Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
Re Haigh, there are some things to it all that don’t make a huge amount of sense to me (e.g if you think you’ve lost your phone and you find it isn’t the first thing you do to fess up and admit you were mistaken - oops, so sorry, I thought it was taken but it obviously wasn’t)? The whole thing about it being activated and then the police investigating feels a little weird to me, but then I’m not across the detail so whatever.
I’m someone who doesn’t really like the concept that someone does something in their 20s and that permanently precludes them from doing what they want in life (even a cabinet minister). Though I do think there must be much better ways to deal with disclosure, monitoring, etc. It’s not one I have easy answers to.
What seems odd to me is - where is the info coming from? Not the company (that's a big HR nono under GDPR).
The Times reported multiple people who worked with her at Aviva. I presume it was probably caused quite a stink if a colleague nicked a number of phones and then the police got called in and they ultimately got the sack.
Getting a conviction as a result of this sequence of events seems rough.
"In a statement, Haigh said that she had been mugged on a night out in 2013 whilst working for the insurer Aviva. She said that she gave the police a list of items that she had thought were missing from her handbag, which wrongly included her mobile work phone which she thought was missing at the time.[56] She was issued with a new phone but when her old phone was switched on, she was called in for police questioning.[57] Haigh said that her solicitor had advised her "not to comment" during that interview.[58] She then pleaded guilty to making a false report to police at magistrates' court, six months before she was elected as an MP at the 2015 general election, and received a conditional discharge. Haigh described the incident as a "genuine mistake" from which she "did not make any gain". Sky News reported that two of their sources alleged that Haigh had wanted a more modern work handset that was being given out to her colleagues at the time."
It's when you realise that everything you bought during the previous three or four weeks has had its price artificially inflated....
Magnet quoted me for a new kitchen a few weeks ago. We've got all the appliances in storage, it's a small kitchen, no wall cupboards, six base unit drawer cabinets and worktops and a sink. The "retail" price was £21475.07. Over 21 grand for 6 painted MDF cabinets and a bit of composite worktop! A fantasy price plucked out of an arse as no one ever pays retail price. "Trade" price got it down to just over £6000. I haggled them down to £5500 just by asking. I then hit them with their price matching promise a few days later as DIY Kitchens were coming in with a price of £3600 for a superior kitchen. They said they'd match it! So "£21k" down to under four grand. And they're still making a profit.
DIY Kitchens have a generally good rep.
Back in the 1990s I had 2 Magnet catalogues for consecutive quarters when they changed to a "1/3 off" discount marketing strategy.
All of the listed prices in the 2nd catalogue were precisely 50% higher than those in the first catalogue.
It's when you realise that everything you bought during the previous three or four weeks has had its price artificially inflated....
Magnet quoted me for a new kitchen a few weeks ago. We've got all the appliances in storage, it's a small kitchen, no wall cupboards, six base unit drawer cabinets and worktops and a sink. The "retail" price was £21475.07. Over 21 grand for 6 painted MDF cabinets and a bit of composite worktop! A fantasy price plucked out of an arse as no one ever pays retail price. "Trade" price got it down to just over £6000. I haggled them down to £5500 just by asking. I then hit them with their price matching promise a few days later as DIY Kitchens were coming in with a price of £3600 for a superior kitchen. They said they'd match it! So "£21k" down to under four grand. And they're still making a profit.
The secret is to remember that there are about 2 grades of actual kitchen cupboards (aka the carcassing). They are all made from the same, standard designs.
What is different is the doors and the fancier kinds of internals - think the corner cupboards that have elaborate carousels etc.
For the doors, you now can buy them separately - after years of the trade fighting this.
The internals - the more expensive kitchen design places frantically try and come up with new, better, internals. But the cheap people are right behind. I recently purchase a drawer replacement from B&Q - kept the existing drawer front. The mechanism is solid, smooth and the soft closer robust.
So the difference between the expensive kitchen and the cheap one, is often just the quality of finish on the doors.
EDIT: even if they don't make a profit on you, that's £17K they've got from a bunch of people. Plus starting with a big number, then allowing people to bargain them down makes the customer feel good. Like those shirts that are always on 40% sale....
Imagine there's no Heaven It's easy if you try No Hell below us Above us, only sky Imagine all the people Living for today
Lennon's philosophy is simplistic but sums up my issue with this approach. Hell simply should not feature in our reasoning on the rights and wrongs of this issue.
Imagine there's no Heaven It's easy if you try No Hell below us Above us, only sky Imagine all the people Living for today
Lennon's philosophy is simplistic but sums up my issue with this approach. Hell simply should not feature in our reasoning on the rights and wrongs of this issue.
I admit, that’s a song I detest, for its vacuity.
It's vacuous, boring, banal, globalist, socialist and dull.
Do you prefer Working Class Hero?
No. Especially as I have heard stories about Lennon treating working class people like dirt. My parents lived near Weybridge when he had a house there and we had tradesmen work at our house who had worked at his. Lennon wouldn't let them use the loo there and stopped his then wife, Cynthia, from making tea for them saying they could use the nearest cafe. I heard only nice things about Cynthia.
Isn't that more along the lines of "almost all celebs are arrogant twats, because it goes to their head" ?
Wonder how many times in the coming years Sir Pious Starmer will regret those words from opposition? When you have this many MPs, could be every couple of months and will be a constant drip and drag. Big lesson for Kemi.
Always thought there was something of the Obadiah Slope in Starmer. Better hair perhaps.
There are three interpretations of that:
Someone who has (ever) been a lawbreaker cannot be a lawmaker
Someone who is a lawmaker cannot break any law while a lawmaker
Someone who has made a law cannot themselves break it
The first is clearly nonsense unless we have no concept of rehabilitation or seriousness of crimes. We've all surely broken the law, so we can't have any lawmakers.
The second has some logic, for more serious crimes. I don't think we require a minister to resign if caught speeding (perhaps if their brief includes road safety etc, but that's more about hypocrisy). Maybe lawmakers cannot break laws they have responsibility for or which expose them as hypocrites or as general wrong'uns.
The third, is the Johnson case of someone introducing new law that applies to everyone and then breaking it themselves. Hypocrisy.
Opposition parties will, of course, take interpretation one and scour public records for any historical offences by anyone in government. They'll do this particularly now a precedent has been set, which is why this seems daft from Starmer unless there is more to the story that could come out. Do we sack Starmer if it emerges that he once bought some weed (supply of a banned substance) for a friend at uni? It would be like Sunak resigning for not wearing a seatbelt.
Is there not a 4th case - certain offences by their nature, preclude the offender from holding various political offices, even after their sentence is complete.
Most people would say that Jonathan Aitken or Jeffery Archer should never be MPs, ever again, for example.
Possibly (although maybe that's just #1 with a severity clause). I'd personally not have any problem with Aitken or Archer having been returned as MPs if they persuaded a constituency to vote for them. Hamilton, of course, held public office again, via party list.
Part of my old job was managing the company's mobile phone contract, and as we had about 6,000 issued phones the money involved was not inconsiderable. One of the techniques I used was to periodically request the top five highest bills, so they could be queried to check that any private use was being paid for, and relying upon the grapevine to spread the word that bills were actually being checked, which mostly they weren't.
Regularly topping the list was the phone registered to one of the people right at the top, who's still a public figure so will remain anonymous; their phone was regularly making calls around the world, especially to Ukraine and the Caribbean, and running up an annual bill of £25,000. I wanted to investigate but several times was warned off by other Directors; after several months of this, I bumped into the person by chance and took the opportunity to make a casual comment about how much they used their phone, only to be told they didn't like mobile phones and had never used one.
Swiftly on the case, it eventually transpired that that phone, and two others, had been stolen within the company by an IT contractor, who had relatives around the world and had passed two of them on and the three of them had been for a long time enjoying free phone calls to each other at the company's expense....
The offence of which Haigh was convicted seems a very strange one to me.
None of it seems to make a lot of sense, which does make one wonder whether there's a lot more to it than has been disclosed, but who knows?
This is an odd bit in the Guardian story:
The circumstances around it are disputed. The Times reported that Aviva launched an investigation after Haigh said that company mobile phones had been stolen or had gone missing on repeated occasions.
The newspaper said the police were given details of more than one instance that had been looked into by Aviva, but that the criminal charge related to one phone.
I don't have access to the Times but don't see how the account of a mugging and later discovery of her own work phone at home, squares with multiple instances of missing phones being investigated??
It was mentioned in other reporting that a personal SIM was put into the phone in question and the phone used.
Which would make that instance a slam dunk - @PBLawyers?
If it was a different SIM, how would they know the phone was being used?
There are two indentifiers with phones the IMSI (user/account) which comes from the SIM card or eSIM, and the IMEI (device). So if the lost/stolen phone is turned on again, that ought to be detected once it has been reported lost/stolen. If a SIM belonging to the person who claims to have lost the phone is put into the lost phone that strongly suggests it wasn't lost and that something is amiss.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
More women marrying earlier and having more kids is not restricting women. The fact you think it is is exactly the type of uber feminist liberalism that there is now a reaction against.
Plenty of men take their responsibilities as husbands seriously and society can support mothers more too who want to stay at home full time with their children or only work part time
They can do the same with fathers.
There is a part of your argument I agree with. It is ludicrous to farm out childcare to strangers whilst both parents go to work. That we have got ourselves into this situation is, I think, the fault of the sort of atomising liberalism that I think you are arguing against.
But it is also ludicrous to stick with outdated gender roles in parenting. Aside from the earliest years kids benefit equally from the influence of both masculine and feminine role models. Productive work is no longer sufficiently physical for it to make any sense that breadwinners should be masculine and caregivers feminine.
We should have a default that both parents work, say, 3 days per week. And we should have a society that makes that affordable. We should also flex that to allow one parent to be at home all the time if that's what works for the family. But it shouldn't default to being the mother.
(To my eye it looks quite Protestant, even down to the checkerboard tiles )
The claim is that it now looks close to what it was when originally built. One can certainly imagine a C13 scrofulous leather tanner having his mind blown when entering it and being given a conception of heaven (hell being akin to his earthly existence).
I'm not ever that clear about "looks like the Medieval original" statements. It's possible to tip over into a "looks like how I want to imagine the original looked" view.
We see that in - for example - an attachment to all types of things. A fetish about the far past which can be an attempted escape from the present.
The same happens with modern "pagan" beliefs. It's in large measure a construct of something convenient and comforting, based on an imagined idea of what the earlier one may have been. I'd make a similar point about some modern evangelical streams - imagining the past helps avoid uncomfortable questions in the present.
But it is not just about "it has to be how it was at the start", Our generation's view is equally as valid as that of the people in 1321 or 1421 or 1521. One of the things I love most about Church of England churches is that they are not state-sponsored husks as in France, but are the continuing story of a community in that place going back up to 1000 years - that I can read now. That's one reason why I am relatively relaxed about careful renovation of buildings, rather than freezing them in the past.
To take a specific, the Leaves of Southwell Minster in the Chapter House are stone carvings. There is evidence that originally they were painted. What should we do?
It's the difference between the Painted Medieval Roof Bosses of Norwich Cathedral being points of colour, along with the windows and textiles, in a stone cathedral, and it all being like that.
Compare, for example, a town church such as Chesterfield Crooked Spire, with St Giles RC Church in Cheadle - where every surface was decorated by Pugin in his creation of his vision of Medieval Gothic.
It's like a One Star Michelin vs a Three Star Michelin meal. For me the latter has so much extra stuff piled on top that before long I just want a piece of buttered toast.
This piece shows a similar contrast of styles, comparing Cheadle with a nearby, less gorgeous, church.
Great buildings new and old, exist in four, not three, dimensions. The fourth dimension is the effluxion of time. I stand in Chichester cathedral. Under my feet is a Roman mosaic. To my right is an 11th century relief sculpture of Lazarus; ahead of me is a Sutherland painting, to my left is Chagall glass and work by John Piper; the music of the day runs from Gregorian chant to a voluntary composed last week.
Fires like Notre Dame can be speedy elements in the time factor. Notre Dame has done well. And Southwell chapter house - a favourite place to be - should for now leave the leaves unpainted, and think about it again after some big thing happens to the building which it will over the next 1000 years.
[Kruger's ] argument - potentially an effective one - is that MPs should not back it if they are uncertain. Leadbeater's was that they should back it if they're uncertain. In both cases, that argument is based on the likelihood of changes at committee stage. Both are aiming squarely for those undecided MPs.
Undecided MPs can always reject it at third reading if they don't like the amendments. To reject it now is surely to say you just oppose assisted dying.
If you read the articles in various papers, you'll see that it is claimed that she had put her own sim in the "lost" work phone and was using it.
If that's true we are well shot of her, a wrong'un and thick as mince.
There was quite a lot of shock on bits of Reddit when Apple cooperated with insurance companies and matched IDs registered* to Apple ID accounts with phones "lost" or "stolen" from companies. The insurance companies then took the list of names and addresses of those who had registered such phones, with the list of the those employees who had had them as work phones.....
*For those that don't know the Apple ecosystem - when setting up the phone, the ID is linked with the Apple account. And sent to Apple. You can request that a lost or stolen phone (now) is blocked, so this process will fail. But it is not always requested by companies that have lost phones.
Interesting presentation of the issue by Viewcode. My answers are: No, Yes, Depends, Yes, Yes, Yes, Vote yes.
Q6 is the most salient imo. Can the system cope with abuse?
I've answered yes (it can) but this is not the same as saying the system can prevent abuse. That isn't possible. A system so watertight that cases of abuse are zero will be a system that helps only a fraction of those it is meant to help. It wouldn't be worth doing.
You have to think about numbers. People never like to but there's no other way to approach it. Imagine that 5,000 deaths per annum happen in England under AD. How many of these involving error or coercion would be too high to countenance? If you say one that's end of story. There's no real difference between that position and just opposing on principle. But assuming you get past this, how many? Not precisely, obviously, but approx. Is it closer to 5 or to 50? I bet people (inc MPs) have quite different assessments.
An analogy is the threshold for legal verdicts. The thing about how it's better that X guilty men go free than that one innocent be falsely convicted. What is X there? It's not 1,000 is it? It's not even 100. If it were we wouldn't have a working criminal justice system.
[Kruger's ] argument - potentially an effective one - is that MPs should not back it if they are uncertain. Leadbeater's was that they should back it if they're uncertain. In both cases, that argument is based on the likelihood of changes at committee stage. Both are aiming squarely for those undecided MPs.
Undecided MPs can always reject it at third reading if they don't like the amendments. To reject it now is surely to say you just oppose assisted dying.
Yes, this sounds right to me. The time to reject if you're unhappy with the bill as is is 3rd reading. 1st is about the principle. You have to be uncertain on the principle to reject at this stage not with the specifics of the bill.
Getting a conviction as a result of this sequence of events seems rough.
"In a statement, Haigh said that she had been mugged on a night out in 2013 whilst working for the insurer Aviva. She said that she gave the police a list of items that she had thought were missing from her handbag, which wrongly included her mobile work phone which she thought was missing at the time.[56] She was issued with a new phone but when her old phone was switched on, she was called in for police questioning.[57] Haigh said that her solicitor had advised her "not to comment" during that interview.[58] She then pleaded guilty to making a false report to police at magistrates' court, six months before she was elected as an MP at the 2015 general election, and received a conditional discharge. Haigh described the incident as a "genuine mistake" from which she "did not make any gain". Sky News reported that two of their sources alleged that Haigh had wanted a more modern work handset that was being given out to her colleagues at the time."
Getting a conviction from those facts as described by Haigh is not difficult, it is impossible. It cannot be done. It is not an offence to make a mistake.
If that is all the relevant facts, it is hard to credit that she gave, or was advised to give, no answers in interview. For the matter was simple: I made a genuine mistake.
Part of my old job was managing the company's mobile phone contract, and as we had about 6,000 issued phones the money involved was not inconsiderable. One of the techniques I used was to periodically request the top five highest bills, so they could be queried to check that any private use was being paid for, and relying upon the grapevine to spread the word that bills were actually being checked, which mostly they weren't.
Regularly topping the list was the phone registered to one of the people right at the top, who's still a public figure so will remain anonymous; their phone was regularly making calls around the world, especially to Ukraine and the Caribbean, and running up an annual bill of £25,000. I wanted to investigate but several times was warned off by other Directors; after several months of this, I bumped into the person by chance and took the opportunity to make a casual comment about how much they used their phone, only to be told they didn't like mobile phones and had never used one.
Swiftly on the case, it eventually transpired that that phone, and two others, had been stolen within the company by an IT contractor, who had relatives around the world and had passed two of them on and the three of them had been for a long time enjoying free phone calls to each other at the company's expense....
How would you stop something like that from happening?
The offence of which Haigh was convicted seems a very strange one to me.
None of it seems to make a lot of sense, which does make one wonder whether there's a lot more to it than has been disclosed, but who knows?
This is an odd bit in the Guardian story:
The circumstances around it are disputed. The Times reported that Aviva launched an investigation after Haigh said that company mobile phones had been stolen or had gone missing on repeated occasions.
The newspaper said the police were given details of more than one instance that had been looked into by Aviva, but that the criminal charge related to one phone.
I don't have access to the Times but don't see how the account of a mugging and later discovery of her own work phone at home, squares with multiple instances of missing phones being investigated??
It was mentioned in other reporting that a personal SIM was put into the phone in question and the phone used.
Which would make that instance a slam dunk - @PBLawyers?
If it was a different SIM, how would they know the phone was being used?
Oh to live in a time when the polis were interested in stolen mobile phones !
Re Haigh, there are some things to it all that don’t make a huge amount of sense to me (e.g if you think you’ve lost your phone and you find it isn’t the first thing you do to fess up and admit you were mistaken - oops, so sorry, I thought it was taken but it obviously wasn’t)? The whole thing about it being activated and then the police investigating feels a little weird to me, but then I’m not across the detail so whatever.
I’m someone who doesn’t really like the concept that someone does something in their 20s and that permanently precludes them from doing what they want in life (even a cabinet minister). Though I do think there must be much better ways to deal with disclosure, monitoring, etc. It’s not one I have easy answers to.
What seems odd to me is - where is the info coming from? Not the company (that's a big HR nono under GDPR).
The Times reported multiple people who worked with her at Aviva. I presume it was probably caused quite a stink if a colleague nicked a number of phones and then the police got called in and they ultimately got the sack.
THanks. All still unclear, though.
Its pretty clear that potentially committing insurance fraud while working for an insurance company is a dumb thing to do, as it is not something they can just turn a blind eye to.
Part of my old job was managing the company's mobile phone contract, and as we had about 6,000 issued phones the money involved was not inconsiderable. One of the techniques I used was to periodically request the top five highest bills, so they could be queried to check that any private use was being paid for, and relying upon the grapevine to spread the word that bills were actually being checked, which mostly they weren't.
Regularly topping the list was the phone registered to one of the people right at the top, who's still a public figure so will remain anonymous; their phone was regularly making calls around the world, especially to Ukraine and the Caribbean, and running up an annual bill of £25,000. I wanted to investigate but several times was warned off by other Directors; after several months of this, I bumped into the person by chance and took the opportunity to make a casual comment about how much they used their phone, only to be told they didn't like mobile phones and had never used one.
Swiftly on the case, it eventually transpired that that phone, and two others, had been stolen within the company by an IT contractor, who had relatives around the world and had passed two of them on and the three of them had been for a long time enjoying free phone calls to each other at the company's expense....
How would you stop something like that from happening?
Better security around ordered phones and checking out any that go missing, is an obvious example. All of this was contracted out and we had a good talk with a supplier about what had happened.
My method of checking out the highest bills - the same approach I used to expenses claims which turned up a fair bit of fraud over the years - also would have worked, had the other Directors not initially stood in the way. It was a common pattern that someone engaged in fraud would start off with small stuff that would never get noticed, or in one memorable case profited from an honest mistake that was not spotted, and then get bolder and greedier until, sure enough, one day they'd make it to the premier league of claims.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
2) Child death rates. We now thankfully have much lower child death rates. Again in ye olden days, you might need to have five pregnancies for two or three to reach adulthood. Or worse. This means that women have to spend longer pregnant, and might spend years looking after babies who do not reach adulthood.
3) Contraception / abortion. Not just in the obvious ways: many couples / women have an idea of how many kids they want. For most of my friends, it seems to be two. They (sometimes struggle to) have that many, then after that, they stop.
4) Since women spend less time pregnant to get the number of kids they want, they use contraception to stop having any more, and go back into the workplace. This feeds back into 1).
5) Longer kidulthoods. Kids now stay at school/education until 18, when they might well have joined the workforce at a much younger age; either leaving home or bringing in a salary to help their families.
(To my eye it looks quite Protestant, even down to the checkerboard tiles )
The claim is that it now looks close to what it was when originally built. One can certainly imagine a C13 scrofulous leather tanner having his mind blown when entering it and being given a conception of heaven (hell being akin to his earthly existence).
I'm not ever that clear about "looks like the Medieval original" statements. It's possible to tip over into a "looks like how I want to imagine the original looked" view.
We see that in - for example - an attachment to all types of things. A fetish about the far past which can be an attempted escape from the present.
The same happens with modern "pagan" beliefs. It's in large measure a construct of something convenient and comforting, based on an imagined idea of what the earlier one may have been. I'd make a similar point about some modern evangelical streams - imagining the past helps avoid uncomfortable questions in the present.
But it is not just about "it has to be how it was at the start", Our generation's view is equally as valid as that of the people in 1321 or 1421 or 1521. One of the things I love most about Church of England churches is that they are not state-sponsored husks as in France, but are the continuing story of a community in that place going back up to 1000 years - that I can read now. That's one reason why I am relatively relaxed about careful renovation of buildings, rather than freezing them in the past.
To take a specific, the Leaves of Southwell Minster in the Chapter House are stone carvings. There is evidence that originally they were painted. What should we do?
It's the difference between the Painted Medieval Roof Bosses of Norwich Cathedral being points of colour, along with the windows and textiles, in a stone cathedral, and it all being like that.
Compare, for example, a town church such as Chesterfield Crooked Spire, with St Giles RC Church in Cheadle - where every surface was decorated by Pugin in his creation of his vision of Medieval Gothic.
It's like a One Star Michelin vs a Three Star Michelin meal. For me the latter has so much extra stuff piled on top that before long I just want a piece of buttered toast.
This piece shows a similar contrast of styles, comparing Cheadle with a nearby, less gorgeous, church.
Great buildings new and old, exist in four, not three, dimensions. The fourth dimension is the effluxion of time. I stand in Chichester cathedral. Under my feet is a Roman mosaic. To my right is an 11th century relief sculpture of Lazarus; ahead of me is a Sutherland painting, to my left is Chagall glass and work by John Piper; the music of the day runs from Gregorian chant to a voluntary composed last week.
Fires like Notre Dame can be speedy elements in the time factor. Notre Dame has done well. And Southwell chapter house - a favourite place to be - should for now leave the leaves unpainted, and think about it again after some big thing happens to the building which it will over the next 1000 years.
Impressed that you mention the Chagall Glass. That is hardly prominent, even if famous . I met it by accident in 2005.
I like the Sutherland Tapestry at Coventry, which is a bit harder to miss.
Part of my old job was managing the company's mobile phone contract, and as we had about 6,000 issued phones the money involved was not inconsiderable. One of the techniques I used was to periodically request the top five highest bills, so they could be queried to check that any private use was being paid for, and relying upon the grapevine to spread the word that bills were actually being checked, which mostly they weren't.
Regularly topping the list was the phone registered to one of the people right at the top, who's still a public figure so will remain anonymous; their phone was regularly making calls around the world, especially to Ukraine and the Caribbean, and running up an annual bill of £25,000. I wanted to investigate but several times was warned off by other Directors; after several months of this, I bumped into the person by chance and took the opportunity to make a casual comment about how much they used their phone, only to be told they didn't like mobile phones and had never used one.
Swiftly on the case, it eventually transpired that that phone, and two others, had been stolen within the company by an IT contractor, who had relatives around the world and had passed two of them on and the three of them had been for a long time enjoying free phone calls to each other at the company's expense....
How would you stop something like that from happening?
Better security around ordered phones and checking out any that go missing, is an obvious example. All of this was contracted out and we had a good talk with a supplier about what had happened.
My method of checking out the highest bills - the same approach I used to expenses claims which turned up a fair bit of fraud over the years - also would have worked, had the other Directors not initially stood in the way. It was a common pattern that someone engaged in fraud would start off with small stuff that would never get noticed, or in one memorable case profited from an honest mistake that was not spotted, and then get bolder and greedier until, sure enough, one day they'd make it to the premier league of claims.
Yup - patterns. It's one area where "AI" has actually worked - detecting unusual patterns in data for further checking.
One thing I do think about this bill is that it’s been brought forward too soon in the parliament. With so many new MPs still getting to grips with everything asking them to decide on something this sensitive as one of their first actions is decidedly unfair.
I realise it isn’t the government’s fault, and as a private member’s bill it is of course going nowhere, but I do think Starmer was unwise not to try and buy off the sponsor so it wasn’t put in the first place.
I get the impression that this is Starmer’s bill. My theory is that he’s trying to get it done without having to do any hard work. And if it fails, never mind, they tried.
Isn't this the quid pro quo for all the Lord Alli donations? It's reportedly an issue he has spoken in the Lords about, as a supporter of a change in the law.
No. It’s a Private Member’s Bill, picked by the MP who was lucky enough to be first in the ballot. The Govt has said they’ll make time for debate, which is what everyone’s been calling for and seems entirely appropriate.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
2) Child death rates. We now thankfully have much lower child death rates. Again in ye olden days, you might need to have five pregnancies for two or three to reach adulthood. Or worse. This means that women have to spend longer pregnant, and might spend years looking after babies who do not reach adulthood.
3) Contraception / abortion. Not just in the obvious ways: many couples / women have an idea of how many kids they want. For most of my friends, it seems to be two. They (sometimes struggle to) have that many, then after that, they stop.
4) Since women spend less time pregnant to get the number of kids they want, they use contraception to stop having any more, and go back into the workplace. This feeds back into 1).
5) Longer kidulthoods. Kids now stay at school/education until 18, when they might well have joined the workforce at a much younger age; either leaving home or bringing in a salary to help their families.
I commented, the other day, in conversation with some friends, about a French like tax break per child. The reactions were interesting.
Election day here in Ireland. Starting off very wet, but forecast dry later, so I'm delaying my vote. Typically I would vote first thing. I've always enjoyed voting as one of my first actions of the day, so feels a bit weird, but with the wind howling and the rain flowing down the windows I'll try and be patient.
I’m in Ireland right now… oh, hold on, wrong bit, not the bit that votes today.
Belfast is looking quite nice, despite the gloomy and damp weather.
Ian Dunt @iandunt.bsky.social · 10m I have to say, I did not wake up this morning thinking that Kit Malthouse would make the best speech I had heard in the Commons for many months. But that's exactly what just happened.
Sometimes you have to hand it to the French. The new Notre-Dame looks magnificent
A real triumph. Must feel so good for Macron to be able to point to something like that and say "we fixed it" And in 5 years as well.
Of course the state funds repairs and conservation for historic Roman Catholic churches and cathedrals in France which has helped with this magnificent restoration of Notre Dame
One thing I do think about this bill is that it’s been brought forward too soon in the parliament. With so many new MPs still getting to grips with everything asking them to decide on something this sensitive as one of their first actions is decidedly unfair.
I realise it isn’t the government’s fault, and as a private member’s bill it is of course going nowhere, but I do think Starmer was unwise not to try and buy off the sponsor so it wasn’t put in the first place.
I get the impression that this is Starmer’s bill. My theory is that he’s trying to get it done without having to do any hard work. And if it fails, never mind, they tried.
Isn't this the quid pro quo for all the Lord Alli donations? It's reportedly an issue he has spoken in the Lords about, as a supporter of a change in the law.
No. It’s a Private Member’s Bill, picked by the MP who was lucky enough to be first in the ballot. The Govt has said they’ll make time for debate, which is what everyone’s been calling for and seems entirely appropriate.
If it's a matter of conscience it often tends to be a private bill, as the government can't really take a line or promote it, at least until there's an established consensus. A pattern that goes back at least to David Steel's private bill on abortion reform, and probably much longer.
Getting a conviction as a result of this sequence of events seems rough.
"In a statement, Haigh said that she had been mugged on a night out in 2013 whilst working for the insurer Aviva. She said that she gave the police a list of items that she had thought were missing from her handbag, which wrongly included her mobile work phone which she thought was missing at the time.[56] She was issued with a new phone but when her old phone was switched on, she was called in for police questioning.[57] Haigh said that her solicitor had advised her "not to comment" during that interview.[58] She then pleaded guilty to making a false report to police at magistrates' court, six months before she was elected as an MP at the 2015 general election, and received a conditional discharge. Haigh described the incident as a "genuine mistake" from which she "did not make any gain". "
Getting a conviction from those facts as described by Haigh is not difficult, it is impossible. It cannot be done. It is not an offence to make a mistake.
If that is all the relevant facts, it is hard to credit that she gave, or was advised to give, no answers in interview. For the matter was simple: I made a genuine mistake.
This part is interesting, and fits with what I posted earlier happened often in those days: Sky News reported that two of their sources alleged that Haigh had wanted a more modern work handset that was being given out to her colleagues at the time.
If this is the case, then there would have been a cost to either her employer or an insurance company, and arguably she would have been better off as a result, if only from the benefit-in-kind perspective.
As for what happened next, regardless of the truth about the phone, it is common for lawyers to advise clients to ‘no comment’ their way through police interviews, especially when the lawyer is not present, and you do not have to look too hard for that advice on the internet.
And then it looks like Haigh fell into a common trap of accepting a caution, presumably in order to close the matter before the election. The trap of course is that while it means no further action, what people often miss is that technically it involves pleading guilty, and that guilty plea can then be found on a DBS check for employment or by political opponents.
So yes, regardless of Haigh's original motivation, the rest of it is pretty standard fare.
As I said last night I don't really see why she needed to resign. It was a relatively minor offence committed before she was elected as an MP for which she has already been sentenced in the magistrates court.
Plus we now have MPs who have served prison time and a President elect of the United States who is also a convicted criminal
We had an MP elected from prison in the past, although they changed the rules afterwards so it couldn’t happen again.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
2) Child death rates. We now thankfully have much lower child death rates. Again in ye olden days, you might need to have five pregnancies for two or three to reach adulthood. Or worse. This means that women have to spend longer pregnant, and might spend years looking after babies who do not reach adulthood.
3) Contraception / abortion. Not just in the obvious ways: many couples / women have an idea of how many kids they want. For most of my friends, it seems to be two. They (sometimes struggle to) have that many, then after that, they stop.
4) Since women spend less time pregnant to get the number of kids they want, they use contraception to stop having any more, and go back into the workplace. This feeds back into 1).
5) Longer kidulthoods. Kids now stay at school/education until 18, when they might well have joined the workforce at a much younger age; either leaving home or bringing in a salary to help their families.
Re 5: Nowadays the cost of housing is so high that, unless they've managed to land a particularly well-paying job, your offspring are likely to be back again at 21 after finishing their degree.
[Kruger's ] argument - potentially an effective one - is that MPs should not back it if they are uncertain. Leadbeater's was that they should back it if they're uncertain. In both cases, that argument is based on the likelihood of changes at committee stage. Both are aiming squarely for those undecided MPs.
Undecided MPs can always reject it at third reading if they don't like the amendments. To reject it now is surely to say you just oppose assisted dying.
Yes, this sounds right to me. The time to reject if you're unhappy with the bill as is is 3rd reading. 1st is about the principle. You have to be uncertain on the principle to reject at this stage not with the specifics of the bill.
Layla Moran just said something along those lines apparently (I stepped away from the coverage so missed the actual words)
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
2) Child death rates. We now thankfully have much lower child death rates. Again in ye olden days, you might need to have five pregnancies for two or three to reach adulthood. Or worse. This means that women have to spend longer pregnant, and might spend years looking after babies who do not reach adulthood.
3) Contraception / abortion. Not just in the obvious ways: many couples / women have an idea of how many kids they want. For most of my friends, it seems to be two. They (sometimes struggle to) have that many, then after that, they stop.
4) Since women spend less time pregnant to get the number of kids they want, they use contraception to stop having any more, and go back into the workplace. This feeds back into 1).
5) Longer kidulthoods. Kids now stay at school/education until 18, when they might well have joined the workforce at a much younger age; either leaving home or bringing in a salary to help their families.
Re 5: Nowadays the cost of housing is so high that, unless they've managed to land a particularly well-paying job, your offspring are likely to be back again at 21 after finishing their degree.
More immediately, the cost of housing is such that affording a bedroom per child is very difficult.
I mean ffs look at Canada. 4% of deaths are via assisted dying. From some much smaller number before the law was changed.
And people think that the huge increase is just a larger number of people with MND deciding to end their lives early, or somesuch.
God and/or hell really doesn't come into it. Agree about the doctors, that said, what on earth (not "in hell") is it to do with them. Either someone wants to end their lives or they don't. As is pointed out, we are all terminally ill so picking some arbitrary point to end it shouldn't depend on anyone apart from the person themselves.
I’m not finding this a very persuasive argument. On what grounds is 4% too high? No, they don’t all have MND, but everyone dies and lots of people die slowly and unpleasantly. That 4% are managing their final days doesn’t inherently seem problematic to me. Is there evidence that any of these cases are seeing an abuse of the system?
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
There are undoubtedly shitty men, as husbands and partners. But, there are shitty women too.
That said, there's nothing "unmanly" about cooking, shopping, cleaning, or looking after children, the first three of which, a man would have to do anyway if he lived alone, and any man who thinks that there is is a fool.
I mean ffs look at Canada. 4% of deaths are via assisted dying. From some much smaller number before the law was changed.
And people think that the huge increase is just a larger number of people with MND deciding to end their lives early, or somesuch.
God and/or hell really doesn't come into it. Agree about the doctors, that said, what on earth (not "in hell") is it to do with them. Either someone wants to end their lives or they don't. As is pointed out, we are all terminally ill so picking some arbitrary point to end it shouldn't depend on anyone apart from the person themselves.
I’m not finding this a very persuasive argument. On what grounds is 4% too high? No, they don’t all have MND, but everyone dies and lots of people die slowly and unpleasantly. That 4% are managing their final days doesn’t inherently seem problematic to me. Is there evidence that any of these cases are seeing an abuse of the system?
The concern, among others, comes from the large number of people in the Canadian scheme, who record "being a burden to family" as a reason.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
Just to comment on this single point, I think it's somewhat mistaken. Lots of mothers would have worked in the past.
Often they would have done work that allowed them to also look after their own kids at the same time - like taking in laundry to wash at home - and that sort of small scale work in the home simply isn't available any more.
Or, because people didn't move around so much, and lived in the same area as extended family, they would have had grandmas, or aunts, to do childcare, rather than having to pay.
These are examples of much larger changes in the structure of the economy and society that aren't changing back.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
I mean ffs look at Canada. 4% of deaths are via assisted dying. From some much smaller number before the law was changed.
And people think that the huge increase is just a larger number of people with MND deciding to end their lives early, or somesuch.
God and/or hell really doesn't come into it. Agree about the doctors, that said, what on earth (not "in hell") is it to do with them. Either someone wants to end their lives or they don't. As is pointed out, we are all terminally ill so picking some arbitrary point to end it shouldn't depend on anyone apart from the person themselves.
I’m not finding this a very persuasive argument. On what grounds is 4% too high? No, they don’t all have MND, but everyone dies and lots of people die slowly and unpleasantly. That 4% are managing their final days doesn’t inherently seem problematic to me. Is there evidence that any of these cases are seeing an abuse of the system?
The concern, among others, comes from the large number of people in the Canadian scheme, who record "being a burden to family" as a reason.
A legacy hunter will encourage them to "do the decent thing."
"For men will more readily forgive the loss of a parent than the loss of their patrimony."
Having watched a friend decline and ultimately die from MND I’d instinctively support the proposal. He expressed repeatedly that he would prefer to be able to choose his exit.
Checks and balances are clearly needed but the current system does not serve the terminally ill well.
It doesn't serve the poor terminally ill well.
Having the financial means to go to another jurisdiction should not be the criteria for the ending of suffering.
Yep. This is the main point I made to my MP.
Who has failed to reply.
Some say MPs should not spend their time as faux social workers or welfare rights advisers helping their less fortunate constituents negotiate their way round a hostile bureaucracy. Others say MPs should not spend their time debating moral or even political issues with constituents. Your correspondence would fall into the second category.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
2) Child death rates. We now thankfully have much lower child death rates. Again in ye olden days, you might need to have five pregnancies for two or three to reach adulthood. Or worse. This means that women have to spend longer pregnant, and might spend years looking after babies who do not reach adulthood.
3) Contraception / abortion. Not just in the obvious ways: many couples / women have an idea of how many kids they want. For most of my friends, it seems to be two. They (sometimes struggle to) have that many, then after that, they stop.
4) Since women spend less time pregnant to get the number of kids they want, they use contraception to stop having any more, and go back into the workplace. This feeds back into 1).
5) Longer kidulthoods. Kids now stay at school/education until 18, when they might well have joined the workforce at a much younger age; either leaving home or bringing in a salary to help their families.
Re 5: Nowadays the cost of housing is so high that, unless they've managed to land a particularly well-paying job, your offspring are likely to be back again at 21 after finishing their degree.
More immediately, the cost of housing is such that affording a bedroom per child is very difficult.
I was thinking more in terms of the likelihood of your offspring having kids (which I think was what JJ vaguely had in mind). If they can't even move into a home of their own - whether rented or bought, let alone one with extra bedrooms - having kids isn't likely to be high on their priority list.
Having watched a friend decline and ultimately die from MND I’d instinctively support the proposal. He expressed repeatedly that he would prefer to be able to choose his exit.
Checks and balances are clearly needed but the current system does not serve the terminally ill well.
It doesn't serve the poor terminally ill well.
Having the financial means to go to another jurisdiction should not be the criteria for the ending of suffering.
Yep. This is the main point I made to my MP.
Who has failed to reply.
Some say MPs should not spend their time as faux social workers or welfare rights advisers helping their less fortunate constituents negotiate their way round a hostile bureaucracy. Others say MPs should not spend their time debating moral or even political issues with constituents. Your correspondence would fall into the second category.
Seems just basic good behaviour to at least provide some kind of acknowledgement that she has received the email!!
Even the previous MP who was basically useless managed to send out acknowledgements.
Part of my old job was managing the company's mobile phone contract, and as we had about 6,000 issued phones the money involved was not inconsiderable. One of the techniques I used was to periodically request the top five highest bills, so they could be queried to check that any private use was being paid for, and relying upon the grapevine to spread the word that bills were actually being checked, which mostly they weren't.
Regularly topping the list was the phone registered to one of the people right at the top, who's still a public figure so will remain anonymous; their phone was regularly making calls around the world, especially to Ukraine and the Caribbean, and running up an annual bill of £25,000. I wanted to investigate but several times was warned off by other Directors; after several months of this, I bumped into the person by chance and took the opportunity to make a casual comment about how much they used their phone, only to be told they didn't like mobile phones and had never used one.
Swiftly on the case, it eventually transpired that that phone, and two others, had been stolen within the company by an IT contractor, who had relatives around the world and had passed two of them on and the three of them had been for a long time enjoying free phone calls to each other at the company's expense....
How would you stop something like that from happening?
Better security around ordered phones and checking out any that go missing, is an obvious example. All of this was contracted out and we had a good talk with a supplier about what had happened.
My method of checking out the highest bills - the same approach I used to expenses claims which turned up a fair bit of fraud over the years - also would have worked, had the other Directors not initially stood in the way. It was a common pattern that someone engaged in fraud would start off with small stuff that would never get noticed, or in one memorable case profited from an honest mistake that was not spotted, and then get bolder and greedier until, sure enough, one day they'd make it to the premier league of claims.
Yup - patterns. It's one area where "AI" has actually worked - detecting unusual patterns in data for further checking.
The use of AI for stuff like that probably has a lot of potential, as you say. Because going through the detail of people's expenses claims or phone bills is labour intensive and companies can't possibly check everything, relying on trust, training, the line manager signoff, the occasional spot checks, and tough sanctions for the few that get caught.
Getting a conviction as a result of this sequence of events seems rough.
"In a statement, Haigh said that she had been mugged on a night out in 2013 whilst working for the insurer Aviva. She said that she gave the police a list of items that she had thought were missing from her handbag, which wrongly included her mobile work phone which she thought was missing at the time.[56] She was issued with a new phone but when her old phone was switched on, she was called in for police questioning.[57] Haigh said that her solicitor had advised her "not to comment" during that interview.[58] She then pleaded guilty to making a false report to police at magistrates' court, six months before she was elected as an MP at the 2015 general election, and received a conditional discharge. Haigh described the incident as a "genuine mistake" from which she "did not make any gain". "
Getting a conviction from those facts as described by Haigh is not difficult, it is impossible. It cannot be done. It is not an offence to make a mistake.
If that is all the relevant facts, it is hard to credit that she gave, or was advised to give, no answers in interview. For the matter was simple: I made a genuine mistake.
This part is interesting, and fits with what I posted earlier happened often in those days: Sky News reported that two of their sources alleged that Haigh had wanted a more modern work handset that was being given out to her colleagues at the time.
If this is the case, then there would have been a cost to either her employer or an insurance company, and arguably she would have been better off as a result, if only from the benefit-in-kind perspective.
As for what happened next, regardless of the truth about the phone, it is common for lawyers to advise clients to ‘no comment’ their way through police interviews, especially when the lawyer is not present, and you do not have to look too hard for that advice on the internet.
And then it looks like Haigh fell into a common trap of accepting a caution, presumably in order to close the matter before the election. The trap of course is that while it means no further action, what people often miss is that technically it involves pleading guilty, and that guilty plea can then be found on a DBS check for employment or by political opponents.
So yes, regardless of Haigh's original motivation, the rest of it is pretty standard fare.
It wasn't a caution though, was it? She was prosecuted, pled guilty and was given an effectively null sentence.
Police cautions avoid prosecution.
So the CPS must have judged it met the standard for likely conviction?
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
There are undoubtedly shitty men, as husbands and partners. But, there are shitty women too.
That said, there's nothing "unmanly" about cooking, shopping, cleaning, or looking after children, the first three of which, a man would have to do anyway if he lived alone, and any man who thinks that there is is a fool.
It should also be noted that men are also perfectly capable of looking after kids, as I did after (and before) my wife died of breast cancer when our lad was two years old. The fact is that many men simply refuse to countenance any course of action that might impact their careers.
Wonder how many times in the coming years Sir Pious Starmer will regret those words from opposition? When you have this many MPs, could be every couple of months and will be a constant drip and drag. Big lesson for Kemi.
Always thought there was something of the Obadiah Slope in Starmer. Better hair perhaps.
There are three interpretations of that:
Someone who has (ever) been a lawbreaker cannot be a lawmaker
Someone who is a lawmaker cannot break any law while a lawmaker
Someone who has made a law cannot themselves break it
The first is clearly nonsense unless we have no concept of rehabilitation or seriousness of crimes. We've all surely broken the law, so we can't have any lawmakers.
The second has some logic, for more serious crimes. I don't think we require a minister to resign if caught speeding (perhaps if their brief includes road safety etc, but that's more about hypocrisy). Maybe lawmakers cannot break laws they have responsibility for or which expose them as hypocrites or as general wrong'uns.
The third, is the Johnson case of someone introducing new law that applies to everyone and then breaking it themselves. Hypocrisy.
Opposition parties will, of course, take interpretation one and scour public records for any historical offences by anyone in government. They'll do this particularly now a precedent has been set, which is why this seems daft from Starmer unless there is more to the story that could come out. Do we sack Starmer if it emerges that he once bought some weed (supply of a banned substance) for a friend at uni? It would be like Sunak resigning for not wearing a seatbelt.
Both Johnson and Sunak broke the law while PM, paying police fines, of course.
I mean ffs look at Canada. 4% of deaths are via assisted dying. From some much smaller number before the law was changed.
And people think that the huge increase is just a larger number of people with MND deciding to end their lives early, or somesuch.
God and/or hell really doesn't come into it. Agree about the doctors, that said, what on earth (not "in hell") is it to do with them. Either someone wants to end their lives or they don't. As is pointed out, we are all terminally ill so picking some arbitrary point to end it shouldn't depend on anyone apart from the person themselves.
I’m not finding this a very persuasive argument. On what grounds is 4% too high? No, they don’t all have MND, but everyone dies and lots of people die slowly and unpleasantly. That 4% are managing their final days doesn’t inherently seem problematic to me. Is there evidence that any of these cases are seeing an abuse of the system?
The concern, among others, comes from the large number of people in the Canadian scheme, who record "being a burden to family" as a reason.
Imagine being incontinent and depending on your family to clean you up every few hours and launder your bedding every day. Imagine being demented and physically attacking your family when they try to undress you and wipe your backside. Imagine being unable to move, and dependent on your family to hoist you into a chair in front of the telly.
Essentially, imagine turning back into a baby, except now your carers are not in their 20s and many times bigger and stronger than you. Except now your carers are in their 60s or 70s and may themselves be frail.
Being a burden to your family is not just a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.
Having watched a friend decline and ultimately die from MND I’d instinctively support the proposal. He expressed repeatedly that he would prefer to be able to choose his exit.
Checks and balances are clearly needed but the current system does not serve the terminally ill well.
It doesn't serve the poor terminally ill well.
Having the financial means to go to another jurisdiction should not be the criteria for the ending of suffering.
Yep. This is the main point I made to my MP.
Who has failed to reply.
Some say MPs should not spend their time as faux social workers or welfare rights advisers helping their less fortunate constituents negotiate their way round a hostile bureaucracy. Others say MPs should not spend their time debating moral or even political issues with constituents. Your correspondence would fall into the second category.
Seems just basic good behaviour to at least provide some kind of acknowledgement that she has received the email!!
Even the previous MP who was basically useless managed to send out acknowledgements.
Well yes, and on those lines, I am surprised Nigel Farage does not have staff running his constituency office even if he himself can barely find Clacton on a map. Maybe he does now since complaints about his neglect seem to have dried up.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
Just to comment on this single point, I think it's somewhat mistaken. Lots of mothers would have worked in the past.
Often they would have done work that allowed them to also look after their own kids at the same time - like taking in laundry to wash at home - and that sort of small scale work in the home simply isn't available any more.
Or, because people didn't move around so much, and lived in the same area as extended family, they would have had grandmas, or aunts, to do childcare, rather than having to pay.
These are examples of much larger changes in the structure of the economy and society that aren't changing back.
Though the ability to do quite a lot of professional work flexibly from home is a reasonably new development that could make that things easier and better. Except that social conservatives tend to be opponents of WFH.
Ultimately, it's bloody house prices. Again. As long as normal people can't have an agreeable life on one salary because of how much they are paying for somewhere to live, more people are going to have to do more paid work than is optimal for them and society.
(It even affects things like assisted dying- I think it was Diane Abbott who made that point in Parliament just now. If people have a lot of wealth tied up in houses, and fear their children not having one in the future, it is going to warp their thoughts about end-of-life care. Land and houses should be stupid places to put wealth.)
I appreciate that not everybody will be a Dominic Cummings fan (I'm not one myself) but he does post some interesting analyses. This, which strikes me as pretty insightful, with much else, just arrived in the inbox...
"Poorer people who don’t watch much news are generally much more open-minded about politics than graduates living in big cities who consume a lot of news, who are much more ‘trapped in narrow information bubbles’ than the average GOP rural voter who pays little attention to politics. And pundits and academics are the most closed-minded of all while thinking of themselves as the opposite. They herd to a few acceptable opinions but think they’re the few able to step outside herding and observe objectively. Another golden rule of politics is that it’s the intelligentsia who are easiest to fool with simple moral propaganda tales…"
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
2) Child death rates. We now thankfully have much lower child death rates. Again in ye olden days, you might need to have five pregnancies for two or three to reach adulthood. Or worse. This means that women have to spend longer pregnant, and might spend years looking after babies who do not reach adulthood.
3) Contraception / abortion. Not just in the obvious ways: many couples / women have an idea of how many kids they want. For most of my friends, it seems to be two. They (sometimes struggle to) have that many, then after that, they stop.
4) Since women spend less time pregnant to get the number of kids they want, they use contraception to stop having any more, and go back into the workplace. This feeds back into 1).
5) Longer kidulthoods. Kids now stay at school/education until 18, when they might well have joined the workforce at a much younger age; either leaving home or bringing in a salary to help their families.
Re 5: Nowadays the cost of housing is so high that, unless they've managed to land a particularly well-paying job, your offspring are likely to be back again at 21 after finishing their degree.
More immediately, the cost of housing is such that affording a bedroom per child is very difficult.
I was thinking more in terms of the likelihood of your offspring having kids (which I think was what JJ vaguely had in mind). If they can't even move into a home of their own - whether rented or bought, let alone one with extra bedrooms - having kids isn't likely to be high on their priority list.
There's an assumption that people make good, rational choices. I'm sure everyone on PB knows people who would be loving, thoughtful partners and/or parents but have chosen not to or have never had the opportunity. And conversely some who are completely unsuitable for that role / some who make terrible choices.
Part of my old job was managing the company's mobile phone contract, and as we had about 6,000 issued phones the money involved was not inconsiderable. One of the techniques I used was to periodically request the top five highest bills, so they could be queried to check that any private use was being paid for, and relying upon the grapevine to spread the word that bills were actually being checked, which mostly they weren't.
Regularly topping the list was the phone registered to one of the people right at the top, who's still a public figure so will remain anonymous; their phone was regularly making calls around the world, especially to Ukraine and the Caribbean, and running up an annual bill of £25,000. I wanted to investigate but several times was warned off by other Directors; after several months of this, I bumped into the person by chance and took the opportunity to make a casual comment about how much they used their phone, only to be told they didn't like mobile phones and had never used one.
Swiftly on the case, it eventually transpired that that phone, and two others, had been stolen within the company by an IT contractor, who had relatives around the world and had passed two of them on and the three of them had been for a long time enjoying free phone calls to each other at the company's expense....
How would you stop something like that from happening?
Better security around ordered phones and checking out any that go missing, is an obvious example. All of this was contracted out and we had a good talk with a supplier about what had happened.
My method of checking out the highest bills - the same approach I used to expenses claims which turned up a fair bit of fraud over the years - also would have worked, had the other Directors not initially stood in the way. It was a common pattern that someone engaged in fraud would start off with small stuff that would never get noticed, or in one memorable case profited from an honest mistake that was not spotted, and then get bolder and greedier until, sure enough, one day they'd make it to the premier league of claims.
Yup - patterns. It's one area where "AI" has actually worked - detecting unusual patterns in data for further checking.
The use of AI for stuff like that probably has a lot of potential, as you say. Because going through the detail of people's expenses claims or phone bills is labour intensive and companies can't possibly check everything, relying on trust, training, the line manager signoff, the occasional spot checks, and tough sanctions for the few that get caught.
I believe that it is in use in a number of companies for fraud detection. With some claims of success.
I mean ffs look at Canada. 4% of deaths are via assisted dying. From some much smaller number before the law was changed.
And people think that the huge increase is just a larger number of people with MND deciding to end their lives early, or somesuch.
God and/or hell really doesn't come into it. Agree about the doctors, that said, what on earth (not "in hell") is it to do with them. Either someone wants to end their lives or they don't. As is pointed out, we are all terminally ill so picking some arbitrary point to end it shouldn't depend on anyone apart from the person themselves.
I’m not finding this a very persuasive argument. On what grounds is 4% too high? No, they don’t all have MND, but everyone dies and lots of people die slowly and unpleasantly. That 4% are managing their final days doesn’t inherently seem problematic to me. Is there evidence that any of these cases are seeing an abuse of the system?
The concern, among others, comes from the large number of people in the Canadian scheme, who record "being a burden to family" as a reason.
Imagine being incontinent and depending on your family to clean you up every few hours and launder your bedding every day. Imagine being demented and physically attacking your family when they try to undress you and wipe your backside. Imagine being unable to move, and dependent on your family to hoist you into a chair in front of the telly.
Essentially, imagine turning back into a baby, except now your carers are not in their 20s and many times bigger and stronger than you. Except now your carers are in their 60s or 70s and may themselves be frail.
Being a burden to your family is not just a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.
Yes, the sad fact is that, even though they may be loved very much by their families, many old people do indeed become a burden on their loved ones, and they know that is the case even though their families would never say so. That is of course no reason for them to end their lives, but you can't blame them for saying it as they see it. None of us want to be a burden on our offstring.
I mean ffs look at Canada. 4% of deaths are via assisted dying. From some much smaller number before the law was changed.
And people think that the huge increase is just a larger number of people with MND deciding to end their lives early, or somesuch.
God and/or hell really doesn't come into it. Agree about the doctors, that said, what on earth (not "in hell") is it to do with them. Either someone wants to end their lives or they don't. As is pointed out, we are all terminally ill so picking some arbitrary point to end it shouldn't depend on anyone apart from the person themselves.
I’m not finding this a very persuasive argument. On what grounds is 4% too high? No, they don’t all have MND, but everyone dies and lots of people die slowly and unpleasantly. That 4% are managing their final days doesn’t inherently seem problematic to me. Is there evidence that any of these cases are seeing an abuse of the system?
For info, this bill is based on the Oregon model where the figure is 1%.
Wonder how many times in the coming years Sir Pious Starmer will regret those words from opposition? When you have this many MPs, could be every couple of months and will be a constant drip and drag. Big lesson for Kemi.
Always thought there was something of the Obadiah Slope in Starmer. Better hair perhaps.
There are three interpretations of that:
Someone who has (ever) been a lawbreaker cannot be a lawmaker
Someone who is a lawmaker cannot break any law while a lawmaker
Someone who has made a law cannot themselves break it
The first is clearly nonsense unless we have no concept of rehabilitation or seriousness of crimes. We've all surely broken the law, so we can't have any lawmakers.
The second has some logic, for more serious crimes. I don't think we require a minister to resign if caught speeding (perhaps if their brief includes road safety etc, but that's more about hypocrisy). Maybe lawmakers cannot break laws they have responsibility for or which expose them as hypocrites or as general wrong'uns.
The third, is the Johnson case of someone introducing new law that applies to everyone and then breaking it themselves. Hypocrisy.
Opposition parties will, of course, take interpretation one and scour public records for any historical offences by anyone in government. They'll do this particularly now a precedent has been set, which is why this seems daft from Starmer unless there is more to the story that could come out. Do we sack Starmer if it emerges that he once bought some weed (supply of a banned substance) for a friend at uni? It would be like Sunak resigning for not wearing a seatbelt.
Both Johnson and Sunak broke the law while PM, paying police fines, of course.
Yes. Sunak did not resign when fined for failing to wear a seatbelt. I'd have been astonished if he had.
Johnson did not resign when fined for breaking laws he introduced. A more honourable man might have done so, although I do have some sympathy for the thing he actually got fined for (although limited - the stupid law was his stupid law) but less sympathy over other things that were happening and of which he was surely aware or event approved.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
I appreciate that not everybody will be a Dominic Cummings fan (I'm not one myself) but he does post some interesting analyses. This, which strikes me as pretty insightful, with much else, just arrived in the inbox...
"Poorer people who don’t watch much news are generally much more open-minded about politics than graduates living in big cities who consume a lot of news, who are much more ‘trapped in narrow information bubbles’ than the average GOP rural voter who pays little attention to politics. And pundits and academics are the most closed-minded of all while thinking of themselves as the opposite. They herd to a few acceptable opinions but think they’re the few able to step outside herding and observe objectively. Another golden rule of politics is that it’s the intelligentsia who are easiest to fool with simple moral propaganda tales…"
Yeah I think he's well worth reading if you can get past the prose style.
One thing I do think about this bill is that it’s been brought forward too soon in the parliament. With so many new MPs still getting to grips with everything asking them to decide on something this sensitive as one of their first actions is decidedly unfair.
I realise it isn’t the government’s fault, and as a private member’s bill it is of course going nowhere, but I do think Starmer was unwise not to try and buy off the sponsor so it wasn’t put in the first place.
I get the impression that this is Starmer’s bill. My theory is that he’s trying to get it done without having to do any hard work. And if it fails, never mind, they tried.
Isn't this the quid pro quo for all the Lord Alli donations? It's reportedly an issue he has spoken in the Lords about, as a supporter of a change in the law.
No. It’s a Private Member’s Bill, picked by the MP who was lucky enough to be first in the ballot. The Govt has said they’ll make time for debate, which is what everyone’s been calling for and seems entirely appropriate.
If it's a matter of conscience it often tends to be a private bill, as the government can't really take a line or promote it, at least until there's an established consensus. A pattern that goes back at least to David Steel's private bill on abortion reform, and probably much longer.
There’s Joseph Reeves’ unsuccessful 1952 Private Member’s Bill to legalise abortion, for one earlier example.
The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 was also a PMB.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
On topic, I'd also like to say that there is a big difference between 'life' and 'existence'. Modern medicine can keep people 'alive' when they are, for all intents and purposes, dead. If (as an example) you have no brain function, then that is not life. It is existence.
Where that boundary lies will vary from person to person. But existence with pain, and no life, seems like torture to me.
(Ben Spencer's intervention about half an hour ago was interesting.)
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
Just to comment on this single point, I think it's somewhat mistaken. Lots of mothers would have worked in the past.
Often they would have done work that allowed them to also look after their own kids at the same time - like taking in laundry to wash at home - and that sort of small scale work in the home simply isn't available any more.
Or, because people didn't move around so much, and lived in the same area as extended family, they would have had grandmas, or aunts, to do childcare, rather than having to pay.
These are examples of much larger changes in the structure of the economy and society that aren't changing back.
Though the ability to do quite a lot of professional work flexibly from home is a reasonably new development that could make that things easier and better. Except that social conservatives tend to be opponents of WFH.
Ultimately, it's bloody house prices. Again. As long as normal people can't have an agreeable life on one salary because of how much they are paying for somewhere to live, more people are going to have to do more paid work than is optimal for them and society.
(It even affects things like assisted dying- I think it was Diane Abbott who made that point in Parliament just now. If people have a lot of wealth tied up in houses, and fear their children not having one in the future, it is going to warp their thoughts about end-of-life care. Land and houses should be stupid places to put wealth.)
I don't oppose WFH.
More women working full time as well as their male partners has in turn led to more incomes for mortgages and rents also pushing up house prices
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
Of course they can.
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
As I said last night I don't really see why she needed to resign. It was a relatively minor offence committed before she was elected as an MP for which she has already been sentenced in the magistrates court.
Plus we now have MPs who have served prison time and a President elect of the United States who is also a convicted criminal
We had an MP elected from prison in the past, although they changed the rules afterwards so it couldn’t happen again.
Bobby Sands of course.
Indeed, even Nelson Mandela spent time in prison, as did our Lord Jesus Christ.
I do wonder how many MPs, particularly on the Tory side, against the bill and calling for better palliative care instead, have voted against increased NHS funding in that area?
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Comments like this are a good example of why I've gone from being strongly in favour of assisted dying to being on the fence. I just don't trust people with this kind of bigoted attitude towards people who are different from them, when they make assurances that the safeguards won't be removed in a few years.
I mean ffs look at Canada. 4% of deaths are via assisted dying. From some much smaller number before the law was changed.
And people think that the huge increase is just a larger number of people with MND deciding to end their lives early, or somesuch.
God and/or hell really doesn't come into it. Agree about the doctors, that said, what on earth (not "in hell") is it to do with them. Either someone wants to end their lives or they don't. As is pointed out, we are all terminally ill so picking some arbitrary point to end it shouldn't depend on anyone apart from the person themselves.
I’m not finding this a very persuasive argument. On what grounds is 4% too high? No, they don’t all have MND, but everyone dies and lots of people die slowly and unpleasantly. That 4% are managing their final days doesn’t inherently seem problematic to me. Is there evidence that any of these cases are seeing an abuse of the system?
The concern, among others, comes from the large number of people in the Canadian scheme, who record "being a burden to family" as a reason.
That does raise some concern, but I’d like to see some follow-up research. What do people mean when they say that? People sometimes rationalise their own feelings by reference to others. Have they been coerced/influenced in their decision or is that just their own interpretation, they feel like a burden? Is that the sole reason they give or one of many?
Getting a conviction as a result of this sequence of events seems rough.
"In a statement, Haigh said that she had been mugged on a night out in 2013 whilst working for the insurer Aviva. She said that she gave the police a list of items that she had thought were missing from her handbag, which wrongly included her mobile work phone which she thought was missing at the time.[56] She was issued with a new phone but when her old phone was switched on, she was called in for police questioning.[57] Haigh said that her solicitor had advised her "not to comment" during that interview.[58] She then pleaded guilty to making a false report to police at magistrates' court, six months before she was elected as an MP at the 2015 general election, and received a conditional discharge. Haigh described the incident as a "genuine mistake" from which she "did not make any gain". Sky News reported that two of their sources alleged that Haigh had wanted a more modern work handset that was being given out to her colleagues at the time."
Getting a conviction from those facts as described by Haigh is not difficult, it is impossible. It cannot be done. It is not an offence to make a mistake.
If that is all the relevant facts, it is hard to credit that she gave, or was advised to give, no answers in interview. For the matter was simple: I made a genuine mistake.
Yes it sounds most odd. Why would you start arsing around with "no comment" to the police rather than just say, "ah yes, sorry, I thought the phone had been nicked but it hadn't. I've found it." A mistake like that is perfectly understandable if you've been mugged.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
Of course they can.
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
Everybody who has ever cast a vote is to some degree trying to impose what they personally want upon others
It's when you realise that everything you bought during the previous three or four weeks has had its price artificially inflated....
Magnet quoted me for a new kitchen a few weeks ago. We've got all the appliances in storage, it's a small kitchen, no wall cupboards, six base unit drawer cabinets and worktops and a sink. The "retail" price was £21475.07. Over 21 grand for 6 painted MDF cabinets and a bit of composite worktop! A fantasy price plucked out of an arse as no one ever pays retail price. "Trade" price got it down to just over £6000. I haggled them down to £5500 just by asking. I then hit them with their price matching promise a few days later as DIY Kitchens were coming in with a price of £3600 for a superior kitchen. They said they'd match it! So "£21k" down to under four grand. And they're still making a profit.
Loving the false precision in the original quote, down to 7p, presumably to imply that they haven't just chosen a number and multiplied it by 6
We did Howdens-Wren ping-pong to lower the price on ours, ended up on about 35% of the original quote, but with some extra bits and some upgrades chucked in. Your ~16% is impressive!
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Comments like this are a good example of why I've gone from being strongly in favour of assisted dying to being on the fence. I just don't trust people with this kind of bigoted attitude towards people who are different from them, when they make assurances that the safeguards won't be removed in a few years.
I can't imagine anything more bigoted than forcing others to do what you personally want.
Don't give @HYUFD ideas. Women should be at home having children. not working.
I did not say women should be banned from most paid work like the Taliban have done, just more mothers should be supported by government to have the option of being stay at home mothers or only working part time if they wish
No, you did not say that. Your emphasis was on women marrying earlier and having more kids; on restricting women. I was the person (not the only one...) to point out that it might just be better for men to take more responsibility, and society to help.
Some special stories on mumsnet last night.
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
I gave an aspect of this a little thought during a walk yesterday (still can't run, annoyingly). Things have changed. Why? Is it just the pernicious forces of uber liberal feminism, as HYUFD fears? Why is the birth rate going down?
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
Just to comment on this single point, I think it's somewhat mistaken. Lots of mothers would have worked in the past.
Often they would have done work that allowed them to also look after their own kids at the same time - like taking in laundry to wash at home - and that sort of small scale work in the home simply isn't available any more.
Or, because people didn't move around so much, and lived in the same area as extended family, they would have had grandmas, or aunts, to do childcare, rather than having to pay.
These are examples of much larger changes in the structure of the economy and society that aren't changing back.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
Of course they can.
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
The notion that politics should be divorced from ethics is an extremely silly one.
Non-religious people have personal beliefs of right and wrong, and if they are legislators, then of course these legislators will vote accordingly.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
I think this is over simplified. Religions as a whole are against murder, but so is secular society. Religions and secular society carefully define and distinguish between killings, making some murder and others not - war, self defence, insanity, accident and so on. No-one is absolutist. They may think they are, but only because they are accustomed to the status quo.
Religion is one of the factors informing opinions on the grey areas, which will always exist.
I am religious (middle of the road CoE) and support assisted dying. Religion assists me in forming this view. Other religious people (and secular ones too) will see it differently. If I were against assisted dying, I would think that there were reasons for that view which were good against the whole world, not just my private opinion, for it would be a disallowed exemption from the general law of murder. An exemption I am content to make.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
Of course they can.
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
Socialists have a right to their views, but they shouldn’t impose their views on the rest of us and are often unbelievably selfish about doing so.
The fact is, everyone tries to impose their views on others to a greater or lesser extent. It’s just that religion being less fashionable at the moment gets more criticism for it.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
I think this is over simplified. Religions as a whole are against murder, but so is secular society. Religions and secular society carefully define and distinguish between killings, making some murder and others not - war, self defence, insanity, accident and so on. No-one is absolutist. They may think they are, but only because they are accustomed to the status quo.
Religion is one of the factors informing opinions on the grey areas, which will always exist.
I am religious (middle of the road CoE) and support assisted dying. Religion assists me in forming this view. Other religious people (and secular ones too) will see it differently. If I were against assisted dying, I would think that there were reasons for that view which were good against the whole world, not just my private opinion, for it would be a disallowed exemption from the general law of murder. An exemption I am content to make.
And to add to that, I don't think religious MPs should be pressured to vote for the bill either. Being an MP is by definition imposing your views on other people and religious MPs beliefs shouldn't count for less just because they're informed by religion rather than politics or other moral values.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Comments like this are a good example of why I've gone from being strongly in favour of assisted dying to being on the fence. I just don't trust people with this kind of bigoted attitude towards people who are different from them, when they make assurances that the safeguards won't be removed in a few years.
I can't imagine anything more bigoted than forcing others to do what you personally want.
The selfishness is breathtaking.
I support assisted dying; but this concept is a big one. The new law when in place makes a significant new exemption from the law of murder. Those against it, both secular and religious, (with whom I respectfully dissent) are saying that this form of killing should not be an exemption from the general law of murder. If they are right that is something which would apply to all, it is not just a personal fad. Bigotry and selfishness do not enter into it.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
Of course they can.
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
Socialists have a right to their views, but they shouldn’t impose their views on the rest of us and are often unbelievably selfish about doing so.
The fact is, everyone tries to impose their views on others to a greater or lesser extent. It’s just that religion being less fashionable at the moment gets more criticism for it.
The point about assisted dying is there is no impact on anyone else.
If a socialist wants to tax me more there is a clear impact on others because that tax raised will improve public services.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
Of course they can.
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
Socialists have a right to their views, but they shouldn’t impose their views on the rest of us and are often unbelievably selfish about doing so.
The fact is, everyone tries to impose their views on others to a greater or lesser extent. It’s just that religion being less fashionable at the moment gets more criticism for it.
The point about assisted dying is there is no impact on anyone else.
If a socialist wants to tax me more there is a clear impact on others because that tax raised will improve public services.
A law on assisted dying could, plausibly, lead to my life being ended prematurely. Now, I don’t think that should be the case if the law is well-written, but I get that such a law can impact others.
Hope you're all doing well. I don't suppose I've been missed, but I've made a deliberate attempt to stay away from here since the election. There's too many other things I want to do rather than spend endless - obviously interesting and thought-provoking! - hours scrolling through the conversation in these parts.
But I thought I'd dip in today to see what folk are saying about the assisted dying bill. As ever, good comments.
My opinion, for what it's worth (obvs very little!), having seen a close relative spend the last decade of 'life' as a empty husk of what they once were thanks to Alzheimer's, and seeing other family and friends in the opiate oblivion of the last days and weeks of cancer, I hope it passes. It's simplistic to say, I know, but we don't put dogs through what we put humans through in the last stages of terminal illness.
I also have a lot of sympathy for severely disabled people who may want to end their suffering. If, God forbid, I were to be paralysed from the neck down, I don't think I would like to carry on.
I know there'll always be vile, unscrupulous, mercenary individuals who will want to relieve themselves of the problem of having to provide some modicum of care and support for a relative, or to hasten their demise to got their venal grasping mitts on an inheritance. But I don't think it's beyond the ability of the UK to put the required safeguards in place.
Pre-Shipman it was probably not uncommon for sympathetic doctors to help such patients slip off painlessly. From what I've read it wasn't uncommon for medics to do the same in warfare to grievously injured soldiers. Nowadays that below the radar euthanasia is obviously not the done thing.
So I hope that as a mature democracy our MPs today have the courage to vote for the bill and do the work necessary to ensure strong safeguards are in place to guard against coercion.
If someone wishes to be euthanised and are judged to be of a sound mind to express that wish and to be judged to be free of coercion, I think we should help them to have their wish and gain their peace and release from suffering I hope none of us ever has to endure.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
I think this is over simplified. Religions as a whole are against murder, but so is secular society. Religions and secular society carefully define and distinguish between killings, making some murder and others not - war, self defence, insanity, accident and so on. No-one is absolutist. They may think they are, but only because they are accustomed to the status quo.
Religion is one of the factors informing opinions on the grey areas, which will always exist.
I am religious (middle of the road CoE) and support assisted dying. Religion assists me in forming this view. Other religious people (and secular ones too) will see it differently. If I were against assisted dying, I would think that there were reasons for that view which were good against the whole world, not just my private opinion, for it would be a disallowed exemption from the general law of murder. An exemption I am content to make.
And to add to that, I don't think religious MPs should be pressured to vote for the bill either. Being an MP is by definition imposing your views on other people and religious MPs beliefs shouldn't count for less just because they're informed by religion rather than politics or other moral values.
Yes. The people, both secular and religious, who are incorrect are those who assume that some concept like 'religion' automatically provides adherents with one 'correct' answer. Would that life were so simple.
I'm not religious but people who are have as much right as anyone else to express their views as anyone else, whether or not they couch them in secular terms. The attempts to disregard the views of people based on their religion are horrific.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
Of course religious people have the right to have a view based upon their religion. The issue is should they be allowed to impose their religious views on everybody else.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
Religious people are entited to vote in the ballot box or in parliament the same as atheists and entitled to have their religion influence their vote too if they wish
Of course they can.
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
Socialists have a right to their views, but they shouldn’t impose their views on the rest of us and are often unbelievably selfish about doing so.
The fact is, everyone tries to impose their views on others to a greater or lesser extent. It’s just that religion being less fashionable at the moment gets more criticism for it.
The point about assisted dying is there is no impact on anyone else.
If a socialist wants to tax me more there is a clear impact on others because that tax raised will improve public services.
Plainly, there is an impact upon others, if assisted dying is legalised. Judges, who have to determine whether it goes ahead. Doctors, who must assist the process. Family members.
There are very few acts that have no impact upon others.
Comments
The husband who peed all over and beside the toilet who told his wife it wasn't his job to clean it up. Another husband who bought a huge TV with family money that is in the living room, but had a code on it and no-one else in the family is allowed to use it.
Bearing in mind that these are the men who are "good enough" for the women to have chosen to marry them, and it makes you wonder what the men who haven't found a woman willing to marry them and have kids are like?
Hard to conclude that women being too fussy is the main problem.
"In a statement, Haigh said that she had been mugged on a night out in 2013 whilst working for the insurer Aviva. She said that she gave the police a list of items that she had thought were missing from her handbag, which wrongly included her mobile work phone which she thought was missing at the time.[56] She was issued with a new phone but when her old phone was switched on, she was called in for police questioning.[57] Haigh said that her solicitor had advised her "not to comment" during that interview.[58] She then pleaded guilty to making a false report to police at magistrates' court, six months before she was elected as an MP at the 2015 general election, and received a conditional discharge. Haigh described the incident as a "genuine mistake" from which she "did not make any gain". Sky News reported that two of their sources alleged that Haigh had wanted a more modern work handset that was being given out to her colleagues at the time."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louise_Haigh#Resignation
Back in the 1990s I had 2 Magnet catalogues for consecutive quarters when they changed to a "1/3 off" discount marketing strategy.
All of the listed prices in the 2nd catalogue were precisely 50% higher than those in the first catalogue.
What is different is the doors and the fancier kinds of internals - think the corner cupboards that have elaborate carousels etc.
For the doors, you now can buy them separately - after years of the trade fighting this.
The internals - the more expensive kitchen design places frantically try and come up with new, better, internals. But the cheap people are right behind. I recently purchase a drawer replacement from B&Q - kept the existing drawer front. The mechanism is solid, smooth and the soft closer robust.
So the difference between the expensive kitchen and the cheap one, is often just the quality of finish on the doors.
EDIT: even if they don't make a profit on you, that's £17K they've got from a bunch of people. Plus starting with a big number, then allowing people to bargain them down makes the customer feel good. Like those shirts that are always on 40% sale....
Regularly topping the list was the phone registered to one of the people right at the top, who's still a public figure so will remain anonymous; their phone was regularly making calls around the world, especially to Ukraine and the Caribbean, and running up an annual bill of £25,000. I wanted to investigate but several times was warned off by other Directors; after several months of this, I bumped into the person by chance and took the opportunity to make a casual comment about how much they used their phone, only to be told they didn't like mobile phones and had never used one.
Swiftly on the case, it eventually transpired that that phone, and two others, had been stolen within the company by an IT contractor, who had relatives around the world and had passed two of them on and the three of them had been for a long time enjoying free phone calls to each other at the company's expense....
Labour List track of Lab MPs now:
For 126
Against 87
Last night it was 106-78
So new declarations added today are 20-9.
They also have 11 declared abstentions / absent.
That still leaves approx 190 unknown.
There are plenty of existing mosques without taking over great Christian cathedrals
There is a part of your argument I agree with. It is ludicrous to farm out childcare to strangers whilst both parents go to work. That we have got ourselves into this situation is, I think, the fault of the sort of atomising liberalism that I think you are arguing against.
But it is also ludicrous to stick with outdated gender roles in parenting. Aside from the earliest years kids benefit equally from the influence of both masculine and feminine role models. Productive work is no longer sufficiently physical for it to make any sense that breadwinners should be masculine and caregivers feminine.
We should have a default that both parents work, say, 3 days per week. And we should have a society that makes that affordable. We should also flex that to allow one parent to be at home all the time if that's what works for the family. But it shouldn't default to being the mother.
Fires like Notre Dame can be speedy elements in the time factor. Notre Dame has done well. And Southwell chapter house - a favourite place to be - should for now leave the leaves unpainted, and think about it again after some big thing happens to the building which it will over the next 1000 years.
To reject it now is surely to say you just oppose assisted dying.
*For those that don't know the Apple ecosystem - when setting up the phone, the ID is linked with the Apple account. And sent to Apple. You can request that a lost or stolen phone (now) is blocked, so this process will fail. But it is not always requested by companies that have lost phones.
Q6 is the most salient imo. Can the system cope with abuse?
I've answered yes (it can) but this is not the same as saying the system can prevent abuse. That isn't possible. A system so watertight that cases of abuse are zero will be a system that helps only a fraction of those it is meant to help. It wouldn't be worth doing.
You have to think about numbers. People never like to but there's no other way to approach it. Imagine that 5,000 deaths per annum happen in England under AD. How many of these involving error or coercion would be too high to countenance? If you say one that's end of story. There's no real difference between that position and just opposing on principle. But assuming you get past this, how many? Not precisely, obviously, but approx. Is it closer to 5 or to 50? I bet people (inc MPs) have quite different assessments.
An analogy is the threshold for legal verdicts. The thing about how it's better that X guilty men go free than that one innocent be falsely convicted. What is X there? It's not 1,000 is it? It's not even 100. If it were we wouldn't have a working criminal justice system.
If that is all the relevant facts, it is hard to credit that she gave, or was advised to give, no answers in interview. For the matter was simple: I made a genuine mistake.
https://spacenews.com/astroscale-approaches-critical-design-review-for-oneweb-de-orbit-mission/
This is required for OneWeb, because of its moderately high orbits. Dead satellites would last for centuries at that altitude.
Like you I don't have answers. It's one of those times I'm glad I'm not an MP having to make this decision.
Some one phone the Fox Killer.
My method of checking out the highest bills - the same approach I used to expenses claims which turned up a fair bit of fraud over the years - also would have worked, had the other Directors not initially stood in the way. It was a common pattern that someone engaged in fraud would start off with small stuff that would never get noticed, or in one memorable case profited from an honest mistake that was not spotted, and then get bolder and greedier until, sure enough, one day they'd make it to the premier league of claims.
Here's some of my random thoughts, which sorta feed into each other:
1) Things cost more. Whereas in ye olden days, the man worked and the woman looked after the children, nowadays couples need, or like, more money to have the quality of life they want. The number of kids also feed into this: the more kids you have, the more they cost. There are not that many economies of scale.
2) Child death rates. We now thankfully have much lower child death rates. Again in ye olden days, you might need to have five pregnancies for two or three to reach adulthood. Or worse. This means that women have to spend longer pregnant, and might spend years looking after babies who do not reach adulthood.
3) Contraception / abortion. Not just in the obvious ways: many couples / women have an idea of how many kids they want. For most of my friends, it seems to be two. They (sometimes struggle to) have that many, then after that, they stop.
4) Since women spend less time pregnant to get the number of kids they want, they use contraception to stop having any more, and go back into the workplace. This feeds back into 1).
5) Longer kidulthoods. Kids now stay at school/education until 18, when they might well have joined the workforce at a much younger age; either leaving home or bringing in a salary to help their families.
I like the Sutherland Tapestry at Coventry, which is a bit harder to miss.
Belfast is looking quite nice, despite the gloomy and damp weather.
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10m
I have to say, I did not wake up this morning thinking that Kit Malthouse would make the best speech I had heard in the Commons for many months. But that's exactly what just happened.
https://bsky.app/profile/iandunt.bsky.social/post/3lc3i6qm3vc26
If this is the case, then there would have been a cost to either her employer or an insurance company, and arguably she would have been better off as a result, if only from the benefit-in-kind perspective.
As for what happened next, regardless of the truth about the phone, it is common for lawyers to advise clients to ‘no comment’ their way through police interviews, especially when the lawyer is not present, and you do not have to look too hard for that advice on the internet.
And then it looks like Haigh fell into a common trap of accepting a caution, presumably in order to close the matter before the election. The trap of course is that while it means no further action, what people often miss is that technically it involves pleading guilty, and that guilty plea can then be found on a DBS check for employment or by political opponents.
So yes, regardless of Haigh's original motivation, the rest of it is pretty standard fare.
That said, there's nothing "unmanly" about cooking, shopping, cleaning, or looking after children, the first three of which, a man would have to do anyway if he lived alone, and any man who thinks that there is is a fool.
Often they would have done work that allowed them to also look after their own kids at the same time - like taking in laundry to wash at home - and that sort of small scale work in the home simply isn't available any more.
Or, because people didn't move around so much, and lived in the same area as extended family, they would have had grandmas, or aunts, to do childcare, rather than having to pay.
These are examples of much larger changes in the structure of the economy and society that aren't changing back.
More generally, I think you make a good point in the article. I strongly believe in individual choice in this, but the issue is much more complicated "if I want to do X, I should be allowed to". Mainly because of the risks (based on anecdotal evidence, it's already not uncommon for people to have Do Not Resuscitate placed in their medical records without being consulted), but also because assisted dying is not just about one person. If it was, the word "assisted" wouldn't be there.
I don't know how I would vote. A few months ago I would have been in favour and that would still be my instinct, but the dismissal of people's concerns and the vilification of opponents has made me reconsider.
"For men will more readily forgive the loss of a parent than the loss of their patrimony."
Even the previous MP who was basically useless managed to send out acknowledgements.
Police cautions avoid prosecution.
So the CPS must have judged it met the standard for likely conviction?
Essentially, imagine turning back into a baby, except now your carers are not in their 20s and many times bigger and stronger than you. Except now your carers are in their 60s or 70s and may themselves be frail.
Being a burden to your family is not just a matter of pounds, shillings and pence.
Ultimately, it's bloody house prices. Again. As long as normal people can't have an agreeable life on one salary because of how much they are paying for somewhere to live, more people are going to have to do more paid work than is optimal for them and society.
(It even affects things like assisted dying- I think it was Diane Abbott who made that point in Parliament just now. If people have a lot of wealth tied up in houses, and fear their children not having one in the future, it is going to warp their thoughts about end-of-life care. Land and houses should be stupid places to put wealth.)
"Poorer people who don’t watch much news are generally much more open-minded about politics than graduates living in big cities who consume a lot of news, who are much more ‘trapped in narrow information bubbles’ than the average GOP rural voter who pays little attention to politics. And pundits and academics are the most closed-minded of all while thinking of themselves as the opposite. They herd to a few acceptable opinions but think they’re the few able to step outside herding and observe objectively. Another golden rule of politics is that it’s the intelligentsia who are easiest to fool with simple moral propaganda tales…"
And conversely some who are completely unsuitable for that role / some who make terrible choices.
Johnson did not resign when fined for breaking laws he introduced. A more honourable man might have done so, although I do have some sympathy for the thing he actually got fined for (although limited - the stupid law was his stupid law) but less sympathy over other things that were happening and of which he was surely aware or event approved.
Suppose someone thinks you should go to church every day. Should they be allowed to impose a law requiring everyone to go to church every day?
Or they think everyone should dress in a certain type of clothes. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
Or maybe they think everyone should eat some particular type of food. Should they be able to impose that requirement on everybody else?
This is what happens in places like Iran and Afghanistan. It has no place whatsoever in the UK.
And the UK public do not want it. There is no reason whatsoever for religious people to force others to live in agony just because an assisted death would offend their own religion.
If you are against assisted dying because of your religion, great. Don't have one. But don't be selfish in making everyone else do the same as you.
The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 was also a PMB.
Where that boundary lies will vary from person to person. But existence with pain, and no life, seems like torture to me.
(Ben Spencer's intervention about half an hour ago was interesting.)
More women working full time as well as their male partners has in turn led to more incomes for mortgages and rents also pushing up house prices
The point is they are unbelievably selfish imposing what they personally want upon others.
Indeed, even Nelson Mandela spent time in prison, as did our Lord Jesus Christ.
(Feeling stoopid.)
We did Howdens-Wren ping-pong to lower the price on ours, ended up on about 35% of the original quote, but with some extra bits and some upgrades chucked in. Your ~16% is impressive!
The selfishness is breathtaking.
Non-religious people have personal beliefs of right and wrong, and if they are legislators, then of course these legislators will vote accordingly.
Religion is one of the factors informing opinions on the grey areas, which will always exist.
I am religious (middle of the road CoE) and support assisted dying. Religion assists me in forming this view. Other religious people (and secular ones too) will see it differently. If I were against assisted dying, I would think that there were reasons for that view which were good against the whole world, not just my private opinion, for it would be a disallowed exemption from the general law of murder. An exemption I am content to make.
The fact is, everyone tries to impose their views on others to a greater or lesser extent. It’s just that religion being less fashionable at the moment gets more criticism for it.
If a socialist wants to tax me more there is a clear impact on others because that tax raised will improve public services.
Hope you're all doing well. I don't suppose I've been missed, but I've made a deliberate attempt to stay away from here since the election. There's too many other things I want to do rather than spend endless - obviously interesting and thought-provoking! - hours scrolling through the conversation in these parts.
But I thought I'd dip in today to see what folk are saying about the assisted dying bill. As ever, good comments.
My opinion, for what it's worth (obvs very little!), having seen a close relative spend the last decade of 'life' as a empty husk of what they once were thanks to Alzheimer's, and seeing other family and friends in the opiate oblivion of the last days and weeks of cancer, I hope it passes. It's simplistic to say, I know, but we don't put dogs through what we put humans through in the last stages of terminal illness.
I also have a lot of sympathy for severely disabled people who may want to end their suffering. If, God forbid, I were to be paralysed from the neck down, I don't think I would like to carry on.
I know there'll always be vile, unscrupulous, mercenary individuals who will want to relieve themselves of the problem of having to provide some modicum of care and support for a relative, or to hasten their demise to got their venal grasping mitts on an inheritance. But I don't think it's beyond the ability of the UK to put the required safeguards in place.
Pre-Shipman it was probably not uncommon for sympathetic doctors to help such patients slip off painlessly. From what I've read it wasn't uncommon for medics to do the same in warfare to grievously injured soldiers. Nowadays that below the radar euthanasia is obviously not the done thing.
So I hope that as a mature democracy our MPs today have the courage to vote for the bill and do the work necessary to ensure strong safeguards are in place to guard against coercion.
If someone wishes to be euthanised and are judged to be of a sound mind to express that wish and to be judged to be free of coercion, I think we should help them to have their wish and gain their peace and release from suffering I hope none of us ever has to endure.
There are very few acts that have no impact upon others.