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Breaking her word – politicalbetting.com
Breaking her word – politicalbetting.com
Picture: Coffin from the walls of Kirstall Abbey
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Breaking her word – politicalbetting.com
Picture: Coffin from the walls of Kirstall Abbey
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It is a scandal that is all around us, in hospitals and hospices.
There needs to be a balance. The current situation is unbalanced and inhumane.
I told Cyclefree that she is being way too harsh about Paula Vennells, I make Kim Leadbetter worse than Paula Vennells and I absolutely think Vennells is going to hell.
I was minded to support this bill, not now.
I am someone modestly in favour of Assisted Dying, like most of the country and most MPs, IIRC
But this, done like this, this way?
No no no no no
Why are they behaving so shoddily and evasively??? There is a natural majority for this if they get it right. Disgraceful
Judging by his actions, he seems more motivated by this than pretty much anything else we’ve seen.
It’s just so fucking WEIRD
To look back at the discussion on the last thread about productivity in the public sector, for a moment: see this, https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/qualitywatch/nhs-performance-dashboard , a new dashboard on NHS performance from the Nuffield Trust.
Also those doctors specialising in palliative care disagree with you.
Contrary to the header, the bill is scrutinised precisely because it is a private member's bill.
Of the 9 lawyers called, 6 are in favour of the Bill and 3 neutral. Again there are no opponents.
This is outrageous.
See here from last week -
I'm another who could be broadly supportive, who has been turned, based on how this has been mis-handled.
Leadbeater has lost any faith I had in her. Hoping this gets stopped.
On a side note ...What of the recent finding that doctors are very bad at assessing when even someone with a terminal illness is likely to die with the sort of accuracy demanded by this Bill? ..
Which study was that ?
The ones I'm aware of show doctors perform reasonably well in estimating the life expectancy of the terminally ill, but tend to err on the upside.
There are occasions when assisted dying could be a relief, but for me this bill seems to be rushed through, and that is wrong for such an emotional and complex issue
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/22/kkk-immigrants-flyers-kentucky
Jolly good. It's what folk voted for.
Something like this should have had public consultation (missing) and pre-legislative scrutiny (also missing). It should not have been drafted by a retired Parliamentary counsel on the basis of instructions given (by whom?) which we have not seen. It should be allowed as much time as it needs and it should not allow its sponsor to have such control over who gives evidence. It is particularly outrageous that the disabled are being ignored completely.
Jon McClain, the chief of police in Bellevue, Kentucky, told the Washington Post that a local resident had found one of the flyers on Monday.
A copper in America called Jon McClain, what were the odds?
If people are suffering, and there is little hope of recovery, let them die if they so choose. Do not make them suffer unnecessarily.
Are you against assisted dying in any form, or just the way it has been introduced?
Indeed
And of ALL the Bills to fuck around with, and look shifty and mendacious, they choose THIS. Assisted Dying??
In terms of human morality, there cannot be anything more significant. This isn’t some tweaking of the tax system or a partisan bit of opposition-baiting, this is “whether the state should enable suicide”, it needs solemn care and due diligence. Shameful
I quote:
Results
4,642 records were identified; 42 studies fully met the review criteria. Wide variation was shown with categorical estimates (range 23% to 78%) and continuous estimates ranged between an underestimate of 86 days to an overestimate of 93 days. The four papers which used probabilistic estimates tended to show greater accuracy (c-statistics of 0.74–0.78). Information available about the clinicians providing the estimates was limited. Overall, there was no clear “expert” subgroup of clinicians identified.
[...]
Conclusion
Studies of prognostic accuracy in palliative care are heterogeneous, but the evidence suggests that clinicians’ predictions are frequently inaccurate. No sub-group of clinicians was consistently shown to be more accurate than any other.
We'll probably end up uing the lecky from the La Rance tidal range. The cheapest power in France.
Until we buy it.
We should separate the substance of the bill from routine procedural aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Byrd
Cyclefree implies that Rantzen has recently been given the drug Osimertinib, whereas she has been on it for at least 18 months (it has been licensed since 2016) - and more importantly has changed her opinion on assisted dying one jot.
"The analysis highlights weaknesses in doctors’ prognoses, raising concerns from leading palliative care clinicians.
The data have been extracted by Paddy Stone, emeritus professor of palliative and end of life care at UCL, from a systematic review he published in BMC Medicine in 2017.
The study looked at the accuracy of the “surprise question”, a tool used by medics in the NHS to identify people within the last year of life.
It collated over 25,000 clinicians’ responses to the question “Would you be surprised if this patient were to die in the next six to 12 months?”
Most doctors responded “Yes”, saying they would be surprised for their patient to die. This response was likely to be correct, as the patients are most often still alive at the end of this time period.
However, when doctors answered “No”, meaning they would be surprised if the patient lived beyond six or 12 months, the patient defied expectations and survived 54 per cent of the time.
‘What will the likely error rate be?’"
Prof Katherine Sleeman, from King’s College London, said: “These findings are in line with my clinical experience, that estimating how long someone has left to live is notoriously difficult.
“If a person’s estimated prognosis will be key to determining whether they are eligible for assisted dying, MPs need to carefully consider how this estimate will be made, by whom, and what the likely error rate will be.”
Prof Stone said: “So, although overall the accuracy of the ‘surprise question’ is about 75 per cent, this is mostly driven by the fact that the question is good at identifying people who are going to live, but not so accurate at predicting who will die within a specified time frame.”"
"The professor suggested that while this high false-positive rate may not be detrimental to normal patient care, it could be “problematic” if the question were to be used as a safeguard in Ms Leadbeater’s Bill.
“The original motivation for the surprise question was to help staff to identify people who might be approaching the end of life and in need of extra support,” he said.
“In this context, it isn’t a problem if doctors over-identify patients at risk of dying, because it’s about giving more patients the opportunity to access additional benefits, palliative care or other healthcare services, and making sure they are prepared.
“However, in the context of an assisted dying bill, it’s a bit more problematic, and I don’t think any clinician estimate of survival would represent a very reliable eligibility criterion.”
“Just saying you’re restricting it to people with a prognosis of less than six months doesn’t seem to me to be a very watertight safeguard,” he added.
‘How many incorrect deaths acceptable?’
He said that if assisted dying was introduced and relied upon doctors’ estimates of survival, one would “never know” if doctors’ prognoses were accurate.
“We would never be able to demonstrate that the doctors’ estimates were wrong, because the patients would already have died as a result of an assisted death,” he said.
Dr Matthew Doré, honorary secretary of the Association for Palliative Medicine, said: “We simply don’t know the future and to make such a judgment of death upon an inaccurate, subjective assessment is societally dangerous and so I ask Kim Leadbeater to consider the question, how many incorrect deaths are acceptable for a ‘right’ to lethal medications?”
Background
Clinicians are inaccurate at predicting survival. The ‘Surprise Question’ (SQ) is a screening tool that aims to identify people nearing the end of life. Potentially, its routine use could help identify patients who might benefit from palliative care services. The objective was to assess the accuracy of the SQ by time scale, clinician, and speciality.
Methods
Searches were completed on Medline, Embase, CINAHL, AMED, Science Citation Index, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Open Grey literature (all from inception to November 2016). Studies were included if they reported the SQ and were written in English. Quality was assessed using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale.
Results
A total of 26 papers were included in the review, of which 22 reported a complete data set. There were 25,718 predictions of survival made in response to the SQ. The c-statistic of the SQ ranged from 0.512 to 0.822. In the meta-analysis, the pooled accuracy level was 74.8% (95% CI 68.6–80.5). There was a negligible difference in timescale of the SQ. Doctors appeared to be more accurate than nurses at recognising people in the last year of life (c-statistic = 0.735 vs. 0.688), and the SQ seemed more accurate in an oncology setting 76.1% (95% CI 69.7–86.3).
Conclusions
There was a wide degree of accuracy, from poor to reasonable, reported across studies using the SQ. Further work investigating how the SQ could be used alongside other prognostic tools to increase the identification of people who would benefit from palliative care is warranted.
The list of witnesses is here and does include MENCAP.
https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/57886/documents/5678
See section 2 which defines who is eligible. Pain is irrelevant. I have 3 health conditions which cannot be reversed. So does my brother. And son. So did my mother and father. In no case is - or was - pain involved that cannot be managed, eliminated or mitigated. Yet we would all be eligible.
My mother in law who had motor neurone disease - an awful way to die (though she was not in pain) - would not be eligible (though she made clear that she did want to be resuscitated.). But since the Bill allows another person to agree to AD for any reason and the family need not be informed, someone like her would be highly vulnerable to abuse of this Bill.
This is a bad Bill being rushed through. Talking about some alternative law is irrelevant. That is why there should be real extensive proper consultation beforehand. Not this.
"Mary Harrington
@moveincircles
I'm not going to speculate at this point, but I'll be very, very surprised if it doesn't eventually transpire that the reason this obviously extremely dangerous young man was handled with such kid gloves was something to do with the specifics of who his parents are"
https://x.com/moveincircles/status/1882025407123452357
1.4GW to Norway
1GW to the Netherlands
1GW to Ireland
3GW to France
So, no we can't buy all the electricity we need from abroad, although we can buy a fair amount.
That being said, this is about as bad as it gets for UK electricity supply. There's little wind, and we have the combination of short days and cloud cover affecting solar electricity production.
To add to this, we have four nuclear reactors either offline, or running significantly below boiler plate capacity:
Two reactors at Heysham 2 are offline, one where summer maintenance needed to be brought forward and the other completely unscheduled and offline. Heysham 1 is also currently being refuelled and is therefore offline. And finally, Hartlepool is offline due to a condensate leak.
Of these four outages, only one was planned to happen over the winter period: Heysham 1 fueling. (And candidly, they should have done it earlier so it didn't coincide with peak electricity and trough insolation.)
Without the nuclear issues, we'd be doing fine. Even with them, we're OK. But I wouldn't want to see another nuclear plant go offline.
Accuracy of clinical predictions of prognosis at the end-of-life: evidence from routinely collected data in urgent care records
https://bmcpalliatcare.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12904-023-01155-y
Note this set of figures:
https://bmcpalliatcare.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12904-023-01155-y/figures/2
The bill sets a limit of six months' life expectancy - which is not the same thing as the "surprise" question - and looking at the actual outcomes for those in the study above, the accuracy of prediction is much greater.
A 28-year-old man from Afghanistan has been arrested following a knife attack in a park in the German city of Aschaffenburg on Wednesday in which two people were killed, including a toddler, police said.
The ratings are in!
Nielsen says that 24.59 million people watched Trump's 2nd inauguration.
That's 9 million less than watched Joe Biden in 2021. And 5 million less than watched Trump in 2017.
This will piss him off. Bigly.
I'm not looking to hurt Russia. I love the Russian people, and always had a very good relationship with President Putin - and this despite the Radical Left's Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX. We must never forget that Russia helped us win the Second World War, losing almost 60,000,000 lives in the process. All of that being said, I'm going to do Russia, whose Economy is failing, and President Putin, a very big FAVOR. Settle now, and STOP this ridiculous War! IT'S ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE. If we don't make a "deal," and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other participating countries. Let's get this war, which never would have started if I were President, over with! We can do it the easy way, or the hard way - and the easy way is always better. It's time to "MAKE A DEAL." NO MORE LIVES SHOULD BE LOST!!!
In other words, could you be persuaded to back a bill that allowed assisted dying?
How would the layman find this news, Is there an aggregator for UK energy chat?
It was more of a foghorn.
Coal is looking more and more attractive - abundant globally, cheap, proven and reliable. We should stop rigging the market in favour of renewables, or unreliables as I call them, and see what energy sources it chooses, as we did in the 90s. My guess would be some combination of gas, coal and nuclear.
lol
US imports from Russia, 2021: $29,600M
2024: $2,900M (but that figure is missing December)
I have been to meet with my MP, who is on the Committee and is against the Bill, to change her mind.
I don't think the Bill goes far enough and is far too restrictive. Hopefully, once it is passed, its scope can be further expanded by further legislation in the years to come. A progressive ladder not a slippery slope.
In a generation of so, people will look back in amazement that it took so long to give people the right to manage their own death. Just as we now look back in amazement at the time it took to give women the right to vote or gays the righ to marry.
Fingers crossed this bill will pass.
The problem will get better over time as storage gets cheaper, but there still needs to be a plan for a dark and still fortnight without the lights going out.
Its a very tricky subject and should not have someone playing fast and loose. Be confident in your case (bill) and do everything above board. Why isn't she doing this? If she was a Tory some wag would suggest she owns shares in the drugs used to help people pass.