It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
You need to look at police per 100k of the population not the absolute numbers. Again the issue comes down the 8m immigrants we've had sine 2005 not generating enough economic output to fund the extra public services that are required to have them here including the NHS, education and policing. They are a net drag on the nation and the Tories or Reform will need to start sending the non-citizens who don't meet a minimum earnings threshold home.
I think it's more complicated than that, and isn't solely about police numbers.
Since 2010, the number of police stations in England and Wales has fallen by two thirds. In London, it's been three quarters.
So, take the example of shop lifting. In the old days, if the miscreants were apprehended, then the police would have a 10 minute trek to the nearest nick. Now it might be more like 45 minutes. So if they arrest someone they're going to be out of commission not for an hour and a half, but maybe two to three hours.
And the underfunding of the court system means that - in the event said miscreant is prosecuted - then the police officer is out of action for a whole day, and the trial might end up getting deferred anyway, because they were unable to find a barrister willing to act for said miscreant.
It's hard to think of an area of government spending with a better cost-benefit analysis than the criminal justice system: police, courts, prisons and the like. We all benefit from a law abiding society, and the best way to ensure that we live in a law abiding society is for there to be a meaningful prospect of apprehension and punishment if you offend. We don't have that today.
We don't just need more police, though. Because there's no point in arresting someone if they won't be prosecuted. We need to fund the entire chain. And that means we need to fund Legal Aid too, because right now a staggering number of cases end up being dismissed or deferred because of lack of legal representation.
But again the point I'm making is that we've added 8m people to the population in 20 years and on average they've not expanded GDP by enough to cover the additional public service expenditure they require. It's meant larger deficits, less money to go around and increasing tax as a proportion of GDP reducing long term trend growth. Uncontrolled immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. Realistically a migrant care worker or cleaner is never going to contribute enough in tax over their lifetime to cover their healthcare or pension let alone education, policing, defence, transport infrastructure etc...
Expanding the population at such a rapid rate with such low skilled workers for the last 20 years is why we are where we are. Every low skill migrant reduces our GDP per capita and their dependents reduce it further and the taxpayer is on the hook to provide them with housing, healthcare, welfare, pensions, education and the rest of it. It's just not feasible and we need to go through a long period of net emigration of low skill and unskilled migrants plus their dependents if we ever hope to have a high yield economy that can fund proper public services and infrastructure while maintaining a relatively balanced budget. We've had a 20 year failed experiment of increasing absolute GDP at the expense of GDP per capita, well maybe the focus should always have been on per capita GDP rather than the headline figure which is absolutely useless.
These are -candidly- separate issues.
Even if there hadn't been any immigration in the last 15 years, the cuts to our criminal justice system would still have had a very serious impact on the lives of citizens.
That's my point. And it's not just - or even mainly - about police numbers. It's about the fact that the legal system is so underfunded we don't prosecute people. It's about the fact that there's not a local police station that people can go to.
Now, has immigration made things worse: probably. It's just not the sole factor here, and may even not be the dominant one. (I.e. if you think about police stations per person in London, then the biggest factor is the drop in the number of police stations, not the increase in the number of people. And the same is true with the dramatic reduction in the number of duty solicitors.)
They aren't separate issues, immigration of the nature we've had for 20 years has directly resulted in lower GDP per capita than we would otherwise have had. That has led to a series of cuts in public services such as policing and justice because there's not enough GDP being generated per capita.
Those cuts to police stations and duty solicitors are because of budget cuts and those budget cuts are a direct result of there just not being enough GDP being generated to tax at a reasonable rate.
The population rose by 8m people since 2005, a 13% increase.
Nominal GDP has increased from £1.49tn to £3.08tn, an increase of 106%.
Nominal GDP per capita has increased from £29,314 to £47,322 an increase of 61%.
Simply, there was more funding per person available for public services on 2005 than we have today because uncontrolled immigration has reduced GDP per capita to such an extent that if it had kept up the government at 35% tax would have an extra £300bn to spend this year than it does currently.
Obviously this is a simplified view, I'm sure if I still had a team to look into it and adjust for inflation and wages the story would be pretty similar.
Falling GDP per capita due to uncontrolled immigration is the root cause of failing public services. On average each migrant worker and their dependents lowers our GDP per capita and now the effect has reached levels where the state can no longer be properly funded without stiflingly high tax rates.
As I said, we need a prolonged period of net emigration for low skilled and unskilled workers and their dependents. They will never contribute enough to the economy or in tax to cover the spending they will require currently and in the future.
Dude:
I am sympathetic to your concerns. Indeed, I probably largely agree with you about what needs to be done.
But that isn't why we had cuts to the criminal justice system. The coalition government - which happened *before* the vast bulk of the immigration happened - enacted a massive reduction in spend as part of austerity.
It had literally nothing to do with immigration.
If you were to make the comparison from 2005 to 2015 I doubt the conclusion would change much, alas I have no time to do it, dinner beckons.
The UK government's Comprehensive Spending Review was announced in October 2010, and involved a 20% real-terms cut in central government funding for police forces over four years, from March 2011 to March 2015. The Ministry of Justice saw an even bigger drop in its budget - falling from £8.3bn to £7bn in the same time.
These weren't cuts relative to population size, or growing the police budget less quickly than the overall : they were large absolute reductions in spend.
And these cuts happened before the wave of immigration.
Your concerns about immigration are not unwarranted, and I don't disagree with much of your critique.
But the massive reductions in spending on criminal justice happened before most of the immigration happened, and they happened at the behest of the coalition government.
Waves of immigration had already begun years earlier, from around 2003/04 onwards they had spiked massively.
But also the country was bust due to overspending by 2010. Cutting expenditure was necessary.
The wrong things were cut though.
Criminal justice wasn't the right thing to cut. And gold playing welfare while working people's pay was frozen was wrong too.
Since 2004, the UK population has experienced net immigration of approximately 5.5m, of which 4m was since 2010. I'm not denying immigration has played a role, I'm just pointing out (which I think you agree with) that the biggest factor in the underfunding of the criminal justice system was the 2010 cuts.
As you say, the wrong things were cut.
The biggest mistake was cutting health spending, medical treatment doesn't get cheaper if it's delayed unless the patient dies before they get treated.
Health spending was not cut.
In fact the promise on the side of the bus was exceeded....
Their anger seems to be focussed on Jenrick rather than the fare dodgers.
They are annoyed he's done something that's generated interest/support
It rather makes his point / again taps in the public mood, that the media will now go into but but but Jenrick he didn't have a permit to film. And the public will go WTF, just sort out the fare dodgers, the shoplifters, the phone snatchers.
Which is what plenty of people have said on Twitter to these people. That Barrister clown reacted rather badly to the lack of deference to their comments
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
I have and its heartbreaking
However, despite the raw emotional pain we never considered his life should be euthanized
And he was my dear father in law who passed in our home holding our hands as nature took its course
Also my daughter in laws father was wheelchair bound with MND and again he passed without intervention nor would the family have wanted it any differently
There are times when assisted dying is sensible but it is a very sensitive subject for many
JENRICKVISION closing in on 5 MILLION views on X (dunno about elsewhere)
He's the only Brit politician - other than Farage - who really gets social media, esp in the TikTok age
You need short, clicky videos, with a plain but compelling narrative. Lots of movement, telling detail, end well
I have just seen the video and full marks to him
Time the London mayor got a grip on this unacceptable behaviour
I agree. Jenrick needs to be admonished.
Do you really support fare dodging ?
I suppose the question is whether fare dodging is a) new, b) getting better/worse, or c) if this is newsworthy because it's more visible. To which I suspect the answers are a) of course not, b) flip knows, c) it's probably a visibility thing rather than a numberical thing.
The nearest I could find to hard data is this FOI request;
The pandemic clearly plays merry hell with the stats, but fare dodging looks like it's been at a steady level for ages. Even when that bloke before Sadiq was Mayor- whatever became of him?
The rail link up to Bedford (both Thameslink and the other one) have put a massive amount of effort into clamping down on fare dodging, and it's been very effective. It's also - I suspect - been a net positive for the financials of the railway companies: if they lost 10% of fare income historically, then a few staff is a very cheap way of boosting revenues.
Suspect that gatelines are the main win here (besides- machines beat people for productivity, as long as there is a human to override the robots when necessary.) The catch is that gates do reduce fare dodging, but the hardcore dodger residue is more visible and harder core. One of those paradoxical situations where making things better makes the situation look worse.
The humans running revenue protection at Manchester Piccadilly are absolute arseholes.
Northern Rail are very bad with frequent cancellations/delays, and the barriers cannot cope with that when you've bought an advance or off-peak ticket and you arrive at peak time.
They'll threaten you with a criminal record etc if you don't pay the minimum £100 fine.
There are knowledgeable people over on Rail Forums who can help anyone faced with that kind of shit.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
And once the door is open what next, the mentally ill, the disabled? Canada is already further along that slippery slope
You can keep rigerous safeguards in place to ensure the system is not abused. If my final six months resembles my father's final six months, I give you all permission to turn the machines off.
Their anger seems to be focussed on Jenrick rather than the fare dodgers.
They are annoyed he's done something that's generated interest/support
It rather makes his point / again taps in the public mood, that the media will now go into but but but Jenrick he didn't have a permit to film. And the public will go WTF, just sort out the fare dodgers, the shoplifters, the phone snatchers.
Which is what plenty of people have said on Twitter to these people. That Barrister clown reacted rather badly to the lack of deference to their comments
I always find it interesting when stolen documents or undercover filming exposes certain things, some people are absolutely fine, when it does other things, the very same people but but but the law, the rules.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
That was a direct result of the decisions of the Tory and LD government of 2010-15 as I said, for which Osborne was most responsible and which Boris and Rishi at least partly reversed in the Conservative majority government of 2019-2024. It was also the same Tory and LD government which said police do not need to prosecute thefts under £200 which to be fair to him Starmer has now reversed.
You keep trying to smear my party with your mistakes.
2010-2015 Government: Home secretary: Theresa May (Tory) Minister of State for Policing: Nick Herbert (Tory) then Damian Green (Tory) then Mike Penning (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Crime Reduction: James Brokenshire (Tory) Secretary of State for Justice: Ken Clarke (Tory) then Chris Grayling (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Prisons: Crispin Blunt (Tory) then Jeremy Wright (Tory) then Andrew Selous (Tory)
Tory Tory Tory Tory. Own your own shit.
Deputy PM Nick Clegg (LD), Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander (LD) both of whom would have signed off Osborne's decisions in Cabinet and cuts the Home Office were told by the Treasury to implement given the Tories could only govern with LD support.
Tory LD, Tory LD, Tory LD. Own your own shit too!
Cicero never rose to these heights.
Its utterly hilarious. A coalition government which absolutely divided up ministries between parties with the Tories notoriously not only holding onto law and order but telling everyone they had done so to be tough.
Every single minister. In both departments. Was a Tory. At all times. And Mr I Only Voted Plaid That One Time thinks that somehow we were responsible for what those Tory ministers were doing.
Why are the Tories sinking into the abyss? Because the public think they are lying shysters who can't take any responsibility for their shit record in office. And here is HY to prove them right.
Wrong, I said the Coalition was wrong to have cut police numbers as hard but the Coalition included LDs too, so yes YOUR party was also responsible.
Though as I also pointed out police numbers rose again under Boris and Rishi
The LibDems do need to take some of the blame, sure. But the Conservatives held all the Home Office, Police and Justice ministries throughout the entire period. The Prime Minister - IIRC - was also a Conservative.
Furthermore, the Conservatives did nothing to reverse the cuts when they were in power on their own from (checks) 2015 to 2024 (with only a brief period when the DUP supported them).
If we took every human on the planet, and put them into a blender to create a goo with the same density as a human (i.e. 985kg/m3).
And if this good was made into a sphere, how big would the sphere be?
Radius 2.2km?
Edit: I calculated rather than guessing
Actually, I think it's smaller than that, if my maths are correct.
(8 billion people) * (62 kg/person) / (985 kg / m3) = 504 million cubic meters of human goo.
The volume of a sphere with diameter d is (pi/6) d3. So we get d3 = (504 million cubic meters)/(pi/6). Take the cube root of each side and you get d = 987 meters.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
It’s not much use paying for police to arrest people If the court case is 3+ years later
I am, it will surprise no-one to hear, not Jenrick's biggest fan.
But I find myself rooting for him against Badenoch. Yes today was a stunt, and in some ways a meaningless one. But that's just politics - if you want to have an impact you need to (1) pick a narrative then (2) find a way to get attention onto that narrative.
He has done well on both counts. Contrast Badenoch who has, it appears, done nothing since gaining power.
Stepping back, I want Labour to succeed i.e. deliver a fairer return to prosperity through delivering in a very tough political and economic environment.
But if they fail (which seems likely) and I'm offered the choice between the Tories or the vanity vehicle non-party that is Reform, I'd go for the Tories any day of the week.
If the Tories keep Badenoch, it seems inevitable to me that we get a Reform government at some point. But on the evidence of today I'd say Jenrick has at least a shot of squashing Farage.
Your enemy's enemy is your friend, I guess you could say.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
It's even worse when there's a feckless parent who won't even think about their kid's need to get onto the property ladder. If we could just allow the children to organize a painless way for their parent to pass on it, would work for all involved.
For a brief moment I was being absolutely serious.
In his post even HY has indicated "terminal illness" and aren't there likely to be safeguards that ensure it would only apply when genuine end of life becomes intolerable, rather than my kids buying me, at aged 63, a one way ticket to Dignitas?
Thats how it started in Canada...only the terminally ill, now you get cases where a woman enquired about having a ramp built for her home gets pointed at their assisted dying program.
Currently 4.1% of canadian deaths are by assisting dying....its not the rare and seldom its being sold as.
Don't get me wrong I am fully in support of assisted dying, however I don't think this bill has enough safeguards to prevent canadian style mission creep
Not crypto, but another thing that is shady as hell that seems to be slipping under the radar. The explosion in "competition" sites, exploiting loopholes in the law and all sorts of dodgyness going on via Instagram/ tiktok.
🚨 NEW: Reform UK intends to cut Capital Gains Tax on crypto from 24% to 10%, turning the UK into a 'crypto powerhouse'
Nigel Farage will set out his full plans at a crypto conference in Las Vegas tonight
Wait: so we're going to have *lower* capital gains taxes for owning unproductive assets, than owning productive ones? That's just stupid.
Although I personally own Bitcoin (and I bought it before you did), it is -in the developed world at least- just a speculative asset, like a tulip in 17th century Amsterdam. It's utility is limited. If you are buying it, you are buying it not in expectation of a flow of dividends, or interest payments, or rent. You are buying it solely because you believe somebody else will buy it for more in the future.
If we took every human on the planet, and put them into a blender to create a goo with the same density as a human (i.e. 985kg/m3).
And if this good was made into a sphere, how big would the sphere be?
Radius 2.2km?
Edit: I calculated rather than guessing
Actually, I think it's smaller than that, if my maths are correct.
(8 billion people) * (62 kg/person) / (985 kg / m3) = 504 million cubic meters of human goo.
The volume of a sphere with diameter d is (pi/6) d3. So we get d3 = (504 million cubic meters)/(pi/6). Take the cube root of each side and you get d = 987 meters.
This is an excellent level 3 core maths estimation question. I'll use it next week in class. Thanks.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
You need to look at police per 100k of the population not the absolute numbers. Again the issue comes down the 8m immigrants we've had sine 2005 not generating enough economic output to fund the extra public services that are required to have them here including the NHS, education and policing. They are a net drag on the nation and the Tories or Reform will need to start sending the non-citizens who don't meet a minimum earnings threshold home.
I think it's more complicated than that, and isn't solely about police numbers.
Since 2010, the number of police stations in England and Wales has fallen by two thirds. In London, it's been three quarters.
So, take the example of shop lifting. In the old days, if the miscreants were apprehended, then the police would have a 10 minute trek to the nearest nick. Now it might be more like 45 minutes. So if they arrest someone they're going to be out of commission not for an hour and a half, but maybe two to three hours.
And the underfunding of the court system means that - in the event said miscreant is prosecuted - then the police officer is out of action for a whole day, and the trial might end up getting deferred anyway, because they were unable to find a barrister willing to act for said miscreant.
It's hard to think of an area of government spending with a better cost-benefit analysis than the criminal justice system: police, courts, prisons and the like. We all benefit from a law abiding society, and the best way to ensure that we live in a law abiding society is for there to be a meaningful prospect of apprehension and punishment if you offend. We don't have that today.
We don't just need more police, though. Because there's no point in arresting someone if they won't be prosecuted. We need to fund the entire chain. And that means we need to fund Legal Aid too, because right now a staggering number of cases end up being dismissed or deferred because of lack of legal representation.
But again the point I'm making is that we've added 8m people to the population in 20 years and on average they've not expanded GDP by enough to cover the additional public service expenditure they require. It's meant larger deficits, less money to go around and increasing tax as a proportion of GDP reducing long term trend growth. Uncontrolled immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. Realistically a migrant care worker or cleaner is never going to contribute enough in tax over their lifetime to cover their healthcare or pension let alone education, policing, defence, transport infrastructure etc...
Expanding the population at such a rapid rate with such low skilled workers for the last 20 years is why we are where we are. Every low skill migrant reduces our GDP per capita and their dependents reduce it further and the taxpayer is on the hook to provide them with housing, healthcare, welfare, pensions, education and the rest of it. It's just not feasible and we need to go through a long period of net emigration of low skill and unskilled migrants plus their dependents if we ever hope to have a high yield economy that can fund proper public services and infrastructure while maintaining a relatively balanced budget. We've had a 20 year failed experiment of increasing absolute GDP at the expense of GDP per capita, well maybe the focus should always have been on per capita GDP rather than the headline figure which is absolutely useless.
These are -candidly- separate issues.
Even if there hadn't been any immigration in the last 15 years, the cuts to our criminal justice system would still have had a very serious impact on the lives of citizens.
That's my point. And it's not just - or even mainly - about police numbers. It's about the fact that the legal system is so underfunded we don't prosecute people. It's about the fact that there's not a local police station that people can go to.
Now, has immigration made things worse: probably. It's just not the sole factor here, and may even not be the dominant one. (I.e. if you think about police stations per person in London, then the biggest factor is the drop in the number of police stations, not the increase in the number of people. And the same is true with the dramatic reduction in the number of duty solicitors.)
They aren't separate issues, immigration of the nature we've had for 20 years has directly resulted in lower GDP per capita than we would otherwise have had. That has led to a series of cuts in public services such as policing and justice because there's not enough GDP being generated per capita.
Those cuts to police stations and duty solicitors are because of budget cuts and those budget cuts are a direct result of there just not being enough GDP being generated to tax at a reasonable rate.
The population rose by 8m people since 2005, a 13% increase.
Nominal GDP has increased from £1.49tn to £3.08tn, an increase of 106%.
Nominal GDP per capita has increased from £29,314 to £47,322 an increase of 61%.
Simply, there was more funding per person available for public services on 2005 than we have today because uncontrolled immigration has reduced GDP per capita to such an extent that if it had kept up the government at 35% tax would have an extra £300bn to spend this year than it does currently.
Obviously this is a simplified view, I'm sure if I still had a team to look into it and adjust for inflation and wages the story would be pretty similar.
Falling GDP per capita due to uncontrolled immigration is the root cause of failing public services. On average each migrant worker and their dependents lowers our GDP per capita and now the effect has reached levels where the state can no longer be properly funded without stiflingly high tax rates.
As I said, we need a prolonged period of net emigration for low skilled and unskilled workers and their dependents. They will never contribute enough to the economy or in tax to cover the spending they will require currently and in the future.
Dude:
I am sympathetic to your concerns. Indeed, I probably largely agree with you about what needs to be done.
But that isn't why we had cuts to the criminal justice system. The coalition government - which happened *before* the vast bulk of the immigration happened - enacted a massive reduction in spend as part of austerity.
It had literally nothing to do with immigration.
If you were to make the comparison from 2005 to 2015 I doubt the conclusion would change much, alas I have no time to do it, dinner beckons.
The UK government's Comprehensive Spending Review was announced in October 2010, and involved a 20% real-terms cut in central government funding for police forces over four years, from March 2011 to March 2015. The Ministry of Justice saw an even bigger drop in its budget - falling from £8.3bn to £7bn in the same time.
These weren't cuts relative to population size, or growing the police budget less quickly than the overall : they were large absolute reductions in spend.
And these cuts happened before the wave of immigration.
Your concerns about immigration are not unwarranted, and I don't disagree with much of your critique.
But the massive reductions in spending on criminal justice happened before most of the immigration happened, and they happened at the behest of the coalition government.
Waves of immigration had already begun years earlier, from around 2003/04 onwards they had spiked massively.
But also the country was bust due to overspending by 2010. Cutting expenditure was necessary.
The wrong things were cut though.
Criminal justice wasn't the right thing to cut. And gold playing welfare while working people's pay was frozen was wrong too.
The Coalition cut anything that mattered, while protecting the things that didn’t.
Whichever way you cut it, the Tories problems started under Cameron and Osborne.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
You need to look at police per 100k of the population not the absolute numbers. Again the issue comes down the 8m immigrants we've had sine 2005 not generating enough economic output to fund the extra public services that are required to have them here including the NHS, education and policing. They are a net drag on the nation and the Tories or Reform will need to start sending the non-citizens who don't meet a minimum earnings threshold home.
I think it's more complicated than that, and isn't solely about police numbers.
Since 2010, the number of police stations in England and Wales has fallen by two thirds. In London, it's been three quarters.
So, take the example of shop lifting. In the old days, if the miscreants were apprehended, then the police would have a 10 minute trek to the nearest nick. Now it might be more like 45 minutes. So if they arrest someone they're going to be out of commission not for an hour and a half, but maybe two to three hours.
And the underfunding of the court system means that - in the event said miscreant is prosecuted - then the police officer is out of action for a whole day, and the trial might end up getting deferred anyway, because they were unable to find a barrister willing to act for said miscreant.
It's hard to think of an area of government spending with a better cost-benefit analysis than the criminal justice system: police, courts, prisons and the like. We all benefit from a law abiding society, and the best way to ensure that we live in a law abiding society is for there to be a meaningful prospect of apprehension and punishment if you offend. We don't have that today.
We don't just need more police, though. Because there's no point in arresting someone if they won't be prosecuted. We need to fund the entire chain. And that means we need to fund Legal Aid too, because right now a staggering number of cases end up being dismissed or deferred because of lack of legal representation.
But again the point I'm making is that we've added 8m people to the population in 20 years and on average they've not expanded GDP by enough to cover the additional public service expenditure they require. It's meant larger deficits, less money to go around and increasing tax as a proportion of GDP reducing long term trend growth. Uncontrolled immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. Realistically a migrant care worker or cleaner is never going to contribute enough in tax over their lifetime to cover their healthcare or pension let alone education, policing, defence, transport infrastructure etc...
Expanding the population at such a rapid rate with such low skilled workers for the last 20 years is why we are where we are. Every low skill migrant reduces our GDP per capita and their dependents reduce it further and the taxpayer is on the hook to provide them with housing, healthcare, welfare, pensions, education and the rest of it. It's just not feasible and we need to go through a long period of net emigration of low skill and unskilled migrants plus their dependents if we ever hope to have a high yield economy that can fund proper public services and infrastructure while maintaining a relatively balanced budget. We've had a 20 year failed experiment of increasing absolute GDP at the expense of GDP per capita, well maybe the focus should always have been on per capita GDP rather than the headline figure which is absolutely useless.
These are -candidly- separate issues.
Even if there hadn't been any immigration in the last 15 years, the cuts to our criminal justice system would still have had a very serious impact on the lives of citizens.
That's my point. And it's not just - or even mainly - about police numbers. It's about the fact that the legal system is so underfunded we don't prosecute people. It's about the fact that there's not a local police station that people can go to.
Now, has immigration made things worse: probably. It's just not the sole factor here, and may even not be the dominant one. (I.e. if you think about police stations per person in London, then the biggest factor is the drop in the number of police stations, not the increase in the number of people. And the same is true with the dramatic reduction in the number of duty solicitors.)
They aren't separate issues, immigration of the nature we've had for 20 years has directly resulted in lower GDP per capita than we would otherwise have had. That has led to a series of cuts in public services such as policing and justice because there's not enough GDP being generated per capita.
Those cuts to police stations and duty solicitors are because of budget cuts and those budget cuts are a direct result of there just not being enough GDP being generated to tax at a reasonable rate.
The population rose by 8m people since 2005, a 13% increase.
Nominal GDP has increased from £1.49tn to £3.08tn, an increase of 106%.
Nominal GDP per capita has increased from £29,314 to £47,322 an increase of 61%.
Simply, there was more funding per person available for public services on 2005 than we have today because uncontrolled immigration has reduced GDP per capita to such an extent that if it had kept up the government at 35% tax would have an extra £300bn to spend this year than it does currently.
Obviously this is a simplified view, I'm sure if I still had a team to look into it and adjust for inflation and wages the story would be pretty similar.
Falling GDP per capita due to uncontrolled immigration is the root cause of failing public services. On average each migrant worker and their dependents lowers our GDP per capita and now the effect has reached levels where the state can no longer be properly funded without stiflingly high tax rates.
As I said, we need a prolonged period of net emigration for low skilled and unskilled workers and their dependents. They will never contribute enough to the economy or in tax to cover the spending they will require currently and in the future.
Dude:
I am sympathetic to your concerns. Indeed, I probably largely agree with you about what needs to be done.
But that isn't why we had cuts to the criminal justice system. The coalition government - which happened *before* the vast bulk of the immigration happened - enacted a massive reduction in spend as part of austerity.
It had literally nothing to do with immigration.
If you were to make the comparison from 2005 to 2015 I doubt the conclusion would change much, alas I have no time to do it, dinner beckons.
The UK government's Comprehensive Spending Review was announced in October 2010, and involved a 20% real-terms cut in central government funding for police forces over four years, from March 2011 to March 2015. The Ministry of Justice saw an even bigger drop in its budget - falling from £8.3bn to £7bn in the same time.
These weren't cuts relative to population size, or growing the police budget less quickly than the overall : they were large absolute reductions in spend.
And these cuts happened before the wave of immigration.
Your concerns about immigration are not unwarranted, and I don't disagree with much of your critique.
But the massive reductions in spending on criminal justice happened before most of the immigration happened, and they happened at the behest of the coalition government.
Waves of immigration had already begun years earlier, from around 2003/04 onwards they had spiked massively.
But also the country was bust due to overspending by 2010. Cutting expenditure was necessary.
The wrong things were cut though.
Criminal justice wasn't the right thing to cut. And gold playing welfare while working people's pay was frozen was wrong too.
Since 2004, the UK population has experienced net immigration of approximately 5.5m, of which 4m was since 2010. I'm not denying immigration has played a role, I'm just pointing out (which I think you agree with) that the biggest factor in the underfunding of the criminal justice system was the 2010 cuts.
As you say, the wrong things were cut.
The biggest mistake was cutting health spending, medical treatment doesn't get cheaper if it's delayed unless the patient dies before they get treated.
Most of which is salaries. They should have just frozen pay or cut it.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
You need to look at police per 100k of the population not the absolute numbers. Again the issue comes down the 8m immigrants we've had sine 2005 not generating enough economic output to fund the extra public services that are required to have them here including the NHS, education and policing. They are a net drag on the nation and the Tories or Reform will need to start sending the non-citizens who don't meet a minimum earnings threshold home.
I think it's more complicated than that, and isn't solely about police numbers.
Since 2010, the number of police stations in England and Wales has fallen by two thirds. In London, it's been three quarters.
So, take the example of shop lifting. In the old days, if the miscreants were apprehended, then the police would have a 10 minute trek to the nearest nick. Now it might be more like 45 minutes. So if they arrest someone they're going to be out of commission not for an hour and a half, but maybe two to three hours.
And the underfunding of the court system means that - in the event said miscreant is prosecuted - then the police officer is out of action for a whole day, and the trial might end up getting deferred anyway, because they were unable to find a barrister willing to act for said miscreant.
It's hard to think of an area of government spending with a better cost-benefit analysis than the criminal justice system: police, courts, prisons and the like. We all benefit from a law abiding society, and the best way to ensure that we live in a law abiding society is for there to be a meaningful prospect of apprehension and punishment if you offend. We don't have that today.
We don't just need more police, though. Because there's no point in arresting someone if they won't be prosecuted. We need to fund the entire chain. And that means we need to fund Legal Aid too, because right now a staggering number of cases end up being dismissed or deferred because of lack of legal representation.
But again the point I'm making is that we've added 8m people to the population in 20 years and on average they've not expanded GDP by enough to cover the additional public service expenditure they require. It's meant larger deficits, less money to go around and increasing tax as a proportion of GDP reducing long term trend growth. Uncontrolled immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. Realistically a migrant care worker or cleaner is never going to contribute enough in tax over their lifetime to cover their healthcare or pension let alone education, policing, defence, transport infrastructure etc...
Expanding the population at such a rapid rate with such low skilled workers for the last 20 years is why we are where we are. Every low skill migrant reduces our GDP per capita and their dependents reduce it further and the taxpayer is on the hook to provide them with housing, healthcare, welfare, pensions, education and the rest of it. It's just not feasible and we need to go through a long period of net emigration of low skill and unskilled migrants plus their dependents if we ever hope to have a high yield economy that can fund proper public services and infrastructure while maintaining a relatively balanced budget. We've had a 20 year failed experiment of increasing absolute GDP at the expense of GDP per capita, well maybe the focus should always have been on per capita GDP rather than the headline figure which is absolutely useless.
These are -candidly- separate issues.
Even if there hadn't been any immigration in the last 15 years, the cuts to our criminal justice system would still have had a very serious impact on the lives of citizens.
That's my point. And it's not just - or even mainly - about police numbers. It's about the fact that the legal system is so underfunded we don't prosecute people. It's about the fact that there's not a local police station that people can go to.
Now, has immigration made things worse: probably. It's just not the sole factor here, and may even not be the dominant one. (I.e. if you think about police stations per person in London, then the biggest factor is the drop in the number of police stations, not the increase in the number of people. And the same is true with the dramatic reduction in the number of duty solicitors.)
They aren't separate issues, immigration of the nature we've had for 20 years has directly resulted in lower GDP per capita than we would otherwise have had. That has led to a series of cuts in public services such as policing and justice because there's not enough GDP being generated per capita.
Those cuts to police stations and duty solicitors are because of budget cuts and those budget cuts are a direct result of there just not being enough GDP being generated to tax at a reasonable rate.
The population rose by 8m people since 2005, a 13% increase.
Nominal GDP has increased from £1.49tn to £3.08tn, an increase of 106%.
Nominal GDP per capita has increased from £29,314 to £47,322 an increase of 61%.
Simply, there was more funding per person available for public services on 2005 than we have today because uncontrolled immigration has reduced GDP per capita to such an extent that if it had kept up the government at 35% tax would have an extra £300bn to spend this year than it does currently.
Obviously this is a simplified view, I'm sure if I still had a team to look into it and adjust for inflation and wages the story would be pretty similar.
Falling GDP per capita due to uncontrolled immigration is the root cause of failing public services. On average each migrant worker and their dependents lowers our GDP per capita and now the effect has reached levels where the state can no longer be properly funded without stiflingly high tax rates.
As I said, we need a prolonged period of net emigration for low skilled and unskilled workers and their dependents. They will never contribute enough to the economy or in tax to cover the spending they will require currently and in the future.
Dude:
I am sympathetic to your concerns. Indeed, I probably largely agree with you about what needs to be done.
But that isn't why we had cuts to the criminal justice system. The coalition government - which happened *before* the vast bulk of the immigration happened - enacted a massive reduction in spend as part of austerity.
It had literally nothing to do with immigration.
If you were to make the comparison from 2005 to 2015 I doubt the conclusion would change much, alas I have no time to do it, dinner beckons.
The UK government's Comprehensive Spending Review was announced in October 2010, and involved a 20% real-terms cut in central government funding for police forces over four years, from March 2011 to March 2015. The Ministry of Justice saw an even bigger drop in its budget - falling from £8.3bn to £7bn in the same time.
These weren't cuts relative to population size, or growing the police budget less quickly than the overall : they were large absolute reductions in spend.
And these cuts happened before the wave of immigration.
Your concerns about immigration are not unwarranted, and I don't disagree with much of your critique.
But the massive reductions in spending on criminal justice happened before most of the immigration happened, and they happened at the behest of the coalition government.
Waves of immigration had already begun years earlier, from around 2003/04 onwards they had spiked massively.
But also the country was bust due to overspending by 2010. Cutting expenditure was necessary.
The wrong things were cut though.
Criminal justice wasn't the right thing to cut. And gold playing welfare while working people's pay was frozen was wrong too.
The Coalition cut anything that mattered, while protecting the things that didn’t.
Cameron had made several hostages to fortune in the campaign as had Clegg. Cameron was determined to protect the NHS and Education and Welfare where it impinged on pensioners. That meant the axe fell disproportionately on other parts of the public sector.
Local Government was a big loser - 1 million jobs were lost between 2012 and 2015 - and arguably the sector has never recovered and in addition had to take on public health information responsibilities (and staff) from the NHS without additional resources.
I supported the Coalition at the time and some of what it tried to do was good but I'm afraid with the passage of time, for all it seems a beacon of competence compared to what followed, it made a lot of mistakes and got a lot wrong and the LDs have to bear responsibility as much as the Conservatives.
Talking of dodging train fares, last week I innocently strolled through Windsor & Eton station on to the little train to Slough without buying a ticket or zapping my card… told the guard at Slough and he just let me through
🚨 NEW: Reform UK intends to cut Capital Gains Tax on crypto from 24% to 10%, turning the UK into a 'crypto powerhouse'
Nigel Farage will set out his full plans at a crypto conference in Las Vegas tonight
Wait: so we're going to have *lower* capital gains taxes for owning unproductive assets, than owning productive ones? That's just stupid.
Although I personally own Bitcoin (and I bought it before you did), it is -in the developed world at least- just a speculative asset, like a tulip in 17th century Amsterdam. It's utility is limited. If you are buying it, you are buying it not in expectation of a flow of dividends, or interest payments, or rent. You are buying it solely because you believe somebody else will buy it for more in the future.
That’s really not different to holding Gold in that respect.
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
If we took every human on the planet, and put them into a blender to create a goo with the same density as a human (i.e. 985kg/m3).
And if this good was made into a sphere, how big would the sphere be?
AI says that the average volume of an adult human body is approximately 62 liters (62,000 cubic centimeters) AI says that the current estimate for the global human population is around 8.2 billion.
so that's 62x10^3 x 8.2 ^10^9 cubic centimetres = 62x8.2 x 10^12 cubic centimeters = approx 500 x 10^12 cubic centimetres = approx 5 x 10^14 cubic centimeters
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
I would agree with this. I'm the same, on that too.
The only mild drama I can report is a fire in East Ham High Street this evening.
Black smoke billowing out of a shop which used to be Iceland but is now a furniture store - also smoke from the buildings at the rear. A decent crowd for the LFB to go about their business.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
It's even worse when there's a feckless parent who won't even think about their kid's need to get onto the property ladder. If we could just allow the children to organize a painless way for their parent to pass on it, would work for all involved.
For a brief moment I was being absolutely serious.
In his post even HY has indicated "terminal illness" and aren't there likely to be safeguards that ensure it would only apply when genuine end of life becomes intolerable, rather than my kids buying me, at aged 63, a one way ticket to Dignitas?
Thats how it started in Canada...only the terminally ill, now you get cases where a woman enquired about having a ramp built for her home gets pointed at their assisted dying program.
Currently 4.1% of canadian deaths are by assisting dying....its not the rare and seldom its being sold as.
Don't get me wrong I am fully in support of assisted dying, however I don't think this bill has enough safeguards to prevent canadian style mission creep
My wife is Canadian. Should I be concerned next time she asks me to accompany her on a visit?
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
That was a direct result of the decisions of the Tory and LD government of 2010-15 as I said, for which Osborne was most responsible and which Boris and Rishi at least partly reversed in the Conservative majority government of 2019-2024. It was also the same Tory and LD government which said police do not need to prosecute thefts under £200 which to be fair to him Starmer has now reversed.
You keep trying to smear my party with your mistakes.
2010-2015 Government: Home secretary: Theresa May (Tory) Minister of State for Policing: Nick Herbert (Tory) then Damian Green (Tory) then Mike Penning (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Crime Reduction: James Brokenshire (Tory) Secretary of State for Justice: Ken Clarke (Tory) then Chris Grayling (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Prisons: Crispin Blunt (Tory) then Jeremy Wright (Tory) then Andrew Selous (Tory)
Tory Tory Tory Tory. Own your own shit.
Deputy PM Nick Clegg (LD), Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander (LD) both of whom would have signed off Osborne's decisions in Cabinet and cuts the Home Office were told by the Treasury to implement given the Tories could only govern with LD support.
Tory LD, Tory LD, Tory LD. Own your own shit too!
Cicero never rose to these heights.
Its utterly hilarious. A coalition government which absolutely divided up ministries between parties with the Tories notoriously not only holding onto law and order but telling everyone they had done so to be tough.
Every single minister. In both departments. Was a Tory. At all times. And Mr I Only Voted Plaid That One Time thinks that somehow we were responsible for what those Tory ministers were doing.
Why are the Tories sinking into the abyss? Because the public think they are lying shysters who can't take any responsibility for their shit record in office. And here is HY to prove them right.
Wrong, I said the Coalition was wrong to have cut police numbers as hard but the Coalition included LDs too, so yes YOUR party was also responsible.
Though as I also pointed out police numbers rose again under Boris and Rishi
The LibDems do need to take some of the blame, sure. But the Conservatives held all the Home Office, Police and Justice ministries throughout the entire period. The Prime Minister - IIRC - was also a Conservative.
Furthermore, the Conservatives did nothing to reverse the cuts when they were in power on their own from (checks) 2015 to 2024 (with only a brief period when the DUP supported them).
Your final paragraph is wrong. As Malmesbury's graph posted earlier showed police numbers rose consistently from autumn 2017 to 2022
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
I would agree with this. I'm the same, on that too.
For me it depends who I am cheating from.
We had a lunch as part of a spa package at a hotel yesterday and I asked to up the tip (it was 10% but only based on the extras we'd bought over and above the package - no reason the wait staff should lose out).
On the other hand if eg Amazon send me something by mistake, no way I'm sending it back. They're thieving b**stards so I feel no moral obligation not to cheat.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
That was a direct result of the decisions of the Tory and LD government of 2010-15 as I said, for which Osborne was most responsible and which Boris and Rishi at least partly reversed in the Conservative majority government of 2019-2024. It was also the same Tory and LD government which said police do not need to prosecute thefts under £200 which to be fair to him Starmer has now reversed.
You keep trying to smear my party with your mistakes.
2010-2015 Government: Home secretary: Theresa May (Tory) Minister of State for Policing: Nick Herbert (Tory) then Damian Green (Tory) then Mike Penning (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Crime Reduction: James Brokenshire (Tory) Secretary of State for Justice: Ken Clarke (Tory) then Chris Grayling (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Prisons: Crispin Blunt (Tory) then Jeremy Wright (Tory) then Andrew Selous (Tory)
Tory Tory Tory Tory. Own your own shit.
Deputy PM Nick Clegg (LD), Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander (LD) both of whom would have signed off Osborne's decisions in Cabinet and cuts the Home Office were told by the Treasury to implement given the Tories could only govern with LD support.
Tory LD, Tory LD, Tory LD. Own your own shit too!
Cicero never rose to these heights.
Its utterly hilarious. A coalition government which absolutely divided up ministries between parties with the Tories notoriously not only holding onto law and order but telling everyone they had done so to be tough.
Every single minister. In both departments. Was a Tory. At all times. And Mr I Only Voted Plaid That One Time thinks that somehow we were responsible for what those Tory ministers were doing.
Why are the Tories sinking into the abyss? Because the public think they are lying shysters who can't take any responsibility for their shit record in office. And here is HY to prove them right.
Wrong, I said the Coalition was wrong to have cut police numbers as hard but the Coalition included LDs too, so yes YOUR party was also responsible.
Though as I also pointed out police numbers rose again under Boris and Rishi
The LibDems do need to take some of the blame, sure. But the Conservatives held all the Home Office, Police and Justice ministries throughout the entire period. The Prime Minister - IIRC - was also a Conservative.
Furthermore, the Conservatives did nothing to reverse the cuts when they were in power on their own from (checks) 2015 to 2024 (with only a brief period when the DUP supported them).
Your final paragraph is wrong. As Malmesbury's graph posted earlier showed police numbers rose consistently from autumn 2017 to 2022
Unfortunately the damage was less the loss of officers as the loss of operational Police Stations and Offices in places like East Ham and Epping. The problems that causes actual policing in terms of handling suspects and the time that takes officers off patrol have done much to weaken the sense we have adequate Police cover.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
That was a direct result of the decisions of the Tory and LD government of 2010-15 as I said, for which Osborne was most responsible and which Boris and Rishi at least partly reversed in the Conservative majority government of 2019-2024. It was also the same Tory and LD government which said police do not need to prosecute thefts under £200 which to be fair to him Starmer has now reversed.
You keep trying to smear my party with your mistakes.
2010-2015 Government: Home secretary: Theresa May (Tory) Minister of State for Policing: Nick Herbert (Tory) then Damian Green (Tory) then Mike Penning (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Crime Reduction: James Brokenshire (Tory) Secretary of State for Justice: Ken Clarke (Tory) then Chris Grayling (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Prisons: Crispin Blunt (Tory) then Jeremy Wright (Tory) then Andrew Selous (Tory)
Tory Tory Tory Tory. Own your own shit.
Deputy PM Nick Clegg (LD), Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander (LD) both of whom would have signed off Osborne's decisions in Cabinet and cuts the Home Office were told by the Treasury to implement given the Tories could only govern with LD support.
Tory LD, Tory LD, Tory LD. Own your own shit too!
Cicero never rose to these heights.
Its utterly hilarious. A coalition government which absolutely divided up ministries between parties with the Tories notoriously not only holding onto law and order but telling everyone they had done so to be tough.
Every single minister. In both departments. Was a Tory. At all times. And Mr I Only Voted Plaid That One Time thinks that somehow we were responsible for what those Tory ministers were doing.
Why are the Tories sinking into the abyss? Because the public think they are lying shysters who can't take any responsibility for their shit record in office. And here is HY to prove them right.
Wrong, I said the Coalition was wrong to have cut police numbers as hard but the Coalition included LDs too, so yes YOUR party was also responsible.
Though as I also pointed out police numbers rose again under Boris and Rishi
The LibDems do need to take some of the blame, sure. But the Conservatives held all the Home Office, Police and Justice ministries throughout the entire period. The Prime Minister - IIRC - was also a Conservative.
Furthermore, the Conservatives did nothing to reverse the cuts when they were in power on their own from (checks) 2015 to 2024 (with only a brief period when the DUP supported them).
Your final paragraph is wrong. As Malmesbury's graph posted earlier showed police numbers rose consistently from autumn 2017 to 2022
My final paragraph is entirely correct.
Overall spending on criminal justice fell. Police numbers are just a small part of the total.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
I have and its heartbreaking
However, despite the raw emotional pain we never considered his life should be euthanized
And he was my dear father in law who passed in our home holding our hands as nature took its course
Also my daughter in laws father was wheelchair bound with MND and again he passed without intervention nor would the family have wanted it any differently
There are times when assisted dying is sensible but it is a very sensitive subject for many
It is exceptionally sensitive and it’s one I’m very torn on. If forced I would have to say I am in very, very cautious support of a highly regulated option, because it is not my place to tell people that they should go on living and suffering through a terminal illness if their settled will is not to.
In the same way I don't want people to feel that that is the option expected of them.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
It's even worse when there's a feckless parent who won't even think about their kid's need to get onto the property ladder. If we could just allow the children to organize a painless way for their parent to pass on it, would work for all involved.
For a brief moment I was being absolutely serious.
In his post even HY has indicated "terminal illness" and aren't there likely to be safeguards that ensure it would only apply when genuine end of life becomes intolerable, rather than my kids buying me, at aged 63, a one way ticket to Dignitas?
Thats how it started in Canada...only the terminally ill, now you get cases where a woman enquired about having a ramp built for her home gets pointed at their assisted dying program.
Currently 4.1% of canadian deaths are by assisting dying....its not the rare and seldom its being sold as.
Don't get me wrong I am fully in support of assisted dying, however I don't think this bill has enough safeguards to prevent canadian style mission creep
My wife is Canadian. Should I be concerned next time she asks me to accompany her on a visit?
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
I would agree with this. I'm the same, on that too.
For me it depends who I am cheating from.
We had a lunch as part of a spa package at a hotel yesterday and I asked to up the tip (it was 10% but only based on the extras we'd bought over and above the package - no reason the wait staff should lose out).
On the other hand if eg Amazon send me something by mistake, no way I'm sending it back. They're thieving b**stards so I feel no moral obligation not to cheat.
Or to paraphrase you "I actually don't have morals, I just sometimes feel bad if I am doing it to someone I feel deserving"
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
You need to look at police per 100k of the population not the absolute numbers. Again the issue comes down the 8m immigrants we've had sine 2005 not generating enough economic output to fund the extra public services that are required to have them here including the NHS, education and policing. They are a net drag on the nation and the Tories or Reform will need to start sending the non-citizens who don't meet a minimum earnings threshold home.
I think it's more complicated than that, and isn't solely about police numbers.
Since 2010, the number of police stations in England and Wales has fallen by two thirds. In London, it's been three quarters.
So, take the example of shop lifting. In the old days, if the miscreants were apprehended, then the police would have a 10 minute trek to the nearest nick. Now it might be more like 45 minutes. So if they arrest someone they're going to be out of commission not for an hour and a half, but maybe two to three hours.
And the underfunding of the court system means that - in the event said miscreant is prosecuted - then the police officer is out of action for a whole day, and the trial might end up getting deferred anyway, because they were unable to find a barrister willing to act for said miscreant.
It's hard to think of an area of government spending with a better cost-benefit analysis than the criminal justice system: police, courts, prisons and the like. We all benefit from a law abiding society, and the best way to ensure that we live in a law abiding society is for there to be a meaningful prospect of apprehension and punishment if you offend. We don't have that today.
We don't just need more police, though. Because there's no point in arresting someone if they won't be prosecuted. We need to fund the entire chain. And that means we need to fund Legal Aid too, because right now a staggering number of cases end up being dismissed or deferred because of lack of legal representation.
But again the point I'm making is that we've added 8m people to the population in 20 years and on average they've not expanded GDP by enough to cover the additional public service expenditure they require. It's meant larger deficits, less money to go around and increasing tax as a proportion of GDP reducing long term trend growth. Uncontrolled immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. Realistically a migrant care worker or cleaner is never going to contribute enough in tax over their lifetime to cover their healthcare or pension let alone education, policing, defence, transport infrastructure etc...
Expanding the population at such a rapid rate with such low skilled workers for the last 20 years is why we are where we are. Every low skill migrant reduces our GDP per capita and their dependents reduce it further and the taxpayer is on the hook to provide them with housing, healthcare, welfare, pensions, education and the rest of it. It's just not feasible and we need to go through a long period of net emigration of low skill and unskilled migrants plus their dependents if we ever hope to have a high yield economy that can fund proper public services and infrastructure while maintaining a relatively balanced budget. We've had a 20 year failed experiment of increasing absolute GDP at the expense of GDP per capita, well maybe the focus should always have been on per capita GDP rather than the headline figure which is absolutely useless.
These are -candidly- separate issues.
Even if there hadn't been any immigration in the last 15 years, the cuts to our criminal justice system would still have had a very serious impact on the lives of citizens.
That's my point. And it's not just - or even mainly - about police numbers. It's about the fact that the legal system is so underfunded we don't prosecute people. It's about the fact that there's not a local police station that people can go to.
Now, has immigration made things worse: probably. It's just not the sole factor here, and may even not be the dominant one. (I.e. if you think about police stations per person in London, then the biggest factor is the drop in the number of police stations, not the increase in the number of people. And the same is true with the dramatic reduction in the number of duty solicitors.)
They aren't separate issues, immigration of the nature we've had for 20 years has directly resulted in lower GDP per capita than we would otherwise have had. That has led to a series of cuts in public services such as policing and justice because there's not enough GDP being generated per capita.
Those cuts to police stations and duty solicitors are because of budget cuts and those budget cuts are a direct result of there just not being enough GDP being generated to tax at a reasonable rate.
The population rose by 8m people since 2005, a 13% increase.
Nominal GDP has increased from £1.49tn to £3.08tn, an increase of 106%.
Nominal GDP per capita has increased from £29,314 to £47,322 an increase of 61%.
Simply, there was more funding per person available for public services on 2005 than we have today because uncontrolled immigration has reduced GDP per capita to such an extent that if it had kept up the government at 35% tax would have an extra £300bn to spend this year than it does currently.
Obviously this is a simplified view, I'm sure if I still had a team to look into it and adjust for inflation and wages the story would be pretty similar.
Falling GDP per capita due to uncontrolled immigration is the root cause of failing public services. On average each migrant worker and their dependents lowers our GDP per capita and now the effect has reached levels where the state can no longer be properly funded without stiflingly high tax rates.
As I said, we need a prolonged period of net emigration for low skilled and unskilled workers and their dependents. They will never contribute enough to the economy or in tax to cover the spending they will require currently and in the future.
Dude:
I am sympathetic to your concerns. Indeed, I probably largely agree with you about what needs to be done.
But that isn't why we had cuts to the criminal justice system. The coalition government - which happened *before* the vast bulk of the immigration happened - enacted a massive reduction in spend as part of austerity.
It had literally nothing to do with immigration.
If you were to make the comparison from 2005 to 2015 I doubt the conclusion would change much, alas I have no time to do it, dinner beckons.
The UK government's Comprehensive Spending Review was announced in October 2010, and involved a 20% real-terms cut in central government funding for police forces over four years, from March 2011 to March 2015. The Ministry of Justice saw an even bigger drop in its budget - falling from £8.3bn to £7bn in the same time.
These weren't cuts relative to population size, or growing the police budget less quickly than the overall : they were large absolute reductions in spend.
And these cuts happened before the wave of immigration.
Your concerns about immigration are not unwarranted, and I don't disagree with much of your critique.
But the massive reductions in spending on criminal justice happened before most of the immigration happened, and they happened at the behest of the coalition government.
Waves of immigration had already begun years earlier, from around 2003/04 onwards they had spiked massively.
But also the country was bust due to overspending by 2010. Cutting expenditure was necessary.
The wrong things were cut though.
Criminal justice wasn't the right thing to cut. And gold playing welfare while working people's pay was frozen was wrong too.
The Coalition cut anything that mattered, while protecting the things that didn’t.
Whichever way you cut it, the Tories problems started under Cameron and Osborne.
IMO the Tories problems started when Starmer became leader of the LP.
Broken Britain update: have just moved some youths on from the garden to my flats - they were sitting on the bins vaping. Amusingly one of them unironically called me "Sir" whilst leaving. School reflex, presumably.
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
That was a direct result of the decisions of the Tory and LD government of 2010-15 as I said, for which Osborne was most responsible and which Boris and Rishi at least partly reversed in the Conservative majority government of 2019-2024. It was also the same Tory and LD government which said police do not need to prosecute thefts under £200 which to be fair to him Starmer has now reversed.
You keep trying to smear my party with your mistakes.
2010-2015 Government: Home secretary: Theresa May (Tory) Minister of State for Policing: Nick Herbert (Tory) then Damian Green (Tory) then Mike Penning (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Crime Reduction: James Brokenshire (Tory) Secretary of State for Justice: Ken Clarke (Tory) then Chris Grayling (Tory) Parliamentary Undersecretary of State for Prisons: Crispin Blunt (Tory) then Jeremy Wright (Tory) then Andrew Selous (Tory)
Tory Tory Tory Tory. Own your own shit.
Deputy PM Nick Clegg (LD), Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander (LD) both of whom would have signed off Osborne's decisions in Cabinet and cuts the Home Office were told by the Treasury to implement given the Tories could only govern with LD support.
Tory LD, Tory LD, Tory LD. Own your own shit too!
Cicero never rose to these heights.
Its utterly hilarious. A coalition government which absolutely divided up ministries between parties with the Tories notoriously not only holding onto law and order but telling everyone they had done so to be tough.
Every single minister. In both departments. Was a Tory. At all times. And Mr I Only Voted Plaid That One Time thinks that somehow we were responsible for what those Tory ministers were doing.
Why are the Tories sinking into the abyss? Because the public think they are lying shysters who can't take any responsibility for their shit record in office. And here is HY to prove them right.
Wrong, I said the Coalition was wrong to have cut police numbers as hard but the Coalition included LDs too, so yes YOUR party was also responsible.
Though as I also pointed out police numbers rose again under Boris and Rishi
The LibDems do need to take some of the blame, sure. But the Conservatives held all the Home Office, Police and Justice ministries throughout the entire period. The Prime Minister - IIRC - was also a Conservative.
Furthermore, the Conservatives did nothing to reverse the cuts when they were in power on their own from (checks) 2015 to 2024 (with only a brief period when the DUP supported them).
Your final paragraph is wrong. As Malmesbury's graph posted earlier showed police numbers rose consistently from autumn 2017 to 2022
Unfortunately the damage was less the loss of officers as the loss of operational Police Stations and Offices in places like East Ham and Epping. The problems that causes actual policing in terms of handling suspects and the time that takes officers off patrol have done much to weaken the sense we have adequate Police cover.
There was very significant damage in the loss of officers imo.
There is a difference between a 15 year career officer, and a 2 or 3 year experienced officer which was most of the newbies as at the last election.
There was a desperate attempt to bulk out numbers to meet the "increase police numbers" pledge in 2020 and 2021.
Talking of dodging train fares, last week I innocently strolled through Windsor & Eton station on to the little train to Slough without buying a ticket or zapping my card… told the guard at Slough and he just let me through
If memory serves correctly, there was no gateline at either Windsor & Eton Central or Windsor & Eton Riverside
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
I would agree with this. I'm the same, on that too.
For me it depends who I am cheating from.
We had a lunch as part of a spa package at a hotel yesterday and I asked to up the tip (it was 10% but only based on the extras we'd bought over and above the package - no reason the wait staff should lose out).
On the other hand if eg Amazon send me something by mistake, no way I'm sending it back. They're thieving b**stards so I feel no moral obligation not to cheat.
Or to paraphrase you "I actually don't have morals, I just sometimes feel bad if I am doing it to someone I feel deserving"
Good lord, in a definite sign of the end times even Gavin 'red ' Barwell is on team Jenrick
I was at college with Gavin: he was a Union hack at the same time I was Union hack. (He was a bit more successful than me, in that he made it to the role of President.)
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
Agree.
However the most generally honest of people tend to have one or two blind spots. I am told (how could I possibly know) that two common ones are parking for a short time at a car park without paying, and the habit among bookish people of not returning books you have borrowed.
They'll save some money by not having to turn the floodlights on (although not much as they're LED)
On that topic (kinda) I watched Bath vs Leicester a couple of weeks ago in a 5.30 kick off. Bright sunshine from a cloudless sky. Yet the floodlights were on. Madness.
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
Totally agree, though I can't imagine being so drunk as to leave a restaurant without paying by mistake...
Broken Britain update: have just moved some youths on from the garden to my flats - they were sitting on the bins vaping. Amusingly one of them unironically called me "Sir" whilst leaving. School reflex, presumably.
Ok I have to ask, what exactly were these kids doing that was wrong? Sounds from your description that they were just sitting on the bins hanging out together. You don't mention them actually causing any sort of nuisance. Indeed when you got on your high horse they left quietly and one even called you sir.
Sorry that doesn't sound like broken britain it sounds like someone that just doesn't want to see teens hanging out somewhere quietly and if anyone here is causing broken britain it is your action
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
Agree.
However the most generally honest of people tend to have one or two blind spots. I am told (how could I possibly know) that two common ones are parking for a short time at a car park without paying, and the habit among bookish people of not returning books you have borrowed.
Actually, you know the parking one. I am guilty of that occasionally. Usually because after ten minutes, I am still unable to use the monumentally awful app that the council has got for collecting parking fees. And I give up in frustration.
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
Totally agree, though I can't imagine being so drunk as to leave a restaurant without paying by mistake...
Perhaps I am too honest.
I've never used oyster or tap on the tube. the few times I've been to that London, it's been with a paper return travelcard with the train fair and tube fair in.
'As my scheduled time as a Special Government Employee comes to an end, I would like to thank President @realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.
Broken Britain update: have just moved some youths on from the garden to my flats - they were sitting on the bins vaping. Amusingly one of them unironically called me "Sir" whilst leaving. School reflex, presumably.
That wouldn't have happened on Jenrick's watch between 2019 to 2023.
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
Totally agree, though I can't imagine being so drunk as to leave a restaurant without paying by mistake...
It's all coming together as David Betz has been predicting. Civil strife within the next few years as the Brits finally revolt
I see Big Dom Cummings is harping on the same theme
And Robert Jenrick's video on X now has nearly 3m views
HRH His holiness the Lord Sir Grant Shapps has joined the adoring Jenners throng. Stick a fork in Clevers and Boris, they're done
I did predict this, when I saw Jenrick's video from Birmingham on the rubbish problem, months back
I said:
He's good to camera He totally gets the grittier issues He's got a skilled editorial team He knows how to use social media REALLY well
And here we are
The problem the Conservative Party has is that the massive underfunding of the criminal justice system happened on their watch.
During their period in government, hundreds of police stations were closed down across the US. Hampstead, for example, lost its police station. Simultaneously, the courts were underfunded, so that even if you do get caught, your chance of having a timely trial is very low.
So: I agree that lawlessness (particularly stuff like endemic shoplifting) is a serious problem. But the problem was caused by cuts from the party of law and order.
Mostly happened under the Cameron and Clegg coalition (Hampstead police station shut in 2013), so the LDs cannot escape blame for police stations closing and legal aid and court cuts either.
Boris and Rishi to be fair to them increased police funding
Here's the problem. In the 2019 parliament so many of your MPs and thus ministers were wazzocks. Insincerely repeating the party line about how many extra police you were adding. Problem is that people knew that you'd taken an axe to police numbers and they could see it. So it sounded like a lie - it WAS a lie as your increase was a decrease.
Whatever happened to the party of Law and Order btw? No police, rampant crime, criminal justice system ground to a halt and the prisons full.
You need to look at police per 100k of the population not the absolute numbers. Again the issue comes down the 8m immigrants we've had sine 2005 not generating enough economic output to fund the extra public services that are required to have them here including the NHS, education and policing. They are a net drag on the nation and the Tories or Reform will need to start sending the non-citizens who don't meet a minimum earnings threshold home.
I think it's more complicated than that, and isn't solely about police numbers.
Since 2010, the number of police stations in England and Wales has fallen by two thirds. In London, it's been three quarters.
So, take the example of shop lifting. In the old days, if the miscreants were apprehended, then the police would have a 10 minute trek to the nearest nick. Now it might be more like 45 minutes. So if they arrest someone they're going to be out of commission not for an hour and a half, but maybe two to three hours.
And the underfunding of the court system means that - in the event said miscreant is prosecuted - then the police officer is out of action for a whole day, and the trial might end up getting deferred anyway, because they were unable to find a barrister willing to act for said miscreant.
It's hard to think of an area of government spending with a better cost-benefit analysis than the criminal justice system: police, courts, prisons and the like. We all benefit from a law abiding society, and the best way to ensure that we live in a law abiding society is for there to be a meaningful prospect of apprehension and punishment if you offend. We don't have that today.
We don't just need more police, though. Because there's no point in arresting someone if they won't be prosecuted. We need to fund the entire chain. And that means we need to fund Legal Aid too, because right now a staggering number of cases end up being dismissed or deferred because of lack of legal representation.
But again the point I'm making is that we've added 8m people to the population in 20 years and on average they've not expanded GDP by enough to cover the additional public service expenditure they require. It's meant larger deficits, less money to go around and increasing tax as a proportion of GDP reducing long term trend growth. Uncontrolled immigration has been an unmitigated disaster for the UK economy. Realistically a migrant care worker or cleaner is never going to contribute enough in tax over their lifetime to cover their healthcare or pension let alone education, policing, defence, transport infrastructure etc...
Expanding the population at such a rapid rate with such low skilled workers for the last 20 years is why we are where we are. Every low skill migrant reduces our GDP per capita and their dependents reduce it further and the taxpayer is on the hook to provide them with housing, healthcare, welfare, pensions, education and the rest of it. It's just not feasible and we need to go through a long period of net emigration of low skill and unskilled migrants plus their dependents if we ever hope to have a high yield economy that can fund proper public services and infrastructure while maintaining a relatively balanced budget. We've had a 20 year failed experiment of increasing absolute GDP at the expense of GDP per capita, well maybe the focus should always have been on per capita GDP rather than the headline figure which is absolutely useless.
These are -candidly- separate issues.
Even if there hadn't been any immigration in the last 15 years, the cuts to our criminal justice system would still have had a very serious impact on the lives of citizens.
That's my point. And it's not just - or even mainly - about police numbers. It's about the fact that the legal system is so underfunded we don't prosecute people. It's about the fact that there's not a local police station that people can go to.
Now, has immigration made things worse: probably. It's just not the sole factor here, and may even not be the dominant one. (I.e. if you think about police stations per person in London, then the biggest factor is the drop in the number of police stations, not the increase in the number of people. And the same is true with the dramatic reduction in the number of duty solicitors.)
They aren't separate issues, immigration of the nature we've had for 20 years has directly resulted in lower GDP per capita than we would otherwise have had. That has led to a series of cuts in public services such as policing and justice because there's not enough GDP being generated per capita.
Those cuts to police stations and duty solicitors are because of budget cuts and those budget cuts are a direct result of there just not being enough GDP being generated to tax at a reasonable rate.
The population rose by 8m people since 2005, a 13% increase.
Nominal GDP has increased from £1.49tn to £3.08tn, an increase of 106%.
Nominal GDP per capita has increased from £29,314 to £47,322 an increase of 61%.
Simply, there was more funding per person available for public services on 2005 than we have today because uncontrolled immigration has reduced GDP per capita to such an extent that if it had kept up the government at 35% tax would have an extra £300bn to spend this year than it does currently.
Obviously this is a simplified view, I'm sure if I still had a team to look into it and adjust for inflation and wages the story would be pretty similar.
Falling GDP per capita due to uncontrolled immigration is the root cause of failing public services. On average each migrant worker and their dependents lowers our GDP per capita and now the effect has reached levels where the state can no longer be properly funded without stiflingly high tax rates.
As I said, we need a prolonged period of net emigration for low skilled and unskilled workers and their dependents. They will never contribute enough to the economy or in tax to cover the spending they will require currently and in the future.
This is so obviously true, yet few will admit it, even on here
The root cause of many if not most of our problems is mass immigration. It is that simple (along with ageing, to which it is complexly related)
This is not the fault of any migrants. They are acting rationally in pursuit of a better life, I don't blame them. It IS the fault of successive British governments which have let in millions of migrants (against public wishes) either from misguided ideology or from sheer stupidity
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
Agree.
However the most generally honest of people tend to have one or two blind spots. I am told (how could I possibly know) that two common ones are parking for a short time at a car park without paying, and the habit among bookish people of not returning books you have borrowed.
Actually, you know the parking one. I am guilty of that occasionally. Usually because after ten minutes, I am still unable to use the monumentally awful app that the council has got for collecting parking fees. And I give up in frustration.
When PB sweeps to power in 2029, and I’m made a junior minister for parking, I’m nationalising car parking. Omnipark. One app, every car park nationwide. And then stepping down.
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
It simply wouldn't ever occur to me to dodge a train fare, and nor could I live with myself if I did. I've maybe forgotten to tap in or out properly a few times whilst drunk, but I'm usually the one who pays for that.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
Totally agree, though I can't imagine being so drunk as to leave a restaurant without paying by mistake...
Lol. I'm sure those who were cheering the rule of law will be ummmm cheering the rule of law??
SFAICS it's an interlocutory order maintaining status quo ante for a short time pending a further hearing. It doesn't tell you anything about the likely outcome - which will be for the SCOTUS.
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
With all the talk of fare dodging, this is an interesting statistic.
"Transport for London (TfL) said fare evasion had actually fallen slightly, down 0.3% from 2023-24 to 3.5%. And officials claimed it was lower than many cities around the world, citing the 13% rate in New York City. They said they hoped to cut fare evasion in the capital to 1.5% by 2030."
With all the talk of fare dodging, this is an interesting statistic.
"Transport for London (TfL) said fare evasion had actually fallen slightly, down 0.3% from 2023-24 to 3.5%. And officials claimed it was lower than many cities around the world, citing the 13% rate in New York City. They said they hoped to cut fare evasion in the capital to 1.5% by 2030."
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
With all the talk of fare dodging, this is an interesting statistic.
"Transport for London (TfL) said fare evasion had actually fallen slightly, down 0.3% from 2023-24 to 3.5%. And officials claimed it was lower than many cities around the world, citing the 13% rate in New York City. They said they hoped to cut fare evasion in the capital to 1.5% by 2030."
Would be interesting to know how it is measured. I might have to dig up that Economist chart regarding shoplifting.
I saw somebody shoplift a rucksack full of stuff from Sainsburys last week. The security guards chased the guy, folded him up like a deckchair, retrieved the items, and let him go, and returned to the store with very much of he will be back soon attitude. There was no police called. So no crime was officially committed.
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
It's even worse when there's a feckless parent who won't even think about their kid's need to get onto the property ladder. If we could just allow the children to organize a painless way for their parent to pass on it, would work for all involved.
How old are these terminally ill feckless parents? In most cases their children and for that matter grandchildren are already housed.
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
Transport for London have said Tory MP Robert Jenrick didn’t have permission to film a video where he was calling out people for alleged fare evasion.
I think we have to chalk this up as a grudging win for Jenrick. Hopefully a unique event.
TfL doing their best to make Jenrick popular, there
They should bring a prosecution against him led by The Secret Barrister and carried on Sadiq Khans Twitter feed Really tap into that public support of fare dodgers
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
Transport for London have said Tory MP Robert Jenrick didn’t have permission to film a video where he was calling out people for alleged fare evasion.
I think we have to chalk this up as a grudging win for Jenrick. Hopefully a unique event.
TfL doing their best to make Jenrick popular, there
Literally reinforcing the feeling that institutions are broken, don't do their job, don't care about the customer....
Even given all that, they people must be absolute morons if they don't realise how badly the PR sounds. Same with the media concentrating on this angle of the story.
Weirdly Assanage / Snowdon i.e. Russian agents, heralded by the media as fearless whistleblowers.
TfL take action on Jenrick video... The spoof statement from Sadiq Khan about distressing footage of a man harassing the fare-evading community wasn't far off:
Transport for London have said Tory MP Robert Jenrick didn’t have permission to film a video where he was calling out people for alleged fare evasion.
That's a beautiful example of something there ought to be a word for, that fabulous bureaucratic missing of the point by reference to some jobsworth charter.
'We regret the fact that the girl was murdered by a psychopath, but she was standing too close to the edge of the platform, ignoring the yellow line and the printed warnings'.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
And once the door is open what next, the mentally ill, the disabled? Canada is already further along that slippery slope
The irony is that the government is perfectly happy for treatment to be withheld from patients when NICE deems their lives not worth the cost of saving them.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I thought the gold was for doctors?
And lawyers ;-)
Straw poll of my colleagues suggests the juniors will be on strike again soon. Pay is an issue, but the main grievance is the rubbish system for places in postgraduate specialist training.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I was having lunch with somebody adjacent to British politics, their view, Tories should support Kim Leadbeter's bill today so we can have mandatory euthanasia for poor pensioners.
Kim Leadbeter's bill is only for the terminally ill and any decent Tories should even have reservations about that
Have you ever watched a terminally ill loved one struggle through those last months? If you haven't it might be an eye opener.
It's even worse when there's a feckless parent who won't even think about their kid's need to get onto the property ladder. If we could just allow the children to organize a painless way for their parent to pass on it, would work for all involved.
How old are these terminally ill feckless parents? In most cases their children and for that matter grandchildren are already housed.
The Tories should have told the pensioners to fuck off and funded law and order and defence properly instead of stuffing their mouths with gold.
I doubt many would have gone for Ed Miliband instead.
I thought the gold was for doctors?
And lawyers ;-)
Straw poll of my colleagues suggests the juniors will be on strike again soon. Pay is an issue, but the main grievance is the rubbish system for places in postgraduate specialist training.
Our junior staff have been told that the way to progress their careers is to quit and find another job. It's been a big morale booster to the teams.
Rentoul declared things can only get worse for the govt yesterday!
Edit- and the polling has shown Reform voters simply won't consider Labour so any success in this strategy sends some back to WNV or (perhaps) the Tories.
Comments
If we took every human on the planet, and put them into a blender to create a goo with the same density as a human (i.e. 985kg/m3).
And if this good was made into a sphere, how big would the sphere be?
France to ban smoking on beaches, parks and near schools
However, despite the raw emotional pain we never considered his life should be euthanized
And he was my dear father in law who passed in our home holding our hands as nature took its course
Also my daughter in laws father was wheelchair bound with MND and again he passed without intervention nor would the family have wanted it any differently
There are times when assisted dying is sensible but it is a very sensitive subject for many
Edit: I calculated rather than guessing
🚨 NEW: Reform UK intends to cut Capital Gains Tax on crypto from 24% to 10%, turning the UK into a 'crypto powerhouse'
Nigel Farage will set out his full plans at a crypto conference in Las Vegas tonight
Furthermore, the Conservatives did nothing to reverse the cuts when they were in power on their own from (checks) 2015 to 2024 (with only a brief period when the DUP supported them).
(8 billion people) * (62 kg/person) / (985 kg / m3) = 504 million cubic meters of human goo.
The volume of a sphere with diameter d is (pi/6) d3. So we get d3 = (504 million cubic meters)/(pi/6). Take the cube root of each side and you get d = 987 meters.
But I find myself rooting for him against Badenoch. Yes today was a stunt, and in some ways a meaningless one. But that's just politics - if you want to have an impact you need to (1) pick a narrative then (2) find a way to get attention onto that narrative.
He has done well on both counts. Contrast Badenoch who has, it appears, done nothing since gaining power.
Stepping back, I want Labour to succeed i.e. deliver a fairer return to prosperity through delivering in a very tough political and economic environment.
But if they fail (which seems likely) and I'm offered the choice between the Tories or the vanity vehicle non-party that is Reform, I'd go for the Tories any day of the week.
If the Tories keep Badenoch, it seems inevitable to me that we get a Reform government at some point. But on the evidence of today I'd say Jenrick has at least a shot of squashing Farage.
Your enemy's enemy is your friend, I guess you could say.
Currently 4.1% of canadian deaths are by assisting dying....its not the rare and seldom its being sold as.
Don't get me wrong I am fully in support of assisted dying, however I don't think this bill has enough safeguards to prevent canadian style mission creep
Although I personally own Bitcoin (and I bought it before you did), it is -in the developed world at least- just a speculative asset, like a tulip in 17th century Amsterdam. It's utility is limited. If you are buying it, you are buying it not in expectation of a flow of dividends, or interest payments, or rent. You are buying it solely because you believe somebody else will buy it for more in the future.
Tired of whining doctors.
Local Government was a big loser - 1 million jobs were lost between 2012 and 2015 - and arguably the sector has never recovered and in addition had to take on public health information responsibilities (and staff) from the NHS without additional resources.
I supported the Coalition at the time and some of what it tried to do was good but I'm afraid with the passage of time, for all it seems a beacon of competence compared to what followed, it made a lot of mistakes and got a lot wrong and the LDs have to bear responsibility as much as the Conservatives.
Not that I do, and I don’t hold Bitcoin either.
I've headed back to restaurants and pubs before when I've realised I've forgotten to pay the bill. I don't like thinking I'm a cheat.
It's about honour.
AI says that the current estimate for the global human population is around 8.2 billion.
so that's 62x10^3 x 8.2 ^10^9 cubic centimetres
= 62x8.2 x 10^12 cubic centimeters
= approx 500 x 10^12 cubic centimetres
= approx 5 x 10^14 cubic centimeters
Using this link gives us a diameter of 985 metres
Black smoke billowing out of a shop which used to be Iceland but is now a furniture store - also smoke from the buildings at the rear. A decent crowd for the LFB to go about their business.
From Zack D, who has an jnteresting Twitter feed.
https://youtube.com/shorts/o6XRvViYlug?si=jp84tKPUy_rFVoLI
We had a lunch as part of a spa package at a hotel yesterday and I asked to up the tip (it was 10% but only based on the extras we'd bought over and above the package - no reason the wait staff should lose out).
On the other hand if eg Amazon send me something by mistake, no way I'm sending it back. They're thieving b**stards so I feel no moral obligation not to cheat.
They can be argued to have sides measured in square or cubic metres, but those are the inside and the outside.
Overall spending on criminal justice fell. Police numbers are just a small part of the total.
https://x.com/kobeissiletter/status/1928167506478322081?s=61
In the same way I don't want people to feel that that is the option expected of them.
https://x.com/caribcricket/status/1928160397619610100?s=61
There is a difference between a 15 year career officer, and a 2 or 3 year experienced officer which was most of the newbies as at the last election.
There was a desperate attempt to bulk out numbers to meet the "increase police numbers" pledge in 2020 and 2021.
However the most generally honest of people tend to have one or two blind spots. I am told (how could I possibly know) that two common ones are parking for a short time at a car park without paying, and the habit among bookish people of not returning books you have borrowed.
Perhaps I am too honest.
Sorry that doesn't sound like broken britain it sounds like someone that just doesn't want to see teens hanging out somewhere quietly and if anyone here is causing broken britain it is your action
@realDonaldTrump for the opportunity to reduce wasteful spending.
The @DOGE mission will only strengthen over time as it becomes a way of life throughout the government.'
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1927877957852266518
The root cause of many if not most of our problems is mass immigration. It is that simple (along with ageing, to which it is complexly related)
This is not the fault of any migrants. They are acting rationally in pursuit of a better life, I don't blame them. It IS the fault of successive British governments which have let in millions of migrants (against public wishes) either from misguided ideology or from sheer stupidity
https://x.com/Channel4News/status/1928140744507715932
Transport for London have said Tory MP Robert Jenrick didn’t have permission to film a video where he was calling out people for alleged fare evasion.
https://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/opinions-orders/25-1812.ORDER.5-29-2025_2522636.pdf
"Transport for London (TfL) said fare evasion had actually fallen slightly, down 0.3% from 2023-24 to 3.5%. And officials claimed it was lower than many cities around the world, citing the 13% rate in New York City. They said they hoped to cut fare evasion in the capital to 1.5% by 2030."
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/may/29/robert-jenrick-turns-vigilante-in-bid-to-tackle-londons-fare-dodgers
Really tap into that public support of fare dodgers
Even given all that, they people must be absolute morons if they don't realise how badly the PR sounds. Same with the media concentrating on this angle of the story.
Weirdly Assanage / Snowdon i.e. Russian agents, heralded by the media as fearless whistleblowers.
'We regret the fact that the girl was murdered by a psychopath, but she was standing too close to the edge of the platform, ignoring the yellow line and the printed warnings'.
Straw poll of my colleagues suggests the juniors will be on strike again soon. Pay is an issue, but the main grievance is the rubbish system for places in postgraduate specialist training.
The original ruling was from a panel of 3 judges from the total 9 Judges on the Court of International Trade.
Was it an actual Appeal Court, or an En Banc hearing (= all the Judges).
Keir Starmer has found Nigel Farage’s weak spot – and it is Trussonomics. Me for @Independent
https://x.com/JohnRentoul/status/1928111735874929119
Edit- and the polling has shown Reform voters simply won't consider Labour so any success in this strategy sends some back to WNV or (perhaps) the Tories.