20mph speed limits in most of London don't seem to have stopped accidents as much as in Wales.
"London road deaths 'crisis' as number of pedestrians killed in collisions soars 25 per cent 10 cyclists died in 2024, including rider hit by London bus who died a fortnight after suffering critical injuries"
Sir Keir Starmer intends to 'push ahead' with deal to cede sovereignty to Chagos Islands and has offered significant concessions
Navin Ramgoolam, Mauritius's new prime minister, said his country has been offered 'complete sovereignty' of Diego Garcia, home to a critical US military base
He claimed that Starmer has effectively doubled the £9bn originally offered to Mauritius and weakened the British lease for Diego Garcia
He said the new deal will frontload instalments and link them to inflation. He also said that Mauritius will now have a right to veto extending the lease
He also revealed that Lord Hermer, the attorney-general, was involved in the latest round of face-to-face negotiations
If he has £9bn to spare, please send it to whomever is making the drones the Ukranians are using to go 1,000km into Russia in the last few days.
Jesus wept.
Where exactly are we supposed to be getting this £9billion from?
To pay for a transfer of sovereignty that the Chagossians themselves don’t even want & pisses off our most important military allay at a time when we can least afford to do so.
Starmer has lawyer brain: the pronouncements of a court with no power staffed by judges with no interest are more important than actual on the ground realpolitik.
It just has me scratching my head. There is no pressing need to do this; a very generous offer has been made and rejected; why can the government not just shrug and walk away?
There has to be *something* behind it, other than sheer ineptitude.
You’d think so, but I honestly think it’s lawyer brain in action. You can’t possibly refuse to implement a legal ruling: what would the world come to if every country did that?! (Spoiler: we are in a world where every country does precisely that & they’re all laughing at us as we tie ourselves in knots over these islands.)
And yet the fact that we honour the rule of law in this country is one of our principal selling points and the reason we remain one of the leading destinations for inward investment. We abandon that at our peril.
It's not the rule of law. The 'court' has made a recommendation - its judgement is in no way legally binding. That's why it's so mystifying.
One thing I would say about the Lucy Letby case is that my father has followed the case with interest (given his professional background) and one thing bugs him about the case.
The prosecution made a big thing about Lucy Letby being on shift when the babies died but that in his view is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
A good defence team should have been able to point out correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Obviously, it's physically possible for anyone to have committed such a crime, but I'd have thought that establishing that she was on shift for the cases being attributed to her was a key starting point for the prosecution.
But it is *not evidence that she did them*. It can't be presented as such in court.
IIRC other people came up on the matrix - if you get quite a lot of people there a lot, apparent hits happen at random surprisingly often, especially with deaths being genuinely doubtful in many cases.
Are you saying that it should have been taken as read that she was there at the time of any crime she was accused of?
Only as a starting point, to identify her as a person of interest for futher examination. No more. Those things crop up at random far too often. Remewmber, if there are n docs, murses, cleaners etc. then you get n goes at getting a hit. And if the confidence limit is something like 5% you don't need that many to have a fair chance of a hit.
And I would want to know how, and when, the deaths were identified as crime or not-crime and who knew and when. Until then, there was no reason at all to change or omit any deaths. Edit: already dealt with by Bondegezou.
But even that needn't be very significant given the known issues with presence/absence data. So even that couldn't be read.
One thing I would say about the Lucy Letby case is that my father has followed the case with interest (given his professional background) and one thing bugs him about the case.
The prosecution made a big thing about Lucy Letby being on shift when the babies died but that in his view is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
A good defence team should have been able to point out correlation doesn’t imply causation.
It is worse than your father imagines – the police and prosecution excluded deaths where Letby was not on duty.
You think she should have been charged with deaths that the prosecution didn't think she had committed?
If evidence suggests that statistically as many babies died off her watch as on her watch it would be presumably interesting circumstantial evidence. Bearing in mind she was exclusively convicted on circumstantial evidence, considering alternative circumstantial evidence might be compelling.
I have no idea whether David Davies has a point or not. I am nervous that were she not a nice, clean middle class white girl-next-door she would be allowed to rot in hell. But then being a middle class white girl- next-door shouldn't preclude her from justice.
Guildford Four, Birmingham Six, Derek Bentley, Christopher Evans – there have been other campaigns against miscarriages of justice not involving middle class White girl-next-door types. Admittedly two of these men had already been hanged by then.
Timothy Evans was convicted on the testimony of the former policeman perpetrator and Derek Bentley was undoubtedly at the scene of the crime. Ironically Bentley, who was 21 and already in custody when the shot was fired was hanged whilst Christopher Craig who took the shot was later released on the grounds of his age at the time of the incident. Today Ruth Ellis would have been convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility after years of mental abuse by the partner/ victim.
The thought of returning to state administered barbarism is horrendous, particularly when the state gets it wrong.
20mph speed limits in most of London don't seem to have stopped accidents as much as in Wales.
"London road deaths 'crisis' as number of pedestrians killed in collisions soars 25 per cent 10 cyclists died in 2024, including rider hit by London bus who died a fortnight after suffering critical injuries"
Well, most of the 20mph limits in London came in much earlier (2020 I think).
But this is super interesting, and reflects a concern I have over the reporting of stats like this. As London has become one of the best cities in the world for cycling, the enormous increase in cyclists was inevitably going to lead to more deaths, even as the streets have become physically much safer.
20mph speed limits in most of London don't seem to have stopped accidents as much as in Wales.
"London road deaths 'crisis' as number of pedestrians killed in collisions soars 25 per cent 10 cyclists died in 2024, including rider hit by London bus who died a fortnight after suffering critical injuries"
Did anyone attempt a serious analysis of the economic affect of the changes in Wales?
Yes we saved X lives and Y serious injuries, but at the cost of Z cumulative hours of extra travel time and ABC pounds of economic activity.
It doesn't have a particularly large effect on journey times, because it only applies in urban areas when you are going over 20mph. Once you've taken into account acceleration/deceleration, junctions, roadworks, congestion... all it does is reduce the risk posed by the small period you can actually get up to 30mph.
The bigger saving is insurance premiums, with a average fall of up to 16% - if you applied that to the whole of the UK, it's about £3 billion saved for drivers. Each fatal collision costs about £2 million for the state to deal with, so the fall in Wales would represent about another £400 million across the UK (plus serious and slight injuries).
20mph speed limits in most of London don't seem to have stopped accidents as much as in Wales.
"London road deaths 'crisis' as number of pedestrians killed in collisions soars 25 per cent 10 cyclists died in 2024, including rider hit by London bus who died a fortnight after suffering critical injuries"
You can see how this is going to go, can't you? The Wales stats will be proof that 20mph zones are good, the London stats will show that we need more of them or lower limits.
I'd be wary about 'soars 25%' over such small numbers as a proportion.
There's also the question of whether/how many of the accidents occurred within the 20mph zones.
And then, somewhat importantly, the correct denominator is miles cycled or, at least, number of cyclists.
Without considering all those, the figures are pretty meaningless.
Other bad news: Senator Susan Collins is going to support Tusli Gabbard’s nomination.
I blame Covid. In the first Trump administration the lunatics hadn't completely taken over the asylum like they have now. We all know people who went down rabbit holes during lockdown, and never came back. Happened to plenty of us ourselves to a certain extent.
I'm coming round to the idea that *none* of the lockdowns were worth it. Yes, more people would have died, health systems would have been overwhelmed, and elected officials would have been punished for that, governments may have fallen. But suspending people's freedoms to such an degree has radicalised large numbers of people in a way that is not healthy for democracy. Why are so many young people willing to say democracy isn't all that, and maybe they'd prefer a dictatorship? They've already been kept under house arrest in a democracy.
There was no argument for locking down healthy young people who were about as likely to be struck by lightning as they were to die from COVID.
There was some argument for measures for over-70s or those who were otherwise vulnerable.
Instead we got a wildly excessive terror campaign and an economically devastating furlough scheme that we're still paying for. At least Starmer wasn't in power then - it would have been even worse with him.
The majority of older people that caught Covid & had serious consequences caught it from younger (probably asymptomatic) people in their own household. In old people’s homes care staff or support workers would have brought it in.
How are you going to prevent schoolkids giving Covid to their parents, or their grandparent who lives in the same household in your non-lockdown world? You’re not, which means in turn that the inevitable outcome would have been the collapse of the NHS as it became overwhelmed with Covid cases & the Covid death rate would probably have doubled.
As it was things were touch and go - I’ve talked to respiratory consultants around where I live & they were absolutely flat out, with no spare capacity whatsoever having dredged up every bit of healthcare support available & running the people involved into the ground. Any further serious cases would have simply been sent to the Nightingale tent hospitals to die (which is what they were for of course).
Lockdowns were the least worst option available to the government at the time.
What evidence do you have that the death rate would have doubled? Or even increased? That's just unsupported, meaningless conjecture. Covid got into care homes and circulated amongst old people despite the fact that we had lockdowns, so they were largely futile.
Sweden didn't have lockdowns, but had a lower excess mortality rate than we did, relying on accurate, reliable, non-sensationalised information and the common sense of the Swedish people.
We (and other countries) trashed our civil liberties, traumatised a generation of children and ruined our economy for no demonstrable gain.
Sweden had restrictions tougher than ours at a few points; the main differences were mostly earlier on.[1] Sweden is a very different country, of course.
It also had excess mortality far higher than the more comparable neighbour countries, particularly earlier on, pre-vaccine, when Sweden's rules were most different.[2]
They made a choice, which was neither right nor wrong (it's all a balance of values) but it's daft to pretend that those choices didn't have immediate impacts on deaths, even if they may have had other/longer term benefits.
For example, for Sweden the index explicitly scores 'recommendations' as if they were legal restrictions AIUI.
In Germany it always scores the most restrictive rules anywhere in the country, even if they apply to only a few districts, for example. So if almost all the schools are open, but are closed in some districts it will score as if the schools are all closed.
I think the biggest difference was that Sweden didn't close kindergartens or primary schools at all. This is a pretty major difference, although in other respects Sweden had somewhat similar measures to other countries. You'd have to look in detail at the restrictions in place in different times and for how long to get an idea of the level of social distancing rules in different places. This is quite a difficult job, but I think the Covid stringency index is too flawed to be useful.
Sir Keir Starmer intends to 'push ahead' with deal to cede sovereignty to Chagos Islands and has offered significant concessions
Navin Ramgoolam, Mauritius's new prime minister, said his country has been offered 'complete sovereignty' of Diego Garcia, home to a critical US military base
He claimed that Starmer has effectively doubled the £9bn originally offered to Mauritius and weakened the British lease for Diego Garcia
He said the new deal will frontload instalments and link them to inflation. He also said that Mauritius will now have a right to veto extending the lease
He also revealed that Lord Hermer, the attorney-general, was involved in the latest round of face-to-face negotiations
If he has £9bn to spare, please send it to whomever is making the drones the Ukranians are using to go 1,000km into Russia in the last few days.
Jesus wept.
Where exactly are we supposed to be getting this £9billion from?
To pay for a transfer of sovereignty that the Chagossians themselves don’t even want & pisses off our most important military allay at a time when we can least afford to do so.
Starmer has lawyer brain: the pronouncements of a court with no power staffed by judges with no interest are more important than actual on the ground realpolitik.
He's been voice coached to say "I surrender", using different words
"Where else but in a leisure centre can we draw together the troubled strands of our society? Where else will you find young and old, of every class and race, playing with each other on the gymnasium floor?"
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And I would want to know how, and when, the deaths were identified as crime or not-crime and who knew and when. Until then, there was no reason at all to change or omit any deaths. Edit: already dealt with by Bondegezou.
But even that needn't be very significant given the known issues with presence/absence data. So even that couldn't be read.
The thought of returning to state administered barbarism is horrendous, particularly when the state gets it wrong.
But this is super interesting, and reflects a concern I have over the reporting of stats like this. As London has become one of the best cities in the world for cycling, the enormous increase in cyclists was inevitably going to lead to more deaths, even as the streets have become physically much safer.
The bigger saving is insurance premiums, with a average fall of up to 16% - if you applied that to the whole of the UK, it's about £3 billion saved for drivers. Each fatal collision costs about £2 million for the state to deal with, so the fall in Wales would represent about another £400 million across the UK (plus serious and slight injuries).
There's also the question of whether/how many of the accidents occurred within the 20mph zones.
And then, somewhat importantly, the correct denominator is miles cycled or, at least, number of cyclists.
Without considering all those, the figures are pretty meaningless.
For example, for Sweden the index explicitly scores 'recommendations' as if they were legal restrictions AIUI.
In Germany it always scores the most restrictive rules anywhere in the country, even if they apply to only a few districts, for example. So if almost all the schools are open, but are closed in some districts it will score as if the schools are all closed.
I think the biggest difference was that Sweden didn't close kindergartens or primary schools at all. This is a pretty major difference, although in other respects Sweden had somewhat similar measures to other countries. You'd have to look in detail at the restrictions in place in different times and for how long to get an idea of the level of social distancing rules in different places. This is quite a difficult job, but I think the Covid stringency index is too flawed to be useful.