I'm sorry but this is ridiculous, the referendum said Leave and Boris was elected with a clear mandate to get us out after May prevaricated and paid the price.
Any talk that Brexit may not happen is utter bollox.
But I'm beginning to realise that some on here aren't too fussed about democracy.
That's not the case, Mr C. We suspect that we are living through, if not the end of 'democracy', a time when the process has become corrupted. It's easy, and understandable, to say the public was 'informed' before they voted, but with majority of the popular media being against the EU, and in many cases quite prepared to publish blatant untruths...... straight bananas anyone ....... many of us are concerned that, as the saying goes, the country is going to hell in a handcart.
And we're worried. In my case, I don't suppose it'll make an enormous difference but I have grandchildren who are young people in this country, and what does it hold for them? I grew up in the 50's, in the shadow of WWII and in the greyness of those times. I saw, and still see, the European project as providing the opportunities for development and creativity. I don't see Brexit Britain as a land of opportunity, but one hedged about with restrictions. Opportunities for the wealthy perhaps, but not for ordinary people.
Yes yes yes I've heard it a million times.
And what you have to do now is have another vote and campaign to rejoin and we'll all decide again.
See what I mean about democracy, you're not too keen on it are you?
Pinhead. This country is not and never has been a direct democracy, and either you have never noticed or you don't mind (because I don't hear you complain on a weekly basis that the government has decided something for itself *again* instead of putting it to a plebiscite). And for good reason; the average voter is as well equipped to decide on complex matters of state as my horse is.
Yebbut dimmocracee innit, you reply. No, it's ochlocracy.
@IshmaelZ Ishmael, excellent new word of the day there, first time I have ever seen it.
Agreed. New one on me too.
But it is the wrong word. We do not have mob rule in that sense. What we need is a Greek-sounding word for government by social media algorithms. Or is it Latin? Boris would know.
Use, or misuse, of social media played a large part in BLM, in the war against statues, and in recent elections and referenda. When the outcome is one we approve of, we downplay its importance. My vote was not changed by Twitter. My shopping is not influenced by advertising. Inconvenient questions about the influence of hostile foreign powers using the same techniques as our main political parties is locked in the Downing Street safe. Are we sure Boaty McBoatface is not ploughing the same seas as 19th Century slavers?
Twitter has a lot of similarity to a mob. Its fairly brainless, simplistic, self selecting and prone to excessive over reaction. Looking for Greek words for social media algorithms seems to me to focus on the manipulation element. I don't really see that. I see a lot of loud mouths looking for attention and clicks. But maybe I am being naïve.
Why would we discuss the unnecessary death of tens of thousands of people? A couple of anonymous websites have suggested that the statue of Captain Cook should be ripped down and Facebook gammon are now providing 24 hour security in Whitby.
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
His resignation probably has more to do with the rather bleak future facing the ES.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
To troll people, they could call it Apeson instead.
It is just a matter of time before someone suggests renaming the Fisher Information matrix or Pearson's correlation coefficient.
In fact, scientific nomenclature needs a deep clean.
Removing the Nazi sympathisers alone is a big, big job (the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, the Stark effect, the Bieberbach conjecture, Teichmuller theory).
There is a whole new continent of wokeful renaming waiting to be discovered.
Mid to late 1930's German scientists realised that smoking was bad for one, and published to that effect. Hitler was a non-smoker.
So it took twenty years after 1945 for the message to be accepted in the West!
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
Fwiw. I used to.BUY the Evening Standard on the 80s when it was a rag of some note.. it even had .. i think Terence Reese writing a Bridge column that was worth reading to while away the train journey. These days you can open and shut it. Its ok as an aid to.lighting my woodburning stove...
It makes you wonder how such a thing could possibly have been done with a genius super-forecaster such as Cummings advising the PM, the one who apparently predicted pandemics.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
Yes, of course, I'd be surprised too, that's why the odds on offer are so long ... the big question is whether or not they provide value, Bigger odds, far bigger odds in fact, are the 500/1 on offer from Unibet against him becoming the next Prime Minister.
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous, the referendum said Leave and Boris was elected with a clear mandate to get us out after May prevaricated and paid the price.
Any talk that Brexit may not happen is utter bollox.
But I'm beginning to realise that some on here aren't too fussed about democracy.
That's not the case, Mr C. We suspect that we are living through, if not the end of 'democracy', a time when the process has become corrupted. It's easy, and understandable, to say the public was 'informed' before they voted, but with majority of the popular media being against the EU, and in many cases quite prepared to publish blatant untruths...... straight bananas anyone ....... many of us are concerned that, as the saying goes, the country is going to hell in a handcart.
And we're worried. In my case, I don't suppose it'll make an enormous difference but I have grandchildren who are young people in this country, and what does it hold for them? I grew up in the 50's, in the shadow of WWII and in the greyness of those times. I saw, and still see, the European project as providing the opportunities for development and creativity. I don't see Brexit Britain as a land of opportunity, but one hedged about with restrictions. Opportunities for the wealthy perhaps, but not for ordinary people.
Yes yes yes I've heard it a million times.
And what you have to do now is have another vote and campaign to rejoin and we'll all decide again.
See what I mean about democracy, you're not too keen on it are you?
Pinhead. This country is not and never has been a direct democracy, and either you have never noticed or you don't mind (because I don't hear you complain on a weekly basis that the government has decided something for itself *again* instead of putting it to a plebiscite). And for good reason; the average voter is as well equipped to decide on complex matters of state as my horse is.
Yebbut dimmocracee innit, you reply. No, it's ochlocracy.
@IshmaelZ Ishmael, excellent new word of the day there, first time I have ever seen it.
Agreed. New one on me too.
But it is the wrong word. We do not have mob rule in that sense. What we need is a Greek-sounding word for government by social media algorithms. Or is it Latin? Boris would know.
Use, or misuse, of social media played a large part in BLM, in the war against statues, and in recent elections and referenda. When the outcome is one we approve of, we downplay its importance. My vote was not changed by Twitter. My shopping is not influenced by advertising. Inconvenient questions about the influence of hostile foreign powers using the same techniques as our main political parties is locked in the Downing Street safe. Are we sure Boaty McBoatface is not ploughing the same seas as 19th Century slavers?
Twitter has a lot of similarity to a mob. Its fairly brainless, simplistic, self selecting and prone to excessive over reaction. Looking for Greek words for social media algorithms seems to me to focus on the manipulation element. I don't really see that. I see a lot of loud mouths looking for attention and clicks. But maybe I am being naïve.
Twitter and Facebook and other social media have highly tuned algorithms that allow what you call a mob to form. These algorithms are designed to spread influence and change behaviour -- originally what brand of toothpaste you buy; lately their use has spread to giving silly names to boats, voting and now removing statues and renaming buildings. Social media companies make their money by selling advertising. Turns out selling ideas is very much like selling toothpaste.
When the crisis began it seemed encouraging that the government was letting us hear from the leading scientists directly. But now things are going pear-shaped it is shabby the way our political leaders are trying to offload the blame.
I think, to be fair, the scientists on SAGE do bear a large chunk of the blame.
There is clearly a shit-storm of blame coming, and both the scientists and the politicians are positioning themselves.
Or rather re-positioning themselves.
It is an interesting question as to how accountable a scientist is if the advice proferred leads to poor decisions.
However, I think it is usually accepted that scientists do have a duty to retract mistakes. That is part of the code of science.
I am not a scientist and you are better placed to judge but my strong impression is that epidemiology has been something of a backwater for some time not attracting either the brightest or the best. There has been clear signs that models were amateurish and simplistic not taking advantage of modern statistical methods, there was the fact that the WHO (who seem to be in the chocolate teapot category) seemed to be using modelling based on work done in the 1930s post Spanish flu. There seems to have been little appreciation of the absolutely massive increase in the movement of people since that time and the implications for transmission. There seemed to be very little thought put into how a trace and search system was ever going to work, a problem we are yet to solve. Some countries, who have had more recent experience such as SARS, do seem to have addressed these issues and therefore had a much better idea about where to start. SK had a tracing system on a public website based on phone data in February, for example. Despite the exercise undertaken under Hunt we seem to have given this little thought. I wonder was this just money or resources or lack of real world examples making it boring?
I think mistakes made in late March/early April were very costly.
I am certain, from examining the published work, that Prof Ferguson's early models on the pandemic spread were wrong, and unfortunately they strongly influenced the Government's early decisions.
Of course, any scientist can be wrong. But, the process of science should be self-correcting. What surprises me is that the other scientists on SAGE did not quickly realise that Ferguson's predictions were wrong, by comparing his model with the daily data.
There seems to have been a groupthink on SAGE that is antithetical to good science.
There should have been a critical inquiry of assumptions in the modelling, and the consequent uncertainties. That does not seem to have happened.
I think UK science has failed rather badly, sad to say.
I always thought Brexit was a stupid idea but even I didn't expect it to kill tens of thousands of people. It really is the gift that keeps on giving isn't it.
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
Wrong market perhaps? George Osborne's availability coincides neatly with stories that unnamed Conservatives are displeased with Shaun Bailey as London Mayoral candidate.
I'm sorry but this is ridiculous, the referendum said Leave and Boris was elected with a clear mandate to get us out after May prevaricated and paid the price.
Any talk that Brexit may not happen is utter bollox.
But I'm beginning to realise that some on here aren't too fussed about democracy.
That's not the case, Mr C. We suspect that we are living through, if not the end of 'democracy', a time when the process has become corrupted. It's easy, and understandable, to say the public was 'informed' before they voted, but with majority of the popular media being against the EU, and in many cases quite prepared to publish blatant untruths...... straight bananas anyone ....... many of us are concerned that, as the saying goes, the country is going to hell in a handcart.
And we're worried. In my case, I don't suppose it'll make an enormous difference but I have grandchildren who are young people in this country, and what does it hold for them? I grew up in the 50's, in the shadow of WWII and in the greyness of those times. I saw, and still see, the European project as providing the opportunities for development and creativity. I don't see Brexit Britain as a land of opportunity, but one hedged about with restrictions. Opportunities for the wealthy perhaps, but not for ordinary people.
Yes yes yes I've heard it a million times.
And what you have to do now is have another vote and campaign to rejoin and we'll all decide again.
See what I mean about democracy, you're not too keen on it are you?
Pinhead. This country is not and never has been a direct democracy, and either you have never noticed or you don't mind (because I don't hear you complain on a weekly basis that the government has decided something for itself *again* instead of putting it to a plebiscite). And for good reason; the average voter is as well equipped to decide on complex matters of state as my horse is.
Yebbut dimmocracee innit, you reply. No, it's ochlocracy.
@IshmaelZ Ishmael, excellent new word of the day there, first time I have ever seen it.
Agreed. New one on me too.
But it is the wrong word. We do not have mob rule in that sense. What we need is a Greek-sounding word for government by social media algorithms. Or is it Latin? Boris would know.
Use, or misuse, of social media played a large part in BLM, in the war against statues, and in recent elections and referenda. When the outcome is one we approve of, we downplay its importance. My vote was not changed by Twitter. My shopping is not influenced by advertising. Inconvenient questions about the influence of hostile foreign powers using the same techniques as our main political parties is locked in the Downing Street safe. Are we sure Boaty McBoatface is not ploughing the same seas as 19th Century slavers?
Twitter has a lot of similarity to a mob. Its fairly brainless, simplistic, self selecting and prone to excessive over reaction. Looking for Greek words for social media algorithms seems to me to focus on the manipulation element. I don't really see that. I see a lot of loud mouths looking for attention and clicks. But maybe I am being naïve.
Aeschylus had a nice equivalent for 'rule by Twitter mob' in his Agamemnon:
A.Ag.883 δημόθρους ἀναρχία ~ 'lawlessness of public clamour'.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
Wrong market perhaps? George Osborne's availability coincides neatly with stories that unnamed Conservatives are displeased with Shaun Bailey as London Mayoral candidate.
Shaun Bailey is Steve Norris levels of unelectable
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
TBH my opinion of Osborne has gone down rather than up since he left, in contrast to that of both Portillo and Balls.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
When you put it that way I am reminded of this: “ There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats. “And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax. “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.” “Nope.” “Pardon?” “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is. “It’s a lot more complicated than that . . .” “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes . . .” “But they starts with thinking about people as things . . . ” ” From the late, great Sir Terry. So yes, I agree.
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
Wrong market perhaps? George Osborne's availability coincides neatly with stories that unnamed Conservatives are displeased with Shaun Bailey as London Mayoral candidate.
Does Osborne really want to be humiliatingly defeated ?
Meanwhile, in ludicrous demo watch: petitions both for and against pulling down statues of Sir Robert Peel, 5,000 in favour of destroying a monument to Mahatma Gandhi in Leicester, and several rival demos planned to converge very close to one another in central London today. The likely efficacy of the Met police in keeping them, at a minimum, out of missile range of each other is questionable at best.
I agree that there will not be a bespoke deal but a deal is still possible, indeed likely. The shape of that deal is in the transitional agreement. Whilst a sticking point or two is possible there is a consensus that both sides want zero tariff free access to each other's markets. Both want at least some degree of mutual recognition of standards so that NTBs are avoided. Both want minimum disruption to existing supply chains. The tricky bits are the LPF conditions and the status of NI. The UK cannot accept restrictions on State aid when Rishi has already lent £20bn and counting to businesses to help with Covid. The EU are of course doing the same. Its possible that there might be an agreement that State aid limitations are suspended for 5 years or so and this is looked at again later. NI remains tricky because there is a strong Irish desire not to have any conditionality on the movement of goods in the island. That either means no conditionality anywhere (possible but unlikely) or different rules. This problem has not gone away. The Brexit process will not end but it will reach another key stage. Future agreements, co-operation and equivalents to what we had as members are all too likely but they will be third party agreements negotiated at arms length.
Broadly agree. I think some sort of deal is politically necessary and will happen, though quite possibly with the inattention to detail that is a hallmark of this government. I can see haggles persisting in 2021 and beyond on extending the deal, for example to give greater access to the EU for financial services than is likely under the basic deal.
The key area, I suspect, will actually be the mutual recognition of standards. The EU will not recognise British agricultural standards if there is the sort of US terade deal that looks likely. More generally, the basic EU model is a level playing field and arbitration by the ECJ, which is anathema to the British government (and even a pro-European like me wouldn't feel a pure EU institution should monitor a deal). With lots of goodwill and careful attention, one can imagine a new structure being built, with an ECJ-like body that wasn't the ECJ to arbitrate, but the preconditions are absent and the push for a US deal probably makes it impossible.
And that will be the real cost of Brexit. If neither goods nor services are routinely accepted in our biggest market, we will have a problem.
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
Wrong market perhaps? George Osborne's availability coincides neatly with stories that unnamed Conservatives are displeased with Shaun Bailey as London Mayoral candidate.
Does Osborne really want to be humiliatingly defeated ?
QTWTAIN.
Suspect the IMF or something like that would be more tempting.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
IIRC, from the Private Eye story, several were involved, mostly Conservatives, but one or two LibDems in the Coalition years. Another IIRC, Jo Swinson doesn't come out of it well. They all seem to have accepted the PO's Chief Exec/Chair's assurances without asking why the same thing was happening time and time again.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
I totally dislike Panorama’s style and presentation, but there is a very genuine scandal there which needs an independent enquiry.
Many people have lost money and in some cases liberty, for reasons that when looked on objectively appear to make no sense at all, with opinions of people and outputs from computer systems treated by courts as unchallengeable facts. It highlights massive institutional issues in public sector administration, management and procurement that urgently need addressing.
Just as well there’s a senior advisor at No.10 who sees reform and accountability of the whole public sector as a high priority, and cases like this are an example of why the attacks on him have been so vicious. He doesn’t want reports produced and lessons learned while everyone involved gets promotions, he wants people held as accountable as they would be in the private sector.
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
Wrong market perhaps? George Osborne's availability coincides neatly with stories that unnamed Conservatives are displeased with Shaun Bailey as London Mayoral candidate.
Does Osborne really want to be humiliatingly defeated ?
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
Interesting. A distant relative has been, apparently, holed up in France since the brown stuff hit the fan. She's now got to leave France ..... lease has run out or something ...... and, according to her father she's heading for Cyprus. Is that a possibility?
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
I totally dislike Panorama’s style and presentation, but there is a very genuine scandal there which needs an independent enquiry.
Many people have lost money and in some cases liberty, for reasons that when looked on objectively appear to make no sense at all, with opinions of people and outputs from computer systems treated by courts as unchallengeable facts. It highlights massive institutional issues in public sector administration, management and procurement that urgently need addressing.
Just as well there’s a senior advisor at No.10 who sees reform and accountability of the whole public sector as a high priority, and cases like this are an example of why the attacks on him have been so vicious. He doesn’t want reports produced and lessons learned while everyone involved gets promotions, he wants people held as accountable as they would be in the private sector.
Agree except for the last bit. An advisor who wants everyone else held accountable whilst being exempted himself isn't a great look.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
I don't disagree.
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
IIRC, from the Private Eye story, several were involved, mostly Conservatives, but one or two LibDems in the Coalition years. Another IIRC, Jo Swinson doesn't come out of it well. They all seem to have accepted the PO's Chief Exec/Chair's assurances without asking why the same thing was happening time and time again.
One of the most scandalous details is that postmasters up in front of the PO for apparently missing money were told they were the only person reporting such big losses, when they were happening all over the place. The managers concerned must have known they were hiding the truth at the time.
Do unfulfilled political ambitions perhaps lie behind George Osborne's decision yesterday to quit as editor of the London Evening Standard? Certainly if there was ever a time for him to commence manoeuvres, that time is probably now. From a betting perspective, those nice folk at Ladbrokes are offering to boost their odds against him being the next Conservative Leader from 100/1 to 130/1. Of course to further his cause, he would first need to secure a seat in the HOC.
DYOR.
I'd be surprised. Like Portillo and Balls, he's a better person outside politics; it is very hard to make a success of re-entry.
Wrong market perhaps? George Osborne's availability coincides neatly with stories that unnamed Conservatives are displeased with Shaun Bailey as London Mayoral candidate.
Does Osborne really want to be humiliatingly defeated ?
QTWTAIN.
Suspect the IMF or something like that would be more tempting.
Ha ha. Osborne has zero chance of becoming IMF MD.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
AIUI, the Sub-Postmasters 'Union'...... thrown out of the TUC for being too close to the bosses, or some such ..... deserves to be in the dock too. Epic fail with regard to defending it's members.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
When the crisis began it seemed encouraging that the government was letting us hear from the leading scientists directly. But now things are going pear-shaped it is shabby the way our political leaders are trying to offload the blame.
I think, to be fair, the scientists on SAGE do bear a large chunk of the blame.
There is clearly a shit-storm of blame coming, and both the scientists and the politicians are positioning themselves.
Or rather re-positioning themselves.
It is an interesting question as to how accountable a scientist is if the advice proferred leads to poor decisions.
However, I think it is usually accepted that scientists do have a duty to retract mistakes. That is part of the code of science.
I am not a scientist and you are better placed to judge but my strong impression is that epidemiology has been something of a backwater for some time not attracting either the brightest or the best. There has been clear signs that models were amateurish and simplistic not taking advantage of modern statistical methods, there was the fact that the WHO (who seem to be in the chocolate teapot category) seemed to be using modelling based on work done in the 1930s post Spanish flu. There seems to have been little appreciation of the absolutely massive increase in the movement of people since that time and the implications for transmission. There seemed to be very little thought put into how a trace and search system was ever going to work, a problem we are yet to solve. Some countries, who have had more recent experience such as SARS, do seem to have addressed these issues and therefore had a much better idea about where to start. SK had a tracing system on a public website based on phone data in February, for example. Despite the exercise undertaken under Hunt we seem to have given this little thought. I wonder was this just money or resources or lack of real world examples making it boring?
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
Having said that academic science has a number of problems: 1 universities value people who bring in funding more than those with technical expertise - a good salesperson trumps a good scientist 2 programmers are second class citizens, the idea of a research software engineer is fairly new and those with phds start on about 30k,those without less. You can't get beyond 60k and that takes probably 15 years or so. Good programmers can do much better 3 programming skills are not valued, no one checks the code. Most of ym colleagueshhave no idea what a function is and most don't know how to use a loop. The imperial model was probably written by post docs on 30k using Google for code snippets to use, no surprise its not pretty.
I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
The adjective "Australian style" will be in there somewhere. That focus groups very well with the Stage 2 Hypertension crowd that constitutes leavers.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
In early March there would have been 200,000 people per day just coming through Heathrow, probably another 200k from other airports plus the Tunnel and ferry traffic. Over a million Brits travelled to Europe during half term week, it would have been physically impossible to quarantine that many people properly, nor to suspend flights and strand them abroad - “abandoning them to die” as the media would have put it.
With hindsight, we should have stopped outbound flights to the whole of Europe as soon as the first cases arrived in Italy, but it’s very easy to say that now, it would have been totally outrageous to have thought seriously about it at the time.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
As the great military theorist Mikhail von Goveitz once opined, 'Brexit is the continuation of war by other means'...
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
Interesting. A distant relative has been, apparently, holed up in France since the brown stuff hit the fan. She's now got to leave France ..... lease has run out or something ...... and, according to her father she's heading for Cyprus. Is that a possibility?
They have started to lift restrictions but UK and France are two countries they are not accepting entry from. Unless she has Cypriot nationality or residency.
When the crisis began it seemed encouraging that the government was letting us hear from the leading scientists directly. But now things are going pear-shaped it is shabby the way our political leaders are trying to offload the blame.
I think, to be fair, the scientists on SAGE do bear a large chunk of the blame.
There is clearly a shit-storm of blame coming, and both the scientists and the politicians are positioning themselves.
Or rather re-positioning themselves.
It is an interesting question as to how accountable a scientist is if the advice proferred leads to poor decisions.
However, I think it is usually accepted that scientists do have a duty to retract mistakes. That is part of the code of science.
I am not a scientist and you are better placed to judge but my strong impression is that epidemiology has been something of a backwater for some time not attracting either the brightest or the best. There has been clear signs that models were amateurish and simplistic not taking advantage of modern statistical methods, there was the fact that the WHO (who seem to be in the chocolate teapot category) seemed to be using modelling based on work done in the 1930s post Spanish flu. There seems to have been little appreciation of the absolutely massive increase in the movement of people since that time and the implications for transmission. There seemed to be very little thought put into how a trace and search system was ever going to work, a problem we are yet to solve. Some countries, who have had more recent experience such as SARS, do seem to have addressed these issues and therefore had a much better idea about where to start. SK had a tracing system on a public website based on phone data in February, for example. Despite the exercise undertaken under Hunt we seem to have given this little thought. I wonder was this just money or resources or lack of real world examples making it boring?
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
Having said that academic science has a number of problems: 1 universities value people who bring in funding more than those with technical expertise - a good salesperson trumps a good scientist 2 programmers are second class citizens, the idea of a research software engineer is fairly new and those with phds start on about 30k,those without less. You can't get beyond 60k and that takes probably 15 years or so. Good programmers can do much better 3 programming skills are not valued, no one checks the code. Most of ym colleagueshhave no idea what a function is and most don't know how to use a loop. The imperial model was probably written by post docs on 30k using Google for code snippets to use, no surprise its not pretty.
Well, I think it is a disgrace that the entire lockdown policy of a government was driven by a bug-ridden mess of code that was 13 years old.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
For sure. A small unnoticed detail in Thursday's lengthy ministerial question slot on the scandal was the minister mentioning that files on a batch of people involved have been sent to the CPS for consideration of prosecution. I'd bet that includes some at the suppliers, who may not have been entirely honest with the PO.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
Karl Pearson was a socialist. He declined an OBE. He was a prominent free-thinker. He supported the suffragettes. He admired Karl Marx.
He was a famous applied statistician at University College, London.
He was a eugenicist (as were many early twentieth century socialists).
So, he is joining statisticians Galton and Fisher on the naughty step.
The Pearson Building at UCL is being renamed.
Some would say your first paragraph contains enough reasons for the renaming...
But you are right: eugenics was an idea of its time and retrospectively condemning people for not anticipating how far a bunch of nutters in Germany would take the idea is as sensible as condemning him for not anticipating what others would do in the name of Marxism.
I think that lets people off too easily. Eugenics is not a bad idea simply because the Nazis took it too far. It was a bad idea long before then because it was based on the idea that humans had no intrinsic value qua humans but only to the extent of their usefulness, intelligence etc. In short it saw humans as a means to an end rather than as an end in themselves. It denied people their essential humanity but simply saw them as an animal to be bred. It was not, at heart, faulty science but faulty morality. Eugenics was a moral failing and that moral failing was there - for those with eyes to see - long before the Nazis did their grisly work.
Indeed, but in the nineteenth and early twentieth century it was just part of a wider conception of "progress". Intrinsic to the idea of Empire was that we were better people than foreigners and our destiny was to supplant and replace them. As well as the racist assumption there was a social class assumption, that the country would be improved by the export of a lot of our surpluss degenerate working class people.
This applied to Scottish clearances, Irish coffin ships, penal settlement in Australia, export of orphans etc etc The plan was that not only would Britain be improved by removing such people, but the colonies would breed out their less desirable traits and turn them into sturdy yeomen in fresh Englands overseas. Such policies continued into the late Sixties and still have echoes today.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
From my recollection of the situation Post Office Ltd asked Fujitsu for system. One was provided. Bugs appeared, as they usually do. Fujitsu told POL all was well, and it all went downhill from there, although pretty soon Fujitsu realised something was wrong. However, as was pointed out upthread, Post Office managers told dozens of postmasters that 'they were the only one having trouble', and they must have reported back up the line. I can't imagine a middle rank manager not reporting back, and their superior not saying 'Hello, same story." If Dr F's about I'm sure he'll confirm that that happens all the time in medicine use.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
In early March there would have been 200,000 people per day just coming through Heathrow, probably another 200k from other airports plus the Tunnel and ferry traffic. Over a million Brits travelled to Europe during half term week, it would have been physically impossible to quarantine that many people properly, nor to suspend flights and strand them abroad - “abandoning them to die” as the media would have put it.
With hindsight, we should have stopped outbound flights to the whole of Europe as soon as the first cases arrived in Italy, but it’s very easy to say that now, it would have been totally outrageous to have thought seriously about it at the time.
The government was still allowing people to fly out on holiday in the middle of March.
When the crisis began it seemed encouraging that the government was letting us hear from the leading scientists directly. But now things are going pear-shaped it is shabby the way our political leaders are trying to offload the blame.
I think, to be fair, the scientists on SAGE do bear a large chunk of the blame.
There is clearly a shit-storm of blame coming, and both the scientists and the politicians are positioning themselves.
Or rather re-positioning themselves.
It is an interesting question as to how accountable a scientist is if the advice proferred leads to poor decisions.
However, I think it is usually accepted that scientists do have a duty to retract mistakes. That is part of the code of science.
I am not a scientist and you are better placed to judge but my strong impression is that epidemiology has been something of a backwater for some time not attracting either the brightest or the best. There has been clear signs that models were amateurish and simplistic not taking advantage of modern statistical methods, there was the fact that the WHO (who seem to be in the chocolate teapot category) seemed to be using modelling based on work done in the 1930s post Spanish flu. There seems to have been little appreciation of the absolutely massive increase in the movement of people since that time and the implications for transmission. There seemed to be very little thought put into how a trace and search system was ever going to work, a problem we are yet to solve. Some countries, who have had more recent experience such as SARS, do seem to have addressed these issues and therefore had a much better idea about where to start. SK had a tracing system on a public website based on phone data in February, for example. Despite the exercise undertaken under Hunt we seem to have given this little thought. I wonder was this just money or resources or lack of real world examples making it boring?
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
Having said that academic science has a number of problems: 1 universities value people who bring in funding more than those with technical expertise - a good salesperson trumps a good scientist 2 programmers are second class citizens, the idea of a research software engineer is fairly new and those with phds start on about 30k,those without less. You can't get beyond 60k and that takes probably 15 years or so. Good programmers can do much better 3 programming skills are not valued, no one checks the code. Most of ym colleagueshhave no idea what a function is and most don't know how to use a loop. The imperial model was probably written by post docs on 30k using Google for code snippets to use, no surprise its not pretty.
So actually, yeah, I agree. Particularly for predictive modelling of infectious disease
When the crisis began it seemed encouraging that the government was letting us hear from the leading scientists directly. But now things are going pear-shaped it is shabby the way our political leaders are trying to offload the blame.
I think, to be fair, the scientists on SAGE do bear a large chunk of the blame.
There is clearly a shit-storm of blame coming, and both the scientists and the politicians are positioning themselves.
Or rather re-positioning themselves.
It is an interesting question as to how accountable a scientist is if the advice proferred leads to poor decisions.
However, I think it is usually accepted that scientists do have a duty to retract mistakes. That is part of the code of science.
I am not a scientist and you are better placed to judge but my strong impression is that epidemiology has been something of a backwater for some time not attracting either the brightest or the best. There has been clear signs that models were amateurish and simplistic not taking advantage of modern statistical methods, there was the fact that the WHO (who seem to be in the chocolate teapot category) seemed to be using modelling based on work done in the 1930s post Spanish flu. There seems to have been little appreciation of the absolutely massive increase in the movement of people since that time and the implications for transmission. There seemed to be very little thought put into how a trace and search system was ever going to work, a problem we are yet to solve. Some countries, who have had more recent experience such as SARS, do seem to have addressed these issues and therefore had a much better idea about where to start. SK had a tracing system on a public website based on phone data in February, for example. Despite the exercise undertaken under Hunt we seem to have given this little thought. I wonder was this just money or resources or lack of real world examples making it boring?
Resources was certainly a part of it. The severe degradation of our public health expertise over the last couple of decades is an undeniable fact. In the shorter term we know that (for example) recommendations for pandemic stockpiling were ignored in 2017.
Contact tracing is not complicated. We’ve been doing it since the 1930s, and far less advanced countries have used it to defeat pandemics (Liberia and Ebola, for instance). It just requires a lot of people and organisation in place - building it from scratch takes time. We had very little capacity at the outset, and we were very slow to start building it.
If those four faces were the Cabinet pandemic team, well no great loss then.
Oh dear, I have news for you. These four faces are still in charge of the pandemic response.
They are? But its going so well.
I feel sure that you would have done better as so many experts on here would have. We could have got rid of the Govt and left it to the PB experts... the only case for real criticism is the care homes...
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
I think he probabaly knows that even with a majority of 80, there are insufficient votes on the back benches for a treaty that ties us to taking EU rules forever.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
Ending free movement from the EU is simple, you can still come here but you need a job that pays the appropriate rate.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
Interesting. A distant relative has been, apparently, holed up in France since the brown stuff hit the fan. She's now got to leave France ..... lease has run out or something ...... and, according to her father she's heading for Cyprus. Is that a possibility?
They have started to lift restrictions but UK and France are two countries they are not accepting entry from. Unless she has Cypriot nationality or residency.
Thanks. Did wonder; she's not a close relative..... daughter of a cousin, so I've no input. I think though that her father said she'd got a house there, so might get away with it. TBH, don't know whether its Cyprus or N Cyprus.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
Bugs are inevitable in software. What's important is that you have a process and culture that can identify bugs and get them fixed. Then you have fewer bugs in the future (until you introduce new ones when modifying the code to add new functionality).
The failure was not accepting the possibility that there could be an error in the software. That is a management failure at the Post Office, unless there's evidence that they went to Fujitsu and received a reply saying the software was working perfectly.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
While a company supplying crappy software is certainly an issue, the testing, acceptance and rollout of it is most definitely on the customer’s shoulders.
As is prosecuting the users because it couldn’t do sums properly.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
IIRC, from the Private Eye story, several were involved, mostly Conservatives, but one or two LibDems in the Coalition years. Another IIRC, Jo Swinson doesn't come out of it well. They all seem to have accepted the PO's Chief Exec/Chair's assurances without asking why the same thing was happening time and time again.
One of the most scandalous details is that postmasters up in front of the PO for apparently missing money were told they were the only person reporting such big losses, when they were happening all over the place. The managers concerned must have known they were hiding the truth at the time.
I am afraid this is quite normal. I am involved in a scandal that I won't go thru' here so as not to bore you all, that has been fought since 2012 regarding an event that occurred 24 years ago. The ministers rely on the information from the civil servants and they rely on what they have been told and nobody has time to look at the details and they don't want to open a can of worms. Inevitably that results in statements being made that are just twaddle.
I will give one example. A letter from a minister (and a FOI request revealed the exact wording came from a civil servant briefing) stated that the ombudsman found that x hadn't been negligent during y.
This statement was in fact true, although completely meaningless as the person the reply went to was not complaining about x or the event y, but a different organisation during a different event some 12 years earlier than the event y. So the reply was utter nonsense.
A reply pointed this out to the minister. The minister not only ignored the point being made, but repeated the same bizarre statement (it was obviously a template response)
An MP wrote to the minister pointing out the nonsense. The reply that came back was that the question had been answered!
The group I am involved in has had 8 years of this twaddle.
Just in case you think we may just be useless in what we are doing, this has involved barristers, 2 debates in parliament an attempted bill to rectify the situation (and probably a 2nd one soon) and several ombudsmen. It has cross party support. An ex minister told me they have not a clue what they are doing regarding this. It is not high profile so it is not in the media.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I wouldn't rule out the second option, Boris and co are stupid enough to think it's wouldn't be a problem because we won't be enforcing checks on imports...
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Quite right, and a strong tradition in Non-Conformist Churches too.
When the crisis began it seemed encouraging that the government was letting us hear from the leading scientists directly. But now things are going pear-shaped it is shabby the way our political leaders are trying to offload the blame.
I think, to be fair, the scientists on SAGE do bear a large chunk of the blame.
There is clearly a shit-storm of blame coming, and both the scientists and the politicians are positioning themselves.
Or rather re-positioning themselves.
It is an interesting question as to how accountable a scientist is if the advice proferred leads to poor decisions.
However, I think it is usually accepted that scientists do have a duty to retract mistakes. That is part of the code of science.
I am not a scientist and you are better placed to judge but my strong impression is that epidemiology has been something of a backwater for some time not attracting either the brightest or the best. There has been clear signs that models were amateurish and simplistic not taking advantage of modern statistical methods, there was the fact that the WHO (who seem to be in the chocolate teapot category) seemed to be using modelling based on work done in the 1930s post Spanish flu. There seems to have been little appreciation of the absolutely massive increase in the movement of people since that time and the implications for transmission. There seemed to be very little thought put into how a trace and search system was ever going to work, a problem we are yet to solve. Some countries, who have had more recent experience such as SARS, do seem to have addressed these issues and therefore had a much better idea about where to start. SK had a tracing system on a public website based on phone data in February, for example. Despite the exercise undertaken under Hunt we seem to have given this little thought. I wonder was this just money or resources or lack of real world examples making it boring?
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
Having said that academic science has a number of problems: 1 universities value people who bring in funding more than those with technical expertise - a good salesperson trumps a good scientist 2 programmers are second class citizens, the idea of a research software engineer is fairly new and those with phds start on about 30k,those without less. You can't get beyond 60k and that takes probably 15 years or so. Good programmers can do much better 3 programming skills are not valued, no one checks the code. Most of ym colleagueshhave no idea what a function is and most don't know how to use a loop. The imperial model was probably written by post docs on 30k using Google for code snippets to use, no surprise its not pretty.
So actually, yeah, I agree. Particularly for predictive modelling of infectious disease
Do you think it might have gone differently had SAGE discussions published and open to scrutiny at the time ?
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Quite right, and a strong tradition in Non-Conformist Churches too.
I'm sure Tim Farron's never been in trouble for interposing his personal religious beliefs in areas where people have no interest in nor need of them...
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
Definitely no images in Islam, except for portraits of national leaders. Mosques are totally empty spaces made of nice materials and decorations.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Just been taking a delve in the detailed tables of the latest full-sample Scottish poll. The breaks are even more depressing for Unionists than the headline 52% pro-independence, 48% pro-subjugation.
The young are overwhelmingly pro-independence, especially younger women (under 35): 69% are pro-sovereignty.
Astonishingly, 40% of SLab voters (2019) are pro-independence. This confirms my theory that the Labour block is absolutely key to winning back our independence.
8% of Yes voters from 2014 have now changed their minds and would vote No today, but a whopping 20% of 2014 No voters have switched in the other direction.
60% want Scotland to re-join the European Union, and that is the baseline before the shit has hit the fan.
The fact that Nats can only get to 48% including Don't Knows, just 3% higher than 2014, despite Brexit is not depressing at all to Unionists. The only people who should be depressed with that are Nats.
Of course the government has also ruled out indyref2 for a generation anyway, respecting the 'once in a generation' 2014 vote
So, in May next year:
1. if Scots vote Conservative there will be no independence referendum 2. if Scots vote SNP there will be no independence referendum
So, what is the point of voting Conservative? According to you, there is not going to be an independence referendum irrespective of who voters choose to vote for. If you are correct, the Scottish Conservatives have lost the USP so assiduously built up by Ruth Davidson.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
While a company supplying crappy software is certainly an issue, the testing, acceptance and rollout of it is most definitely on the customer’s shoulders.
As is prosecuting the users because it couldn’t do sums properly.
From the media coverage one of the issues - revealed eventually by a Fujitsu whistleblower - was that the software supplier could, and was, remotely making software changes including changes affecting individual accounts, when the PO was telling its postmasters that only they had access to the financial data in their accounts.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
In early March there would have been 200,000 people per day just coming through Heathrow, probably another 200k from other airports plus the Tunnel and ferry traffic. Over a million Brits travelled to Europe during half term week, it would have been physically impossible to quarantine that many people properly, nor to suspend flights and strand them abroad - “abandoning them to die” as the media would have put it.
With hindsight, we should have stopped outbound flights to the whole of Europe as soon as the first cases arrived in Italy, but it’s very easy to say that now, it would have been totally outrageous to have thought seriously about it at the time.
The government was still allowing people to fly out on holiday in the middle of March.
Indeed, as I did. But the graph down the page here https://virological.org/t/preliminary-analysis-of-sars-cov-2-importation-establishment-of-uk-transmission-lineages/507 indicates that the peak in imported infections was 23 March, so closing down from mid March would have been largely pointless (you might have flattened the peak a bit). 23 Feb looks like the day it should have started, although it would have been best to do it a week earlier so that half term holidaymakers were unable to travel, rather than stranded abroad.
If those four faces were the Cabinet pandemic team, well no great loss then.
Oh dear, I have news for you. These four faces are still in charge of the pandemic response.
They are? But its going so well.
I feel sure that you would have done better as so many experts on here would have. We could have got rid of the Govt and left it to the PB experts... the only case for real criticism is the care homes...
Testing, a late lockdown and PPE aside. I would tend to pass the care homes blame to the clinicians desperate to free up hospital beds. They bear as much, if not more than the responsibility of government.
My biggest criticism has been for the adhoc, ill-prepared, chaotic winding down of lockdown in England. We are yet to see if any of those chickens come home to roost.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I wouldn't rule out the second option, Boris and co are stupid enough to think it's wouldn't be a problem because we won't be enforcing checks on imports...
Don't get me wrong, if he thought it would work for him politically I would expect him to do it, lunacy or not. But imo it's just the immigration control he needs to satiate most Leavers (esp the Red Wallers). They would not thank him for the disruption and job losses arising from an overnight "frictionless to WTO"
So I think No Deal remains the red herring it has always been. It's just needed for the dialogue and the rhetoric. We will all play along - talk about it for a few more months as if it might happen and then it won't. You need the spectre of No Deal in the discourse in order to present the "Surrender Deal" when it comes as a triumph. You need 'relief' working its magic on your side at that moment.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
I think he probabaly knows that even with a majority of 80, there are insufficient votes on the back benches for a treaty that ties us to taking EU rules forever.
It’s now about the only possible piece of legislation guaranteed to wipe out the government’s majority overnight, and the government are well aware of that.
The other would have been a deadline extension, but thankfully that has now passed.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Yay - idiotic vandals destroyed cultural treasures in the past, so it's fine to do so in the present. A brilliant argument indeed!
You really are not very bright are you? The point is some isolated incidents of minor vandalism are not an “orgy” of destruction. Seriously, you are so blinkered by your paranoid delusions of Marxist insurrection and determination to preserve your own comforting version of history you wouldn’t know an argument if it bit you in the arse.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
In early March there would have been 200,000 people per day just coming through Heathrow, probably another 200k from other airports plus the Tunnel and ferry traffic. Over a million Brits travelled to Europe during half term week, it would have been physically impossible to quarantine that many people properly, nor to suspend flights and strand them abroad - “abandoning them to die” as the media would have put it.
With hindsight, we should have stopped outbound flights to the whole of Europe as soon as the first cases arrived in Italy, but it’s very easy to say that now, it would have been totally outrageous to have thought seriously about it at the time.
The government was still allowing people to fly out on holiday in the middle of March.
The most remarkable discordance was between the treatment of the apparently uninfected people off that Princess cruise ship, who were met at the docks by people in hazmat suits and driven off to an enforced two week quarantine in the Wirral, and the nonchalance with which later returnees from virus hotspots arriving by air were waved through airports and let free to travel home.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Yay - idiotic vandals destroyed cultural treasures in the past, so it's fine to do so in the present. A brilliant argument indeed!
Indeed, the very point Ms S is making. I'm sure I read somewhere that around 90% of English and Welsh art was destroyed during the Reformation, with yet more during the period of the Commonwealth.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Quite right, and a strong tradition in Non-Conformist Churches too.
I'm sure Tim Farron's never been in trouble for interposing his personal religious beliefs in areas where people have no interest in nor need of them...
Speaking as an epidemiologist - and also one of the brightest and best and so disproving your theory
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
I think the problem is that other countries were working with bad data. And they did a much better job.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
In early March there would have been 200,000 people per day just coming through Heathrow, probably another 200k from other airports plus the Tunnel and ferry traffic. Over a million Brits travelled to Europe during half term week, it would have been physically impossible to quarantine that many people properly, nor to suspend flights and strand them abroad - “abandoning them to die” as the media would have put it.
With hindsight, we should have stopped outbound flights to the whole of Europe as soon as the first cases arrived in Italy, but it’s very easy to say that now, it would have been totally outrageous to have thought seriously about it at the time.
The government was still allowing people to fly out on holiday in the middle of March.
The most remarkable discordance was between the treatment of the apparently uninfected people off that Princess cruise ship, who were met at the docks by people in hazmat suits and driven off to an enforced two week quarantine in the Wirral, and the nonchalance with which later returnees from virus hotspots arriving by air were waved through airports and let free to travel home.
Indeed.
I'm curious as to when the policy changed and how they could change it without getting a proper testing system in place beforehand.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
Ending free movement from the EU is simple, you can still come here but you need a job that pays the appropriate rate.
Something like that, yes.
And we retain full access to the SM for a fee.
Plus the (stated) aspiration of "phased future divergence" as and when. Maybe with some "targets" and "deadlines" thrown in to make it look very serious.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Yay - idiotic vandals destroyed cultural treasures in the past, so it's fine to do so in the present. A brilliant argument indeed!
You really are not very bright are you? The point is some isolated incidents of minor vandalism are not an “orgy” of destruction. Seriously, you are so blinkered by your paranoid delusions of Marxist insurrection and determination to preserve your own comforting version of history you wouldn’t know an argument if it bit you in the arse.
Not very bright? I can't imagine the depths of benighted ignorance I'd have to plumb before I celebrated the destruction of cultural heritage the way you and other leftists do.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I wouldn't rule out the second option, Boris and co are stupid enough to think it's wouldn't be a problem because we won't be enforcing checks on imports...
Don't get me wrong, if he thought it would work for him politically I would expect him to do it, lunacy or not. But imo it's just the immigration control he needs to satiate most Leavers (esp the Red Wallers). They would not thank him for the disruption and job losses arising from an overnight "frictionless to WTO"
So I think No Deal remains the red herring it has always been. It's just needed for the dialogue and the rhetoric. We will all play along - talk about it for a few more months as if it might happen and then it won't. You need the spectre of No Deal in the discourse in order to present the "Surrender Deal" when it comes as a triumph. You need 'relief' working its magic on your side at that moment.
A later extension is of course possible right up to the last minute, just as the earlier ones were. The artificially self imposed July deadline can simply be amended out of the law by rushing something quickly through parliament in December.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Yay - idiotic vandals destroyed cultural treasures in the past, so it's fine to do so in the present. A brilliant argument indeed!
You really are not very bright are you? The point is some isolated incidents of minor vandalism are not an “orgy” of destruction. Seriously, you are so blinkered by your paranoid delusions of Marxist insurrection and determination to preserve your own comforting version of history you wouldn’t know an argument if it bit you in the arse.
Not very bright? I can't imagine the depths of benighted ignorance I'd have to plumb before I celebrated the destruction of cultural heritage the way you and other leftists do.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
For sure. A small unnoticed detail in Thursday's lengthy ministerial question slot on the scandal was the minister mentioning that files on a batch of people involved have been sent to the CPS for consideration of prosecution. I'd bet that includes some at the suppliers, who may not have been entirely honest with the PO.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
Yep, from listening to the quite brilliant programmes on R4, it seems to me that the PO missed almost every opportunity to turn this around and do the right thing. They had a new Chief Executive come in who had clean hands and who instigated an external independent enquiry and then, just before it was about to produce a damning report on the scandal, they shut it down and released their own report saying everything was fine.
People died because of this. Many people had their lives ruined. If ever there was a case for a proper independent enquiry it is this.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
Bugs are inevitable in software. What's important is that you have a process and culture that can identify bugs and get them fixed. Then you have fewer bugs in the future (until you introduce new ones when modifying the code to add new functionality).
The failure was not accepting the possibility that there could be an error in the software. That is a management failure at the Post Office, unless there's evidence that they went to Fujitsu and received a reply saying the software was working perfectly.
And why would Fujitsu do that? Granted, if there is a bug you may have to fix it at your own expense, but failing to fix once you have been notified of it opens you up to professional liability claims. Besides, all programmers and software companies know there will be bugs, it is part of the profession as is hunting down bugs and eliminating them.
Personally I blame the whole "Agile" culture which seemed to degrade into a cost-saving mindset of "Slam out some code, if there are bugs the users will find them". I was interested to see that the creator of the Agile concept has since denounced it and declared it not fit for purpose.
Tories have fucked up a sensible Brexit Tories have fucked up the economy Tories have fucked up Covid 19 and left us with the most per capita pandemic deaths of any major Nation
Still lead 43% to 38% though.
The 4th sentence suggests the first 3 aren't entirely true
Disagree. They are all statements of fact.
The fourth sentence merely suggests other factors are at play.
Edit - although that said, we can’t be sure of the third one yet. And it will take time before we have reliable statistics that tell us who comes where in this grim table.
But on the information we have, it’s a reasonable statement. We’ve certainly suffered very badly when we had every advantage of geography.
Every advantage of geography?
We are an interconnected globalised nation with one of the highest rates of urbanisation and population density of major developed nations. That certainly has a role to play.
We’re also a series of islands.
Is an island that has millions crossing it's border every single week back in February really an island?
The irony is that Eastern European landlocked nations back in February were probably more of an island in hindsight.
That begs the question - why were we allowing millions of people to cross our borders?
Because the science as advised by SAGE, Nervtag and the World Health Organisation was that we should.
Any other questions?
It depends on when. The recent "where did Covid come from" study suggests well over a thousand separate importations from late February onwards, mostly from France, Spain and Italy. I suspect most of these were Brits returning from holidays. So this suggests that it would have been effective to close borders and quarantine returners from say the last week in February. It's certainly similar to what New Zealand did, although I am not sure when they closed the borders. Would this have in any way been politically possible? By mid April very few people were coming in and out of the country anyway.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
Interesting. A distant relative has been, apparently, holed up in France since the brown stuff hit the fan. She's now got to leave France ..... lease has run out or something ...... and, according to her father she's heading for Cyprus. Is that a possibility?
They have started to lift restrictions but UK and France are two countries they are not accepting entry from. Unless she has Cypriot nationality or residency.
Thanks. Did wonder; she's not a close relative..... daughter of a cousin, so I've no input. I think though that her father said she'd got a house there, so might get away with it. TBH, don't know whether its Cyprus or N Cyprus.
If she has a house there, she probably has residency. The UK (until recently) has probably been the only country not to have a process where EU citizens can gain a chit to say they are ordinarily resident. The North is of course a different matter entirely - the border is officially closed but I understand people are being let out to catch repatriation flights. You might be able to enter via Turkey.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
While a company supplying crappy software is certainly an issue, the testing, acceptance and rollout of it is most definitely on the customer’s shoulders.
As is prosecuting the users because it couldn’t do sums properly.
From the media coverage one of the issues - revealed eventually by a Fujitsu whistleblower - was that the software supplier could, and was, remotely making software changes including changes affecting individual accounts, when the PO was telling its postmasters that only they had access to the financial data in their accounts.
Who knew what and when, I cannot say.
Yes, I did read that one. Utterly incomprehensible to me that a vendor has remote access to modify a production database, without very close permission, supervision, testing and extensive logging going on.
The relationship between supplier and customer was totally borked, with everyone on both sides way more interested in covering their arses than addressing the problems - while people were being sent to prison, based solely on the output of their product.
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Quite right, and a strong tradition in Non-Conformist Churches too.
I'm sure Tim Farron's never been in trouble for interposing his personal religious beliefs in areas where people have no interest in nor need of them...
Brilliant argument. Outstanding,
Once we start on 'graven images' as a whole, we might just end up biting off more than we want to chew. Could I be allowed to keep the graven images of Mona Lisa, The Girl with the Pearl Earring and maybe a few Rembrandts for old time's sake?
In The Ten Commandments (No 4) we are told to avoid "graven images". If you visit a synagogue or travel to Israel you will notice that there are no statues, and this is why. I believe the same applies to the Islamic world, although I am not an expert. In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Islam is the same, I believe. It's down to Allah to create man, not man. Or something like that!
If you think that the current events are an “orgy of cultural destruction” the Byzantines say hello -
Yay - idiotic vandals destroyed cultural treasures in the past, so it's fine to do so in the present. A brilliant argument indeed!
You really are not very bright are you? The point is some isolated incidents of minor vandalism are not an “orgy” of destruction. Seriously, you are so blinkered by your paranoid delusions of Marxist insurrection and determination to preserve your own comforting version of history you wouldn’t know an argument if it bit you in the arse.
Not very bright? I can't imagine the depths of benighted ignorance I'd have to plumb before I celebrated the destruction of cultural heritage the way you and other leftists do.
I don’t celebrate the destruction of cultural heritage neither am I a “leftist” (whatever that is) so multiple fails there then. As for ignorance, can you point to any cultural heritage hat has been destroyed? Because I can’t see any. If any cultural heritage actually had been destroyed you would have a point. The illegal removal (not destruction) and minor damage to a statute of no cultural importance whatsoever is not the destruction of cultural heritage. Graffiti is damage, not destruction. You are building straw men, and badly at that.
You’re fine with silencing people demonstrating racial prejudice by highlighting some minor examples of vandalism on one or two occasions and hysterically speaking as if your culture is being destroyed. It must be hard to be that fragile
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
I totally dislike Panorama’s style and presentation, but there is a very genuine scandal there which needs an independent enquiry.
Many people have lost money and in some cases liberty, for reasons that when looked on objectively appear to make no sense at all, with opinions of people and outputs from computer systems treated by courts as unchallengeable facts. It highlights massive institutional issues in public sector administration, management and procurement that urgently need addressing.
Just as well there’s a senior advisor at No.10 who sees reform and accountability of the whole public sector as a high priority, and cases like this are an example of why the attacks on him have been so vicious. He doesn’t want reports produced and lessons learned while everyone involved gets promotions, he wants people held as accountable as they would be in the private sector.
Agree except for the last bit. An advisor who wants everyone else held accountable whilst being exempted himself isn't a great look.
Yes, I knew the last bit would be controversial. The fact remains that he is only an advisor - it’s the government, their ministers and Parliament who make the decisions.
Meanwhile, under the radar but well worth a watch if you missed it, this week’s Panorama with the scandal of how a government owned organisation covered up its failings, leading to the suicide, bankruptcy and false imprisonment of entirely innocent people:
The government is currently under pressure from all sides to concede a judicial inquiry.
There is also a very good series on Radio 4 by Neil Wallis the journalist who covered the story, available on BBC iPlayer.
The story - and there is much more to come out, I expect - is an absolute scandal.
Who would be the Minister responsible for this scandal?
I would have said the people responsible were
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
POL was a separate subsidiary - and eventually an entirely separate company - and it is hard to see that Royal Mail would have had much if anything to do with it.
Agreed -- but surely the software company have some blame here?
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
For sure. A small unnoticed detail in Thursday's lengthy ministerial question slot on the scandal was the minister mentioning that files on a batch of people involved have been sent to the CPS for consideration of prosecution. I'd bet that includes some at the suppliers, who may not have been entirely honest with the PO.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
Yep, from listening to the quite brilliant programmes on R4, it seems to me that the PO missed almost every opportunity to turn this around and do the right thing.
The company had a command and control culture - part of its inheritance (in the 50s the Post Office was run along military lines mostly by ex forces officers, and a little known detail of history is that the PO had an effective police force well before the actual police were created, to deal with the threat of highwaymen to its stage coaches) - which would have made it more difficult for people within the hierarchy to rock the boat.
But this really isn't an excuse for the level of denial they appear to have achieved in having hundreds of their longer serving postmasters apparently suddenly turning to thievery just at the time computerised accounting had been introduced. Nor for the many apparently known lies told along the way.
"That almost certainly means there won’t be a deal."
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
I think you're underestimating the will to avoid any form of rule-taking from the EU on pretty much anything except exports into the EU. Not only in No 10, but in the Tory party and country at large.
I think the need to avoid WTO trumps that. Ending FM is imo the one thing that Johnson must demonstrate occurs on 1st Jan 2021. The rest he can get away with fudging for now. And indeed forever, in my view, but certainly for now.
I think he probabaly knows that even with a majority of 80, there are insufficient votes on the back benches for a treaty that ties us to taking EU rules forever.
Right. So it will not be written that way. The wording will need to be finessed so Johnson can sell it. I visualize "Phased Future Divergence" with some target areas and perhaps even some new deadlines. In practice, an extension but not technically an extension. Sellable to his MPs imo so long as FM is ended. I can see Steve Baker and a few others not happy but it should pass OK.
Comments
https://twitter.com/Simon_Nixon/status/1271699738665066497
THAT is the real threat to Britain
So it took twenty years after 1945 for the message to be accepted in the West!
I am certain, from examining the published work, that Prof Ferguson's early models on the pandemic spread were wrong, and unfortunately they strongly influenced the Government's early decisions.
Of course, any scientist can be wrong. But, the process of science should be self-correcting. What surprises me is that the other scientists on SAGE did not quickly realise that Ferguson's predictions were wrong, by comparing his model with the daily data.
There seems to have been a groupthink on SAGE that is antithetical to good science.
There should have been a critical inquiry of assumptions in the modelling, and the consequent uncertainties. That does not seem to have happened.
I think UK science has failed rather badly, sad to say.
A.Ag.883 δημόθρους ἀναρχία ~ 'lawlessness of public clamour'.
Another study, of blood donated, shows the virus had probably reached 5 or 6 percent of the London population by early March.
I went to Cyprus 11-16 March. At the beginning of that period they had started to quarantine arrivals, although not from the UK. By the 14th they had banned travel to Cyprus for the purposes of tourism and on the 16th they closed all bars and restaurants, that was the day Boris gave his social distancing speech. I know we were ahead of the curve on Cyprus, but could we really have closed the country down three weeks earlier|?
(1) the software company who provide the crappy accounting program to Royal Mail (Fujitsu)
(2) the people running Royal Mail who ignored the evidence (the Chief Executive).
Don't rule out a return by Balls.
“ There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats. “And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.
“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”
“Nope.”
“Pardon?”
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that . . .”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes . . .”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things . . . ” ”
From the late, great Sir Terry.
So yes, I agree.
The key area, I suspect, will actually be the mutual recognition of standards. The EU will not recognise British agricultural standards if there is the sort of US terade deal that looks likely. More generally, the basic EU model is a level playing field and arbitration by the ECJ, which is anathema to the British government (and even a pro-European like me wouldn't feel a pure EU institution should monitor a deal). With lots of goodwill and careful attention, one can imagine a new structure being built, with an ECJ-like body that wasn't the ECJ to arbitrate, but the preconditions are absent and the push for a US deal probably makes it impossible.
And that will be the real cost of Brexit. If neither goods nor services are routinely accepted in our biggest market, we will have a problem.
Suspect the IMF or something like that would be more tempting.
Many people have lost money and in some cases liberty, for reasons that when looked on objectively appear to make no sense at all, with opinions of people and outputs from computer systems treated by courts as unchallengeable facts. It highlights massive institutional issues in public sector administration, management and procurement that urgently need addressing.
Just as well there’s a senior advisor at No.10 who sees reform and accountability of the whole public sector as a high priority, and cases like this are an example of why the attacks on him have been so vicious. He doesn’t want reports produced and lessons learned while everyone involved gets promotions, he wants people held as accountable as they would be in the private sector.
Is that a possibility?
Surprising though it seems now, eugenics was thought to be a progressive movement at the time. It was the movement of the woke for the early twentieth century.
Other prominent eugenicists are ... Darwin, many famous Liberal & Labour MPs from the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, Julian Huxley, Marie Stopes, George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells and William Beveridge.
My only point is that -- if we are renaming buildings because they carry the name of an eugenicist -- there is an awful lot of renaming to be done.
In present circumstances it would have saved an enormous amount of bad-temper if we had all followed this injunction.
Epic fail with regard to defending it's members.
I hold the opposite view.
Two things can be ruled out. (i) An extension. (ii) An overnight move from frictionless trade to WTO. The first being politically impossible (for Johnson) and the second being utter lunacy on every level and from every perspective.
Therefore there almost certainly WILL be a deal. And given the negotiating realities it will be largely on the EU's terms. So in the parlance of the Header, "Submission or No Deal" - the answer is Submission.
But Johnson (as he did with the Withdrawal Agreement) will brand it otherwise. Submission will once again become triumph. I predict the phrase "Flexible Future Divergence" - or perhaps "Dynamic Democratic Alignment" - will be much heard. I know! But that's what we have come to with all this "leaving the EU" nonsense.
Brexit. A great big sack of stupid, quite frankly. Total waste of time. Always was.
Ultimately -- if I understand right -- it was poor software that was the root cause.
So, surely there is a claim against Fujitsu, provider of IT solutions ?
First, you're expecting miracles. The information early on was poor, it's still not very good. Poor information leads to imprecise or plain wrong predictions. Take a good look at the imperial paper and exactly what was modeled. The detail is quite impressive, some of the assumptions were probably wrong, but not unreasonable at the time (even the conservative doubling time given they were showing a situation much worse than previously thought). The main problem we've had is bad data.
Having said that academic science has a number of problems:
1 universities value people who bring in funding more than those with technical expertise - a good salesperson trumps a good scientist
2 programmers are second class citizens, the idea of a research software engineer is fairly new and those with phds start on about 30k,those without less. You can't get beyond 60k and that takes probably 15 years or so. Good programmers can do much better
3 programming skills are not valued, no one checks the code. Most of ym colleagueshhave no idea what a function is and most don't know how to use a loop. The imperial model was probably written by post docs on 30k using Google for code snippets to use, no surprise its not pretty.
With hindsight, we should have stopped outbound flights to the whole of Europe as soon as the first cases arrived in Italy, but it’s very easy to say that now, it would have been totally outrageous to have thought seriously about it at the time.
Nevertheless it would appear from the evidence that the company from the top down was trying to cover its back rather than facing facts, and even people who didn't know should responsibly have been digging into the matter rather than simply assuming that hundreds of their long serving postmasters had suddenly turned into thieves.
I worked at Royal Mail HQ at the time, and, while I heard nothing specific about the losses scandal, it was common gossip within the company that Horizon had turned into an implementation mess, over budget, behind timescale, and beset with problems. As with many government IT projects.
This applied to Scottish clearances, Irish coffin ships, penal settlement in Australia, export of orphans etc etc The plan was that not only would Britain be improved by removing such people, but the colonies would breed out their less desirable traits and turn them into sturdy yeomen in fresh Englands overseas. Such policies continued into the late Sixties and still have echoes today.
However, as was pointed out upthread, Post Office managers told dozens of postmasters that 'they were the only one having trouble', and they must have reported back up the line. I can't imagine a middle rank manager not reporting back, and their superior not saying 'Hello, same story."
If Dr F's about I'm sure he'll confirm that that happens all the time in medicine use.
The severe degradation of our public health expertise over the last couple of decades is an undeniable fact. In the shorter term we know that (for example) recommendations for pandemic stockpiling were ignored in 2017.
Contact tracing is not complicated. We’ve been doing it since the 1930s, and far less advanced countries have used it to defeat pandemics (Liberia and Ebola, for instance). It just requires a lot of people and organisation in place - building it from scratch takes time. We had very little capacity at the outset, and we were very slow to start building it.
The failure was not accepting the possibility that there could be an error in the software. That is a management failure at the Post Office, unless there's evidence that they went to Fujitsu and received a reply saying the software was working perfectly.
As is prosecuting the users because it couldn’t do sums properly.
I will give one example. A letter from a minister (and a FOI request revealed the exact wording came from a civil servant briefing) stated that the ombudsman found that x hadn't been negligent during y.
This statement was in fact true, although completely meaningless as the person the reply went to was not complaining about x or the event y, but a different organisation during a different event some 12 years earlier than the event y. So the reply was utter nonsense.
A reply pointed this out to the minister. The minister not only ignored the point being made, but repeated the same bizarre statement (it was obviously a template response)
An MP wrote to the minister pointing out the nonsense. The reply that came back was that the question had been answered!
The group I am involved in has had 8 years of this twaddle.
Just in case you think we may just be useless in what we are doing, this has involved barristers, 2 debates in parliament an attempted bill to rectify the situation (and probably a 2nd one soon) and several ombudsmen. It has cross party support. An ex minister told me they have not a clue what they are doing regarding this. It is not high profile so it is not in the media.
https://twitter.com/timfarron/status/1271444206331011074?s=09
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Iconoclasm
As does the English Reformation -
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/art-under-attack-histories-british-iconoclasm/art-under-attack-1
1. if Scots vote Conservative there will be no independence referendum
2. if Scots vote SNP there will be no independence referendum
So, what is the point of voting Conservative? According to you, there is not going to be an independence referendum irrespective of who voters choose to vote for. If you are correct, the Scottish Conservatives have lost the USP so assiduously built up by Ruth Davidson.
Sir Humphrey had a word for that: “brave”.
Who knew what and when, I cannot say.
My biggest criticism has been for the adhoc, ill-prepared, chaotic winding down of lockdown in England. We are yet to see if any of those chickens come home to roost.
So I think No Deal remains the red herring it has always been. It's just needed for the dialogue and the rhetoric. We will all play along - talk about it for a few more months as if it might happen and then it won't. You need the spectre of No Deal in the discourse in order to present the "Surrender Deal" when it comes as a triumph. You need 'relief' working its magic on your side at that moment.
The other would have been a deadline extension, but thankfully that has now passed.
(And of course, scientists have evolved methodologies for dealing with lousy data -- I work with lousy data all the time).
The Imperial paper should be retracted. By April 1, Ferguson's model predicted 50 daily death. On April 1, there were 670 actual deaths. Ferguson's model was out by over an order of magnitude.
Even by March 25th, the actual deaths were 186, Ferguson's prediction was under 10. He was out by an order off magnitude even within a week of his model being published.
I am sorry for Ferguson. But he screwed up, & there was (it seems) no critical thinking of his model at SAGE. His reputation as the expert seems to have meant he was not seriously challenged.
I am very grateful that when I make mistakes, and they are buried in academic journals.
I'm curious as to when the policy changed and how they could change it without getting a proper testing system in place beforehand.
And we retain full access to the SM for a fee.
Plus the (stated) aspiration of "phased future divergence" as and when. Maybe with some "targets" and "deadlines" thrown in to make it look very serious.
People died because of this. Many people had their lives ruined. If ever there was a case for a proper independent enquiry it is this.
Personally I blame the whole "Agile" culture which seemed to degrade into a cost-saving mindset of "Slam out some code, if there are bugs the users will find them". I was interested to see that the creator of the Agile concept has since denounced it and declared it not fit for purpose.
The relationship between supplier and customer was totally borked, with everyone on both sides way more interested in covering their arses than addressing the problems - while people were being sent to prison, based solely on the output of their product.
You’re fine with silencing people demonstrating racial prejudice by highlighting some minor examples of vandalism on one or two occasions and hysterically speaking as if your culture is being destroyed. It must be hard to be that fragile
But this really isn't an excuse for the level of denial they appear to have achieved in having hundreds of their longer serving postmasters apparently suddenly turning to thievery just at the time computerised accounting had been introduced. Nor for the many apparently known lies told along the way.