's not.
Your attitude is disappointing but it doesn't matter since we don't have the tech yet. It's years away. Hopefully you'll be less knee-jerk hostile by then.
The state spying on people and judging people before they've acted is illiberal and never OK, even if the tech were there.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
A free country is one where a person is free to do crime but not free to avoid the sentence. The state should serve its people, not domesticate them.
As described up thread number plate recognition would be used to pick up actual crimes previously committed - driving without insurance, swapping number plates. That these infractions may indicate more serious crimes doesn't change that.
Yes, its a completely different proposal to precog etc.
I would be opposed to the Police being able to track vehicles that have not committed any crime, that's Orwellian and illiberal.
The Police dealing with people who have broken the law, after they break the law, that's a totally different matter.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
No, let's not.
Your attitude is disappointing but it doesn't matter since we don't have the tech yet. It's years away. Hopefully you'll be less knee-jerk hostile by then.
You seem unable to conceive of the state acting malevolently.
Despite the recent example of the Post Office, the Met and many more.
At the very least, they will take the attitude of "Computer says guilty". They have always done so, previously. And show no signs of learning.
Since no technology can be 100% accurate this will mean that they will be quite willing to punish innocent people for crimes they didn't commit.
There's Westminster polling from BMG taken between the 5th and 7th of August:
Lab 33% Con 24% Ref 18% LD 12% Grn 8% SNP 2%
Isn't that more or less the GE with a slight uptick for Ref. ?
Methodology for the Labour figure has been been furiously back pedaled by the looks of it.
Do we know of any methodology changes? It could be explained by false recall being less of an effect, for example.
After an election the pollsters recalibrate their weights. The numbers the polls produce are changed by the pollsters using "weights": multipliers designed to fix their unbalanced responses to match the population and to change the output by turnout. Weights are intelligent guesses based on the past but they are guesses and are usually wrong. Sometimes they are wrong by a lot, sometimes by a little, but either way they need fixing. Elections provide a good test of the weights so when elections happen the weights are recalibrated.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
I am not particularly pro Goodwin, but this is unfair. His academic stuff is his published academic work. Feel free to review it critically. He is also a polemicist and politically engaged, as are many academics, mostly on the left. Nearly all politicking is polemic, distorted, one sided, limited. Gosh. Who knew?
You're saying it's unfair to him to expect some semblance of intellectual heft in his musings ?
You're probably right.
There's intellectual heft in SOME of his musings. I do think saying that the real cause of the riots is the ruling elites is no more sensible than calling them the Farage riots. I suppose borrowing from a very leftwing playbook you could argue that the ruling elites are the only people with power or agency and so de facto they can be the only ones responsible.
Regarding seaside towns, its quite possible to have both successful and unsuccessful seaside towns just a few miles apart.
In the Northwest I'd say Blackpool fits within the Clacton stereotype of a struggling seaside resort that is no longer as attractive as it was to British tourists, though it still gets a lot of tourist income its quite run down in places.
Just a few miles down the road though in Lytham it is clean, busy still at the beach but not run down or tatty and with lots of well off homes and businesses in the area. Fylde was narrowly held by the Tories even in 2024. Quite a bit of construction going on in Lytham too as people want to move there, which is a good thing in my view, you know what I think about construction, but its certainly not blighted.
Clacton should have better weather than Lytham and quite a few opportunities, how you get it to go from failing to successful I'm not entirely certain but its not impossible and there's no reason for seaside to be blighted by nature, quite the opposite.
One of the bigger issues is that success breeds success and failure breeds failure.
You could equally compare Frinton with Clacton. Chalk and cheese!
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
I confess I've only seen the film, rather than read the bokk, but it's not my memory that the perp gets a shot at rehabilitation. Rather, the perp gets imprisoned (in, I think, a weird futuristic prison, but that's not important) as if he had committed the crime. I don't know if that changes your position? I'm all for the police stopping murders, of course.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
A free country is one where a person is free to do crime but not free to avoid the sentence. The state should serve its people, not domesticate them.
Right - but is that a philosophical assertion or a born-of-pragmatism one?
Eg assuming it really was possible to head off all pre-meditated murder by use of infallible Pre-Cog technology, would you still say no, that's wrong?
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
No, let's not.
Your attitude is disappointing but it doesn't matter since we don't have the tech yet. It's years away. Hopefully you'll be less knee-jerk hostile by then.
You seem unable to conceive of the state acting malevolently.
Despite the recent example of the Post Office, the Met and many more.
At the very least, they will take the attitude of "Computer says guilty". They have always done so, previously. And show no signs of learning.
Since no technology can be 100% accurate this will mean that they will be quite willing to punish innocent people for crimes they didn't commit.
Computer says guilty is current UK law - which is going to be a problem as AIs are computers and therefore 100% accurate even what they think is a complete hallucination
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
No, let's not.
Your attitude is disappointing but it doesn't matter since we don't have the tech yet. It's years away. Hopefully you'll be less knee-jerk hostile by then.
The state spying on people and judging people before they've acted is illiberal and never OK, even if the tech were there.
So, the state shouldn't try to infiltrate extremist organisations that might be set on future terrorist attacks? And no-one should be ever tried for conspiracy?
In a further slight enshittification of cricket, the BBC is now reporting scores in the Hundred just by teams' confected nicknames e.g. 'Spirit' 'Fire'. So not only do I now have to translate "Southern" - ah, they mean "Hampshire"; I have to go through two stages i.e. "Brave" - who are ... brave? ah, yes, "Southern" - so they must mean Hampshire.
It's as if the ECB hadn't noticed the existence of the T20 blast, which does everything they wanted the Hundred to do, only much better.
Hmm, maybe I was wrong. I always thought the idea of the Hundred was just to kill off the counties that don't have Test grounds, but maybe it's to kill off the county structure entirely.
Durham isn't part of the Hundred - so it wasn't all counties with Test grounds...
Edit and I enjoy a good (heck even a bad) one day or T20 match. For some reason I just don't like the Hundred...
Is CLS still a Test ground? I don't recall one there for a while.
Last one was Sri Lanka, IIRC, a few years back. We get a one dayer every year.
There's Westminster polling from BMG taken between the 5th and 7th of August:
Lab 33% Con 24% Ref 18% LD 12% Grn 8% SNP 2%
Isn't that more or less the GE with a slight uptick for Ref. ?
Methodology for the Labour figure has been been furiously back pedaled by the looks of it.
Do we know of any methodology changes? It could be explained by false recall being less of an effect, for example.
After an election the pollsters recalibrate their weights. The numbers the polls produce are changed by the pollsters using "weights": multipliers designed to fix their unbalanced responses to match the population and to change the output by turnout. Weights are intelligent guesses based on the past but they are guesses and are usually wrong. Sometimes they are wrong by a lot, sometimes by a little, but either way they need fixing. Elections provide a good test of the weights so when elections happen the weights are recalibrated.
So they should be getting more accurate? Or do the 'weights' vary randomly each time?
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
I always thought it somewhat likely a rogue element associated with Ukrainian security services was responsible for blowing up the Nordstream pipeline. But if so they acted against Ukraine's interest. The attack sent a message to Russia, but even more so to Germany, at a time when Ukraine was dependent on German support, when that support wasn't necessarily forthcoming.
That sounds plausible. but naming him as Volodymyr Z for privacy reasons is peculiar. Sounds almost farcical......... Serbia was blamed for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand with all the subsequent consequences but I don't think that's ever been proven as state sponsored.
That's just how the German legal system works. Reporting of surnames is verboten.
Well maybe it's just unfortunate that when you say Volodymyr Z a particular person is likely to come to mind which will encourage people to believe it was a state sanctioned attack.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
I confess I've only seen the film, rather than read the bokk, but it's not my memory that the perp gets a shot at rehabilitation. Rather, the perp gets imprisoned (in, I think, a weird futuristic prison, but that's not important) as if he had committed the crime. I don't know if that changes your position? I'm all for the police stopping murders, of course.
I proceed on the following basis
1) No technology is 100% accurate 2) Many times, states have proceeded on the basis that "Computer says guilty" = 100% guilty. 3) Corruption and malevolent behaviour is inevitable in any organisation. 4) What is done to black people at breakfast, will be done to the Jews by lunch time and the Muslims by afternoon tea. It will happen to me at supper time.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
Orwellian is the total surveillance. Which leads, inevitably, to corruption.
Or did you think Dr Raymond Cocteau was the hero?
As I said, devil in the detail. Nobody wants anything Orwellian. The "Pre Cog" tech, when it's invented, has to pass the cost/benefit test.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
No, let's not.
Your attitude is disappointing but it doesn't matter since we don't have the tech yet. It's years away. Hopefully you'll be less knee-jerk hostile by then.
The state spying on people and judging people before they've acted is illiberal and never OK, even if the tech were there.
So, the state shouldn't try to infiltrate extremist organisations that might be set on future terrorist attacks? And no-one should be ever tried for conspiracy?
The state shouldn't have a blank cheque to spy on everyone and where applicable should require a warrant to do so. "This makes it easier for us to spy on extremists" is not an excuse to let the state spy on everyone.
Conspiracy is a crime, so prosecuting people for that is not prejudging them.
In a further slight enshittification of cricket, the BBC is now reporting scores in the Hundred just by teams' confected nicknames e.g. 'Spirit' 'Fire'. So not only do I now have to translate "Southern" - ah, they mean "Hampshire"; I have to go through two stages i.e. "Brave" - who are ... brave? ah, yes, "Southern" - so they must mean Hampshire.
It's as if the ECB hadn't noticed the existence of the T20 blast, which does everything they wanted the Hundred to do, only much better.
Hmm, maybe I was wrong. I always thought the idea of the Hundred was just to kill off the counties that don't have Test grounds, but maybe it's to kill off the county structure entirely.
Durham isn't part of the Hundred - so it wasn't all counties with Test grounds...
Edit and I enjoy a good (heck even a bad) one day or T20 match. For some reason I just don't like the Hundred...
My wife and I both really enjoy a day out at the T20 at Riverside. Been to a couple this year. One was a double header with a womens game which was also very good.
Cannot stand the Hundred.
I also like the way they have all the streetfood and entertainment at the back of the Don Robson stand. Makes it more of a day out.
They also have the food festival there in 6 or so weeks which is ace.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
I confess I've only seen the film, rather than read the bokk, but it's not my memory that the perp gets a shot at rehabilitation. Rather, the perp gets imprisoned (in, I think, a weird futuristic prison, but that's not important) as if he had committed the crime. I don't know if that changes your position? I'm all for the police stopping murders, of course.
Philip K. Dick was a very imaginative writer, who also took way too many drugs. It's a great film, but the idea is a result of drug-fuelled paranoia, not a documentary. I'm unclear why it's being discussed as some sort of achievable reality.
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
I confess I've only seen the film, rather than read the bokk, but it's not my memory that the perp gets a shot at rehabilitation. Rather, the perp gets imprisoned (in, I think, a weird futuristic prison, but that's not important) as if he had committed the crime. I don't know if that changes your position? I'm all for the police stopping murders, of course.
Philip K. Dick was a very imaginative writer, who also took way too many drugs. It's a great film, but the idea is a result of drug-fuelled paranoia, not a documentary. I'm unclear why it's being discussed as some sort of achievable reality.
Because @kinabalu finds it an attractive proposition he'd like, rather than a dystopian nightmare to avoid.
Regarding seaside towns, its quite possible to have both successful and unsuccessful seaside towns just a few miles apart.
In the Northwest I'd say Blackpool fits within the Clacton stereotype of a struggling seaside resort that is no longer as attractive as it was to British tourists, though it still gets a lot of tourist income its quite run down in places.
Just a few miles down the road though in Lytham it is clean, busy still at the beach but not run down or tatty and with lots of well off homes and businesses in the area. Fylde was narrowly held by the Tories even in 2024. Quite a bit of construction going on in Lytham too as people want to move there, which is a good thing in my view, you know what I think about construction, but its certainly not blighted.
Clacton should have better weather than Lytham and quite a few opportunities, how you get it to go from failing to successful I'm not entirely certain but its not impossible and there's no reason for seaside to be blighted by nature, quite the opposite.
One of the bigger issues is that success breeds success and failure breeds failure.
You could equally compare Frinton with Clacton. Chalk and cheese!
Yes, but the point is why?
On seaside towns: I was in De Haan, Belgium, on Monday. It's fucking lovely*. I realised I had formed a stereotype in my head of what seaside towns are like: straight coastline - brash lowest common denominator or dull retirement community (Skegness or Worthing). Jagged coastline: charming but possibly over-busy touristified fishing village (Looe or Salcombe). But De Haan (flat coastline) was neither, and both. It was clean and prosperous and charming and bustling, with an excellent beach, appealing shops and cafes, and impeccable parks and gardens. There's no reason I can see that British seaside towns can't be like this, and no doubt some were, once.
*Standards of travel writing around here are already slipping.
OT, just had an email from Octopus. They're offering free electricity (beyond what you normally use) between 1pm and 2pm tomorrow, which is a first. May as well charge the car up a bit.
OT, just had an email from Octopus. They're offering free electricity (beyond what you normally use) between 1pm and 2pm tomorrow, which is a first. May as well charge the car up a bit.
"German authorities have issued an arrest warrant over the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines nearly two years ago, according to German news outlets ARD, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Zeit.
In an investigation published Wednesday, the outlets reported that the suspect is a Ukrainian diving instructor, named only as Volodymyr Z. for privacy reasons.
It is alleged he attacked the pipelines in tandem with at least two others, who are also believed to be Ukrainian citizens.
The suspect was believed to last be living in Poland, but Polish authorities said they could not act on the warrant because he had left the country."
Utterly disgraceful to be wanting to arrest a Ukrainian for attacking Russian infrastructure during a war Russia has started.
Shame on Germany.
Massive fuckup by Ukraine if they got caught carrying out pointless international terrorism and so risk public support in what could soon be their most important ally. Different thing if they destroy pipelines in Russia - and they have had plenty of opportunity to destroy the ones that go via Ukraine which are still running, but they havent. Not a good look.
Err russia invades ukraine they at war. That is not terrorism any more than french resistance fighters blowing up infrastructure was
https://www.greaterlondon.co/p/safer-streets ...About eight percent of those killed on the road each year – 130 people – are killed by that one percent of uninsured drivers. According to West Mercia Police, uninsured drivers are also ten times more likely to be a convicted drink driver, six times more likely to have a defective vehicle, and five times more likely to get caught speeding by cameras. Clearly not all serious car crimes are committed by those driving without insurance, but a significant fraction are.
What makes this especially notable is that there is an easy way we could make a big difference to the number of uninsured and untaxed drivers on London’s streets, making the roads safer for other road users. You will already know that there are about 2,000 cameras around London, which use automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) to enforce the congestion charge, ultra-low emissions zone, and more. They’re also accessible by police.
Police cars have their own cameras. If one of the police cameras sees an uninsured or untaxed car it pings the policeman automatically and they can decide whether to pursue and stop it. But the vast majority of cameras, the non-police cameras that you go past every day on London’s roads, don’t alert them: they just pump the data (which numberplates were where) into a database.
To be clear, the police are allowed to access this information, they just don’t get sent it by default. If they did manually pore over the records they would find all the uninsured and untaxed drivers driving around, plus those previously used for crimes, and those with suspicious plates. But by the time they did that the car would be long gone, so in practice the perpetrators get away with it practically every time. What the Met need is an automatic ping, like they get with their own cameras.
This could go beyond telling police where uninsured drivers are going. Cloning number plates is itself a crime, but it is also only useful if you are trying to cover up another crime by pretending to be someone else, so picking up those driving with fake numberplates could help prevent many other crimes. It would only take a simple predictive system, which looked at where the car was registered, and where it had last been tracked by cameras, to identify and rapidly investigate suspicious cars...
I suspect that such surveillance would payoff by detecting a lot of other crimes and antisocial behavior.
Nick them and confiscate their vehicles.
If we surveil people 24hrs a day and combine it with numerous "nudge" and hate-crime programs, we can realistically reduce crime and antisocial behaviour to zero...
...But having built Hell, who would want to live in it?
You’re so unambitious, we want to focus on pre-crime like in Minority Report.
I loved that film and was quite attracted to the idea of arresting a perp before he gets to actually perp. Devil in the detail though.
Honestly? You do realise it's supposed to be a dystopia?
Yep, but in theory I like it. If you really could home in on a person who was tracking for absolute certain to carry out murder most foul, planning done, route scouted, knife cleaned and sharpened, mentally 100% resolved, and today is the day. So off he goes, buys his ticket ... but then bam, the Authorities swoop in and he is foiled. Crime doesn't happen. Victim lives. Perp gets a shot at rehabilitation.
Nothing Orwellian about that. It's a deeply benign vision.
I confess I've only seen the film, rather than read the bokk, but it's not my memory that the perp gets a shot at rehabilitation. Rather, the perp gets imprisoned (in, I think, a weird futuristic prison, but that's not important) as if he had committed the crime. I don't know if that changes your position? I'm all for the police stopping murders, of course.
Philip K. Dick was a very imaginative writer, who also took way too many drugs. It's a great film, but the idea is a result of drug-fuelled paranoia, not a documentary. I'm unclear why it's being discussed as some sort of achievable reality.
Because @kinabalu finds it an attractive proposition he'd like, rather than a dystopian nightmare to avoid.
I find the idea of marrying Taylor Swift an attractive proposition, but it's not going to happen!
If one wants to engage with kinabalu's position, surely the only sensible approach is in terms of literary criticism. kinabalu, you concur that Dick, and the film adapters, were putting forth what they intended to be a dystopia. So, how does your perception of the vision as "benign" interact with the narrative's intention?
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
If Goodwin could perhaps demonstrate somewhere else that followed alternative policies, and which was thriving, then I would take his prognostications a lot more seriously.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
Goodwin is commenting on the gap between how 'liberal elites' view the world and how 'ordinary people' view the world, a well known problem common to all countries, to a varying degree.
The error he seems to be making in his recent comments is that he seems to suggest the riots have some popular support. In fact the rioting is a small group causing disproportionate amounts of damage and conflict, they aren't popular at all, that is clear from all the polls, even the ones he is quoting.
He is right though that there is some sympathy with the underlying problem (concern about immigration and multiculturalism)., and elites are not very good at dealing with that, which is likely to push people towards more radical positions over time. He is warning about this, as many others have done before, and the problems prevail.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ · 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
There are places, lots of them, that have lost their original purpose. Faded seaside resorts, military bases, towns based on one industry that we don't need so much any more, market towns where the market has moved online or elsewhere. The place I grew up is struggling with the first two, and the place I live now has aspects of the last one.
And transitioning to something else is painful. Especially for older dogs who don't particularly want to learn new tricks. That's your core RefUK demographic, both geographically and socially.
So yes, there's a real problem, probably made worse by austerity reducing the money that can cushion the blow. But where Goodwin is utterly wrong is seeing an elite conspiracy.
Take seaside resorts. They're not struggling because of schemes in sinister offices. Their problem is that abroad is nicer for holidays; more interesting, better weather, better value. If people can go to Corfu easily, why the hell would they want to go to Clacton? And that's globalisation in a nutshell.
I would take Goodwin seriously on this if he dropped the "Elite conspiracy" stuff. He does have a point about the left behind communities and globalisation has had an impact on communities as old manufacturing jobs have moved to lower cost economies. The problem is not so much globalisation such as the moving of high labour intensive jobs overseas, the problem is what replaced it was very often minimum wage jobs in call centres and warehouses rather than higher skilled, better paying jobs.
Matt Goodwin @GoodwinMJ 1h "It wasn’t Farage who decimated the communities that saw the worst rioting by ushering in globalisation, mass immigration, & deindustrialisation; it was the elite class. It wasn’t Farage who promised they'd lower immigration only to do the opposite; it was the elite class"
If Goodwin could perhaps demonstrate somewhere else that followed alternative policies, and which was thriving, then I would take his prognostications a lot more seriously.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
If he can’t critique the past decade of government with insight or honesty, he has no chance of providing solutions. But then again, like much of the political class he condemns, his training is pretty well exclusively in politics and philosophy.
OT, just had an email from Octopus. They're offering free electricity (beyond what you normally use) between 1pm and 2pm tomorrow, which is a first. May as well charge the car up a bit.
Presumably it's part of the move they are trying to encourage towards pricing adjusted demand - and I guess they predict large amounts of solar and wind generation tomorrow such that the wholesale electricity price goes negative (or close to). It's the same thing (although other side of the coin) as the 'turn everything off between 5 and 7 on this cold, winters day and we'll pay you for the reduction in demand from normal' approach. Interesting though.
Comments
The electorate should not be and should be punishing them for their pro-Putinism, not letting them "have a field day".
Nor should the prosecution service be pandering to them by issuing arrest warrants for Ukrainians defending their country by destroying the invaders infrastructure.
Well done to the attackers.
Shame on Germany.
It's all about class - even @HYUFD bangs on about it at times. Given I thought we'd moved into the classless society, it seems some still obsess about it.
Goodwin's a radical Marxist - who'd have thunk it?
And No.
They should get a medal. But they also destroyed German property. So, they will have committed a criminal offence, no matter how positive their actions were.
No community has been "decimated" by globalisation, immigration and deindustrialisation.
Nor did Boris promise to lower immigration.
The cost of the average motor insurance premium is increased by £53 a year to cover claims for crashes caused by uninsured drivers, according to the Association for British Insurers (ABI) trade body.
For law-abiding drivers this issue is worsened by record high car insurance premiums, with the typical driver paying £627 a year for cover by the end of 2023, the ABI said.
More drivers are considering driving uninsured due to the high cost of living, according to research from The Green Insurer, a broker, in December 2023.
The research found that 7 per cent of drivers admitted to driving uninsured, with 6 per cent saying they were likely to do so in 2024 due to high insurance premiums.
https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-13214763/Car-insurance-costs-fall-government-plans-rip-EU-rules-letting-uninsured-drivers-claim.html
https://site.uit.no/nclos/2023/11/21/did-an-alleged-ukrainian-attack-against-the-nord-stream-pipelines-violate-the-law-of-armed-conflict/
conclusion:
"It is doubtful that the Nord Stream pipelines could have served as a military objective even in the context of the armed conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The Nord Stream pipelines likely did not serve as a civilian object that contributed to a belligerent State’s war-sustaining effort from the perspective of the ongoing international armed conflict in Europe, given that the flow of natural gas from the Russian Federation to Germany had stopped by the time the attacks were launched against the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022. Nor did the perpetrators of the attack give due regard for the protection and preservation of the Baltic Sea marine environment. Based on these reasons, it appears that an attack allegedly attributable to Ukraine against the Nord Stream pipelines was not in conformity with the law of armed conflict."
also their actions were not positive
If it was the Ukrainian equivalent of the SOE, is anybody outside Moscow going to get too bent out of shape? It all acted as a spur for Germany to move away from hydrocarbons so the planet says "Yay!"
Blowing up a pipeline that wasn't being used was a fucking stupid thing to do. The attackers were morons.
He is simply a Reform shill. He demonstrates no academic analysis, and the crucial key to academic rigour is balancing source material to prove one's theory. Just blaming an "elite" into which he would dovetail nicely is a nonsense.
In some parts of the world you can buy explosives over the counter in considerable quantities.
Every moderate sized quarry has an explosives shed.
Is Nigel going to get the blame for the protests kicking off into riots? If so will that melt away soft conservative support that went to Reform?
Seen lots of comments on line in response to the rumours of a clamp down on gifting to avoid inheritance tax, much of it along the lines "hardly anyone pays it anyways, and only rich toffos".
Not sure if that is the case with inheritance tax, the threshold been £325,000, with options to avoid tax by going to spouse. £325,000 is a little above the average house price, with a good number of old people owning their house outright. Lots of people dont talk about wealth openly, but they'll be doing the sums on their Gran's nice little house in Harrogate.
He also dropped the "bringing immigration down to the tens of thousands" pledge that Cameron and May had run on too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgrj2g29kzxo.amp
I'm old, unlike you youngsters I can't quote the great man's every utterance verbatim.
But let's not reject out of hand. Let's keep an open mind until we see what the Authorities come up with on this one.
And like many people who spend their lives in the swamp that is Twitter he seems to have been driven mad by it and has become more and more extreme as time goes on.
But here's the thing: there are countries that are thriving and have lots of immigration (Singapore, Switzerland, Norway, Canada, Australia); there are also countries with very low levels of immigration that are really struggling (like Japan).
Every country needs to - in the long-run - pay its way. When Goodwin rails against globalization, what would he suggest? The UK is a small country, that is highly dependent on the imports of basic materials (food, fertilizer, energy, metals) to keep the lights on and everybody fed. That means we're dependent on exports to pay for those imports. How is Mr Goodwin planning on rolling back globalization, while somehow managing to export enough to pay for the basic raw material imports the country needs?
It's absurd and ridiculous and hyperbolic, and it makes it seem like complex problems have simple solutions. And he should be better than that.
Sodium cyanide: hold my beer.
He just doesn't like calling the elite the Conservative party and comes to the wrong conclusions. The answer is build infrastructure, housing and decent public services.
But if pushed ... I think they should pick Cleverly with a mandate of just stopping the rot.
See people dragged through the courts over cloned number plates. The attitude seems to be "We have evidence that *could* connect you to a crime. Therefore we will go after you as if we have proved it beyond all doubt."
And transitioning to something else is painful. Especially for older dogs who don't particularly want to learn new tricks. That's your core RefUK demographic, both geographically and socially.
So yes, there's a real problem, probably made worse by austerity reducing the money that can cushion the blow. But where Goodwin is utterly wrong is seeing an elite conspiracy.
Take seaside resorts. They're not struggling because of schemes in sinister offices. Their problem is that abroad is nicer for holidays; more interesting, better weather, better value. If people can go to Corfu easily, why the hell would they want to go to Clacton? And that's globalisation in a nutshell.
And he's found a very profitable (for the moment) niche doing just that.
You use TNT or RDX derivatives in quarries.
"Look at us, aren't we clever. Let's all point and laugh at this broken non-entity trying to rebuild her life after a very public failure".
Not nice at all.
Is this a reference to the Tory leadership contest?
We not only can't but shouldn't uninvent the wheel. Holidays being affordable is a good thing, places that are struggling need to adapt.
Seaside towns have an opportunity to adapt if they want as many people will pay good money to live by the beach, they don't need to be cheap tat holiday resorts.
Lab 33%
Con 24%
Ref 18%
LD 12%
Grn 8%
SNP 2%
Methodology for the Labour figure has been been furiously back pedaled by the looks of it.
My irritation is with her insistence on being given the normal respect accorded to former prime ministers when she never made it through probation. So she will be attending state occasions in that capacity for decades. And will be encouraged to pontificate on every topic she has no expertise in.
You're probably right.
In the Northwest I'd say Blackpool fits within the Clacton stereotype of a struggling seaside resort that is no longer as attractive as it was to British tourists, though it still gets a lot of tourist income its quite run down in places.
Just a few miles down the road though in Lytham it is clean, busy still at the beach but not run down or tatty and with lots of well off homes and businesses in the area. Fylde was narrowly held by the Tories even in 2024. Quite a bit of construction going on in Lytham too as people want to move there, which is a good thing in my view, you know what I think about construction, but its certainly not blighted.
Clacton should have better weather than Lytham and quite a few opportunities, how you get it to go from failing to successful I'm not entirely certain but its not impossible and there's no reason for seaside to be blighted by nature, quite the opposite.
One of the bigger issues is that success breeds success and failure breeds failure.
I would be opposed to the Police being able to track vehicles that have not committed any crime, that's Orwellian and illiberal.
The Police dealing with people who have broken the law, after they break the law, that's a totally different matter.
Despite the recent example of the Post Office, the Met and many more.
At the very least, they will take the attitude of "Computer says guilty". They have always done so, previously. And show no signs of learning.
Since no technology can be 100% accurate this will mean that they will be quite willing to punish innocent people for crimes they didn't commit.
https://melaniephillips.substack.com/p/welby
I think Meanie Phillips has been rather more sensible, if typically strident, in her analysis and the possible double standards at work.
Eg assuming it really was possible to head off all pre-meditated murder by use of infallible Pre-Cog technology, would you still say no, that's wrong?
1) No technology is 100% accurate
2) Many times, states have proceeded on the basis that "Computer says guilty" = 100% guilty.
3) Corruption and malevolent behaviour is inevitable in any organisation.
4) What is done to black people at breakfast, will be done to the Jews by lunch time and the Muslims by afternoon tea. It will happen to me at supper time.
Conspiracy is a crime, so prosecuting people for that is not prejudging them.
Cannot stand the Hundred.
I also like the way they have all the streetfood and entertainment at the back of the Don Robson stand. Makes it more of a day out.
They also have the food festival there in 6 or so weeks which is ace.
On seaside towns: I was in De Haan, Belgium, on Monday. It's fucking lovely*. I realised I had formed a stereotype in my head of what seaside towns are like: straight coastline - brash lowest common denominator or dull retirement community (Skegness or Worthing). Jagged coastline: charming but possibly over-busy touristified fishing village (Looe or Salcombe). But De Haan (flat coastline) was neither, and both. It was clean and prosperous and charming and bustling, with an excellent beach, appealing shops and cafes, and impeccable parks and gardens. There's no reason I can see that British seaside towns can't be like this, and no doubt some were, once.
*Standards of travel writing around here are already slipping.
If one wants to engage with kinabalu's position, surely the only sensible approach is in terms of literary criticism. kinabalu, you concur that Dick, and the film adapters, were putting forth what they intended to be a dystopia. So, how does your perception of the vision as "benign" interact with the narrative's intention?
The error he seems to be making in his recent comments is that he seems to suggest the riots have some popular support. In fact the rioting is a small group causing disproportionate amounts of damage and conflict, they aren't popular at all, that is clear from all the polls, even the ones he is quoting.
He is right though that there is some sympathy with the underlying problem (concern about immigration and multiculturalism)., and elites are not very good at dealing with that, which is likely to push people towards more radical positions over time. He is warning about this, as many others have done before, and the problems prevail.
But then again, like much of the political class he condemns, his training is pretty well exclusively in politics and philosophy.
So nothing that's happened in the past month has moved public opinion? 🤔