BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
It's time we started seriously asking whether the BBC is really essential, pandemic or no...
(I omitted China on the judgement that the data wasn't reliable, and South Korea because it was way, way out on its own and we already know it's doing far better than anyone else)
It's an excellent chart, thank you. Only suggestions I would make would be to plot the logarithm of the per million rate, and I'd be interested in seeing the US and Belgium (but the chart is already crowded, so difficult).
I can have a crack. US was already on it (but crowded so hard to see). Belgium added, logs taken - and I changed colours to match the original one and added the country names close to the line to aid identification.
That's a good comparison now. (Edit: by which I mean the best I've seen)
Embarrassingly I think I assumed the US wasn't on the chart because I was expecting it to have the worst trajectory of all. My bias showing itself.
The graph of subnational regions is probably more revealing given the pattern of local epicentres.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
I had someone banging on at me about "DIY" stores. So I asked him, if a pipe burst to list the tools and supplies required to fix it....
The US intelligence community is famous for its 'conclusions'. Envy of the world.
Who in their right mind believes the Chinese statistics?
I'm not sure whether anyone believes the entire body of Chinese statistics, but at the height of the outbreak in Wuhan the WHO sent fact finding missions who monitored what the Chinese were doing and they came to the conclusion that their reporting was adequate. Make of that what you will.
I think you're placing too much trust in the WHO.
I am not convinced by the WHO in regard to China
I think the Chinese figures are probably no further out than other countries.
My wife works on medical journals which include Chinese senior doctors.... She said that the Chinese have been particularly transparent in sharing data about all things Covid 19...but heh...why let the truth get in the way of a good old racist anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.....
As transparent as the police arresting Dr Li Wenliang for spreading false rumours (the truth) about the virus?
There was a cover up at the start...I'm not saying that.....
But Wuhan Medics have been sharing data with colleagues in journals about Covid 19...
You see no difference between Chinese medics and the Chinese state?
BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
Not to mention that we need something to do while locked down - so deliveries of books / knitting wool and other crafts / games etc is pretty much essential and plants etc for those with gardens.
The US intelligence community is famous for its 'conclusions'. Envy of the world.
Who in their right mind believes the Chinese statistics?
I'm not sure whether anyone believes the entire body of Chinese statistics, but at the height of the outbreak in Wuhan the WHO sent fact finding missions who monitored what the Chinese were doing and they came to the conclusion that their reporting was adequate. Make of that what you will.
I think you're placing too much trust in the WHO.
I am not convinced by the WHO in regard to China
I think the Chinese figures are probably no further out than other countries.
My wife works on medical journals which include Chinese senior doctors.... She said that the Chinese have been particularly transparent in sharing data about all things Covid 19...but heh...why let the truth get in the way of a good old racist anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.....
As transparent as the police arresting Dr Li Wenliang for spreading false rumours (the truth) about the virus?
There was a cover up at the start...I'm not saying that.....
But Wuhan Medics have been sharing data with colleagues in journals about Covid 19...
You see no difference between Chinese medics and the Chinese state?
The People Are The State. The State Is The People.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
Cooking bay is a much darker green. This is not cooking bay.
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
Oh. I have a bay tree in my garden and always assumed I could one day use its leaves to save replacing the packet of supermarket bay leaves that I need to buy once every decade or so. Now you’re saying I might poison myself?
If anyone is still interested in why Germany manages to test vastly more people despite facing the same global shortages of chemicals as the UK, this is a good summary.
It's complicated. Top line summary: Germany is more on the ball than we are. The chemical shortage is part of the mix however
I recommend reading the whole thing, but what I take away, (yes because it backs up my pre-held belief LOL) is that the privit secter when involved can and will achieve amazing things very quickly. in the US and here the CDC and Public Heath England, wanted a monopoly, on testing and then could not cope.
The NHS is full of lots of wonderful people who are highly skilled, working exceptionally hard and at the moment brave, but the organisation stretcher is rubbish.
Basically the Germans started earlier, moved faster and were better coordinated than we were. There are some structural reasons for this. I think what it shows is that marginal advantages can add up to a big difference when there are enough of them.
I'd be a bit wary of that reaction.life article re the differences between the German and UK testing situations. Much of it is entirely speculative and admits this is the case (eg the £billions comparison between the size of the biotech sectors but in fairness admitting the author doesn't know whether there is a difference in how many UK/German firms specialise in the kit which is actually relevant). Other bits of it are very know-it-all. I'm not sufficiently expert to judge the overall quality of the article or the validity of its conclusions, but the non-speculative know-it-all bits contain some big red flags that indicate the author knows surprisingly little about either the UK/German pharmaceutical industries and public health systems, and probably hasn't talked in depth to people who do while doing his research (he says he's followed some twitter threads but that isn't the same thing).
Quick google reveals the author is a fresh-out-of-uni Early Modern History grad from Cambridge University which may explain some of the lapses. I could see there's some logic in comparing the £billion sizes of UK and German biotech sectors with the caveat that's only going to tell you a limited amount about who's got access to what kit, and I can't see what he was thinking when he wrote "Of course, turnover is not as reliable an indication as revenue figures".
A huge giveaway is Public Health England has a number of public health laboratories which provide a number of centres of regional excellence.... Then there are the biosafety laboratories of great institutions such as the Francis Crick Institute, the Health Protection Agency, and the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response.
That's hilarious. You couldn't possibly have made that mistake if you'd visited Colindale, for example. Or talked in depth to someone who'd had a senior career in UK public health. Or even read the basic Wikipedia entries for PHE and the HPA! It's the sort of mistake a google-instaexpert makes due to lack of awareness of historic/political context. There is more stuff that smelled wrong but I won't go on.
In fairness the author does compile some interesting stuff about the German system. But then if he's so wrong about stuff that I do know, how much do I trust re the bits that I don't?
Fair enough. Do you have any thoughts on why the Germans are so far ahead of us with testing despite facing broadly the same set of circumstances?
I think this is a question that requires very deep expertise to answer and isn't one for the google'sperts or even the informed speculators. Jane Hill kept quizzing a UK professor about the UK situation on the Beeb today and while she was trying to manoeuvre him into saying something accusatory he just kept on saying it was all very complex and despite knowing a lot about the mechanics and technology of testing, he was in no position to answer. He emphasised the issue was a "systems problem" with severe logistical complications, not one of technological know-how or unavailability of competent technicians to run the tests.
Perhaps interestingly in regards to that article, he also emphasised that there were big trade-offs between a more "distributed" system in which more university labs got involved in testing, versus a more centralised one, and that they might help or they might get in the way (all kinds of problems from staff safety to the IT). He was happy to assume that PHE had their Big Brains on it with expertise in building and managing and entire testing infrastructure, and that was good enough for him. Unfortunately I get the impression the Big Brains in this highly specialised area are unlikely to speak publicly for some time to come!
I am sure you have seen it already but Alex Wickham's article seemed potentially more on-point to me with regards to the UK, though doesn't make an in-depth comparison to Germany and is somewhat misleading in that it compares the UK only to the highest-testing countries when in fact, even among developed countries, there is quite a spread. (It also irritates me when journalists pull the old trick of "the UK is doing X tests per day, but Summuvvaland is doing Y tests per week!" which is a trick straight out of Darrell Huff...)
Wickham does seem to have done some legwork and talked to people who know something about what's happened. The article also raises some more subtle points eg you can't just compare the number of labs, since the size and efficiency of labs makes a big difference as well as the way workload is shared between groups of labs. There's a chicken-and-egg thing he doesn't really get to the bottom of, but I suspect nobody will manage to even if it gets dragged up at any future inquiry: on the one hand PHE told the modellers/strategists that its capacity to ramp up testing in the short run was limited (indeed the article concedes even countries like Germany are likely to find their testing strategy is going to have to change as the epidemic peaks and overtakes their expansion in capacity) but on the other hand the modellers/strategists, apparently in response to this limitation, chose a path that didn't require a rapid upsurge in testing capacity (potentially reducing the urgency in PHE to pursue an expansion).
The article doesn't go into any depth on the supply chain other than acknowledging they were an issue: we don't know things like were there enough machines/trained staff, what machines need which supplies (chemicals, swabs), where could those supplies be sourced and when could/should orders have been placed? We know universities have handed over PCR machines to PHE - has this created heterogeneity in kit and knock-on issues with logistics/training? These kind of questions I suspect we're more likely to get firmer answers to at some point. There's also been a substantial restructuring of the UK's public health laboratory system in recent memory, which is mentioned in Wickham's article along with some explanation for why it took place. Those restructuring decisions will have been based on plans which I'm sure are going to come in for a lot of scrutiny, but for the time being health officials seem quite bullish that they were a good move that have brought several advantages (including the possibility of a faster roll-out of a brand new test than would be achievable if the system were more scattered and broken up). Whether they'll change their tune if in retrospect it's judged they limited the UK's ability to respond, we'll have to see.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
The answer would be no but enforcement in this emergency is vital as there are so many who do not care and even see it as a challenge to provoke reactions
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
A friend has been told the interest rate he will be charged is 30% for his profitable business (the bank is also asking for a PG.)
Bloody shameful.
Remarkable
Disgraceful
Are the banks not just being cautious, as we wanted them to be post-2008?
No.
+1 not at 30%, the bank is getting this money for free / at 0.1% remember..
Ok, I know I am going to be in a small minority here but...
How many of these businesses are going to go bust - even with the loan? What percentage of these debts are going to go bad? 1%? 5%? 10%? 30%?
Put it another way, when given the opportunity of a refund or a 125% future cruise credit on our cancelled cruise, which did I decide to opt for?
(Clue, I didn't fancy giving Carnival an unsecured loan event at 25% interest)
It's a broad brush stroke, but if the banks are effectively being given money (which they have to repay) at 0.1% interest, charging 30% on it implies either a) they think the chances of the recipient defaulting are close to 30%, less a per cent or two for profit. Or b) they are profiteering massively.
I think as much as a 20% contraction in GDP for the next quarter is coming. Great depression territory. Sky high unemployment. Huge government spending required. Vastly reduced tax base with which to recoup it from. This won't be a V shaped recession, either. Even those who don't lose their jobs will be staying at home, not spending, shocked. Things will get very ugly.
It is somewhat ironic that, just over a decade on from the GFC, the banks are now being lambasted for seeming to be overly cautious with lending criteria to small businesses. As opposed to the totally incautious approach they used to take, for which they were (correctly) lambasted, as it caused the country's/world's last major crisis.
I suppose the counterpoint is that, if they'd been a bit more careful then, they'd have a lot more credit with the public over being more careful now, but it doesn't seem useful to help fight this crisis in a way that might trigger the last one happening again.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
It’s tough isn’t it. I look at the items Amazon has delivered me since the lockdown:
- rat poison, to deal the mice that keep eating my emergency food supplies. Surely essential? - replacement mop heads so that I can keep my floors hygienically clean. Ditto. - bug spray to deal with the scale insect on my olive tree. Probably not essential. - vet bandage to stop my dog licking his injured carpal pad. Surely essential. - a new iPad charging lead to avoid the old dodgy one setting fire to my house. Essential
And, more to the point, coping with the confinement of lockdown is a lot easier with Amazon able to home deliver anything that I might need.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
'
You keep saying this, when the point is about them potentially stopping people or telling them not to do things which are not in contravention of HMG requirements, or misleading people into thinking HMG requests are HMG requirements.
I don't think anyone has suggested they should not be supported in enforcing the law. Heck, the header does not even say the guidance should not be followed or the police should not mention it.
But I don't see how it makes sense to say one would not support them misleading about what the law is (intentionallyor not), but then support them in enforcing non legal matters.
It's not enforcement if there is not a law to enforce.
A friend has been told the interest rate he will be charged is 30% for his profitable business (the bank is also asking for a PG.)
Bloody shameful.
Remarkable
Disgraceful
Are the banks not just being cautious, as we wanted them to be post-2008?
No.
+1 not at 30%, the bank is getting this money for free / at 0.1% remember..
Ok, I know I am going to be in a small minority here but...
How many of these businesses are going to go bust - even with the loan? What percentage of these debts are going to go bad? 1%? 5%? 10%? 30%?
Put it another way, when given the opportunity of a refund or a 125% future cruise credit on our cancelled cruise, which did I decide to opt for?
(Clue, I didn't fancy giving Carnival an unsecured loan event at 25% interest)
It's a broad brush stroke, but if the banks are effectively being given money (which they have to repay) at 0.1% interest, charging 30% on it implies either a) they think the chances of the recipient defaulting are close to 30%, less a per cent or two for profit. Or b) they are profiteering massively.
I think as much as a 20% contraction in GDP for the next quarter is coming. Great depression territory. Sky high unemployment. Huge government spending required. Vastly reduced tax base with which to recoup it from. This won't be a V shaped recession, either. Even those who don't lose their jobs will be staying at home, not spending, shocked. Things will get very ugly.
It is somewhat ironic that, just over a decade on from the GFC, the banks are now being lambasted for seeming to be overly cautious with lending criteria to small businesses. As opposed to the totally incautious approach they used to take, for which they were (correctly) lambasted, as it caused the country's/world's last major crisis.
I suppose the counterpoint is that, if they'd been a bit more careful then, they'd have a lot more credit with the public over being more careful now, but it doesn't seem useful to help fight this crisis in a way that might trigger the last one happening again.
Banks lending to small businesses was not part of the GFC at all. It was supposed to be part of the solution with QE, but they didnt lend it to small businesses, they just lent it to asset holders to create asset inflation.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
The answer would be no but enforcement in this emergency is vital as there are so many who do not care and even see it as a challenge to provoke reactions
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
There is no law forbidding English people coming into North Wales. If you have a reasonable excuse anyone is perfectly entitled to go to North Wales or anywhere else, come to that.
You support the police enforcing a “law” which does not exist. You might want to reflect on what that actually means and what exactly it is you are supporting.
I am afraid that erosion of trust and faith in the police is something that has been happening for a very long time - starting back at least in the early 80s with the atrocious behaviour of some police forces during the miner's strike. There will always be people on the fringes of society who distrust or dislike the police because they are prevented from doing exactly what they want when they want even when it includes breaking the law. But since the 1980s that distrust and dislike has moved into demographics that previously had a good relationship with the police - the working and middle classes.
Of course in recent years this has been accentuated by the failings of the police to deal with basic crimes. This may not be entirely their fault with cuts and ever increasing demands but in the eyes of most people I believe there are basic things that the police should react to. When we see only 1 or 2% of burglaries being solved in some areas and the police loath to even give out crime numbers because it will reflect badly on their stats (this has happened twice to me in the last 5 years) then it is clear there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our police forces are operating.
The current crisis 'could' greatly improve the image of the police as they are being asked to do a very difficult job under very trying circumstances and most reasonable people would accept that most police are going to try and react reasonably. Unfortunately a few examples of police abusing their powers are likely to mean that the outcome is a force regarded with more suspicion rather than less.
The Police appear to have ample resources when it comes to policing "hate crimes" on Twitter or historical allegations against Tories. It's just the stuff that's important to ordinary members of the public that they have not got the resources to deal with, such as anti-social behaviour and burglary.
Burglars biggest group signing on as everyone is in !!!
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
If anyone is still interested in why Germany manages to test vastly more people despite facing the same global shortages of chemicals as the UK, this is a good summary.
It's complicated. Top line summary: Germany is more on the ball than we are. The chemical shortage is part of the mix however
I recommend reading the whole thing, but what I take away, (yes because it backs up my pre-held belief LOL) is that the privit secter when involved can and will achieve amazing things very quickly. in the US and here the CDC and Public Heath England, wanted a monopoly, on testing and then could not cope.
The NHS is full of lots of wonderful people who are highly skilled, working exceptionally hard and at the moment brave, but the organisation stretcher is rubbish.
Whether the testing is done in the private or public sector is not really the point. The point is does the country have a plan in place to ramp up to 10,000 tests a day if suddenly required.
Not Invented Here syndrome.
Given the Germans were ahead of the UK in designing tests, the UK could have made up a couple of weeks by deciding, the Germans know what they are doing, their standards are just as good as ours. We'll take their design and work out where to source it. Instead of which they started out from first principles.
We should be sourcing tests, PPE and ventilators from China, Germany, Ineos, internally, small 3D printers; anywhere and everywhere. Ideology and prejudice needs to go out the window.
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
Cooking bay is a much darker green. This is not cooking bay.
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
Oh. I have a bay tree in my garden and always assumed I could one day use its leaves to save replacing the packet of supermarket bay leaves that I need to buy once every decade or so. Now you’re saying I might poison myself?
Compare it with shop-bought bay. If it looks *and smells" the same it is ok and if not, very much not. The smell is very distinctive.
BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
It’s tough isn’t it. I look at the items Amazon has delivered me since the lockdown:
- rat poison, to deal the mice that keep eating my emergency food supplies. Surely essential? - replacement mop heads so that I can keep my floors hygienically clean. Ditto. - bug spray to deal with the scale insect on my olive tree. Probably not essential. - vet bandage to stop my dog licking his injured carpal pad. Surely essential. - a new iPad charging lead to avoid the old dodgy one setting fire to my house. Essential
And, more to the point, coping with the confinement of lockdown is a lot easier with Amazon able to home deliver anything that I might need.
Re the rat poison.
We had mice in the house a couple of years ago and dealt with it with humane mouse traps and sealing the entry pounts. Poisoning is cruel and needless
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
The US intelligence community is famous for its 'conclusions'. Envy of the world.
Who in their right mind believes the Chinese statistics?
I'm not sure whether anyone believes the entire body of Chinese statistics, but at the height of the outbreak in Wuhan the WHO sent fact finding missions who monitored what the Chinese were doing and they came to the conclusion that their reporting was adequate. Make of that what you will.
I think you're placing too much trust in the WHO.
I am not convinced by the WHO in regard to China
I think the Chinese figures are probably no further out than other countries.
My wife works on medical journals which include Chinese senior doctors.... She said that the Chinese have been particularly transparent in sharing data about all things Covid 19...but heh...why let the truth get in the way of a good old racist anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.....
As transparent as the police arresting Dr Li Wenliang for spreading false rumours (the truth) about the virus?
There was a cover up at the start...I'm not saying that.....
But Wuhan Medics have been sharing data with colleagues in journals about Covid 19...
The medics aren't the problem. The Chinese State is.
Bit like Chernobyl - the Russians on the ground were generally good guys to very high degree... The system, not so much.
I am not arguing that the Chinese State is benign, or that Chinese gastronomy is not to blame. Just that I am more inclined to believe a WHO team expert in infectious disease, who have visited China, over annatibuted reports in the press.
Our own government believes that we our under reporting our own cases, and mortality by the lack of testing in community managed cases. I think more or less the same happened in China, but that the severe and harsh curfew measures, both physical and electronic, in China are very effective from a public health perspective, if not from a human rights one.
We'll know more in four days, but of today we're at a third of fatalities, so these would have to triple in four days. I'm not sure that's the current trajectory.
(I omitted China on the judgement that the data wasn't reliable, and South Korea because it was way, way out on its own and we already know it's doing far better than anyone else)
It's an excellent chart, thank you. Only suggestions I would make would be to plot the logarithm of the per million rate, and I'd be interested in seeing the US and Belgium (but the chart is already crowded, so difficult).
I can have a crack. US was already on it (but crowded so hard to see). Belgium added, logs taken - and I changed colours to match the original one and added the country names close to the line to aid identification.
Apologies if I'm pointing out the obvious here, but by logging the "death rate per million" you're effectively just adding vertical offsets for each country to the simple log of deaths.
The usefulness of the logged rates chart is you can compare which countries are doing better/worse "per head" in a way you can't do on the logged deaths chart, just pointing out that you don't learn any more from the slopes/curvature (eg if you're looking for signs of levelling out) from the logged rates graph than you would from the logged deaths graph.
True. I do think you get more from it (as you say), and in two ways: - The slope is the same (no extra information) - The vertical position of the slope gives extra information (as you say) - like Belgium now really stands out - The horizontal position of the slope gives other information. The logged death rate graph starts from an arbitrary point of 50 deaths in total. This is very different for different countries - 50 deaths in Belgium is a rather different thing than 50 deaths in the US (and Norway wouldn't yet even appear on the graphs if we waited for 50 deaths). And if the per capita deaths correlates quite well with per capita infections, it should be a more meaningful start point.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Arrested, dragged to the station. Expect some malicious "informing your employer of an arrest" as well.
If it ever gets near the courts, the officer involved will end up on long term sick leave until 30 seconds after the case is dropped.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
The answer would be no but enforcement in this emergency is vital as there are so many who do not care and even see it as a challenge to provoke reactions
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
There is no law forbidding English people coming into North Wales. If you have a reasonable excuse anyone is perfectly entitled to go to North Wales or anywhere else, come to that.
You support the police enforcing a “law” which does not exist. You might want to reflect on what that actually means and what exactly it is you are supporting.
North Wales? We're all going to check on Big_G. We heard his Weetabix stash was running low.....
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
The answer would be no but enforcement in this emergency is vital as there are so many who do not care and even see it as a challenge to provoke reactions
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
There is no law forbidding English people coming into North Wales. If you have a reasonable excuse anyone is perfectly entitled to go to North Wales or anywhere else, come to that.
You support the police enforcing a “law” which does not exist. You might want to reflect on what that actually means and what exactly it is you are supporting.
The cars turned back did not have a legitimate reason for coming into Wales or the national parks. Those that did were allowed through
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
Do you still want the state to go away during the pandemic?
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
Cooking bay is a much darker green. This is not cooking bay.
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
Oh. I have a bay tree in my garden and always assumed I could one day use its leaves to save replacing the packet of supermarket bay leaves that I need to buy once every decade or so. Now you’re saying I might poison myself?
No - if you have proper cooking bay which looks like this - https://www.thompson-morgan.com/p/laurus-nobilis-standard/t44505TM - then by all means use. You can tell because if you pick a leaf and crush it between your fingers it will smell delicious. If it doesn’t, don’t use.
BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
Not to mention that we need something to do while locked down - so deliveries of books / knitting wool and other crafts / games etc is pretty much essential and plants etc for those with gardens.
Indeed my daughter just had her sixth birthday under quarantine. She's taken with very good grace the fact she's not getting a birthday party this year, or seeing her relatives, or her friends. Quite proud of her.
But we've been unable to go shopping for her presents, as have her relatives who haven't been able to see her. But I'll be damned if her birthday is not "essential". Try telling a six year old her birthday itself is cancelled.
So we've had to get her presents delivered by Amazon. Her grandparents ordered off Amazon and had their gifts sent here which we wrapped. For her birthday we video chatted with her grandparents and she was able to unwrap her presents from them on respective video chats.
A bizarre 21st century birthday but it worked and she was happy. Stop online deliveries and it would have been a nightmare and people would flout the rules because it would be unrealistic.
Once you reach the peak mass testing is less effective than the number of ventilators you have, which is the only advantage Germany might have given we are both now in lockdown
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
I am told the police are positively taught to say "Drop the f---ing gun" because it gets obeyed more often than Drop the gun.
My friends might be some of the last people completing a house move in England shortly. House round the corner from where they are renting, they'll have to do all the physical work themselves to move but they can do it.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
That just goes down to whether or not you are bothered about being arrested. Most people would avoid it.
(I omitted China on the judgement that the data wasn't reliable, and South Korea because it was way, way out on its own and we already know it's doing far better than anyone else)
It's an excellent chart, thank you. Only suggestions I would make would be to plot the logarithm of the per million rate, and I'd be interested in seeing the US and Belgium (but the chart is already crowded, so difficult).
I can have a crack. US was already on it (but crowded so hard to see). Belgium added, logs taken - and I changed colours to match the original one and added the country names close to the line to aid identification.
Apologies if I'm pointing out the obvious here, but by logging the "death rate per million" you're effectively just adding vertical offsets for each country to the simple log of deaths.
The usefulness of the logged rates chart is you can compare which countries are doing better/worse "per head" in a way you can't do on the logged deaths chart, just pointing out that you don't learn any more from the slopes/curvature (eg if you're looking for signs of levelling out) from the logged rates graph than you would from the logged deaths graph.
True. I do think you get more from it (as you say), and in two ways: - The slope is the same (no extra information) - The vertical position of the slope gives extra information (as you say) - like Belgium now really stands out - The horizontal position of the slope gives other information. The logged death rate graph starts from an arbitrary point of 50 deaths in total. This is very different for different countries - 50 deaths in Belgium is a rather different thing than 50 deaths in the US (and Norway wouldn't yet even appear on the graphs if we waited for 50 deaths). And if the per capita deaths correlates quite well with per capita infections, it should be a more meaningful start point.
Yes, to be clear wasn't making a criticism! I think I missed what you're using using as your horizontal (time) origin now? As you say 50 deaths is very arbitrary...
Incidentally I did a quick negative binomial time-series regressions (ie Poisson time-series regression with overdispersion) of the death counts if anyone's interested in me sharing the results. (Not a million miles away from looking at the trendline on the logplot and trying to spot if there's a change in slope.)
I did get press accreditation for the Tory Party conferences between 2012-15.
I also attended a couple of Labour party conferences during that time thanks to a couple of pollsters.
I'll see if I can get added to the Downing Street pressers from now on.
Have you had yourself added to the "Advanced Copy of Frontpage" mailing lists that the likes of Newsnight get?
I got on a couple of them when I was editing the Wardman Wire, and I still get sent a range of pages from the Indy every day. I just rang them up and asked.
Useful for the occasions when you want to get in first in the search engines.
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
I am told the police are positively taught to say "Drop the f---ing gun" because it gets obeyed more often than Drop the gun.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
But you can make the argument before the courts that the police had no lawful basis for issuing the summons, that therefore you cannot have committed the offence and that it is entirely unreasonable of the court to impose a penalty for you for not complying with an order which should never have been made and that, in addition, you will seek an order ruling the police’s guidance on this unlawful etc etc.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
I did get press accreditation for the Tory Party conferences between 2012-15.
I also attended a couple of Labour party conferences during that time thanks to a couple of pollsters.
I'll see if I can get added to the Downing Street pressers from now on.
Have you had yourself added to the "Advanced Copy of Frontpage" mailing lists that the likes of Newsnight get?
I got on a couple of them when I was editing the Wardman Wire, and I still get sent a range of pages from the Indy every day. I just rang them up and asked.
Useful for the occasions when you want to get in first in the search engines.
I do, I get those, the occasional embargoed poll, invites to lots of events, some relevant, some not.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
The answer would be no but enforcement in this emergency is vital as there are so many who do not care and even see it as a challenge to provoke reactions
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
There is no law forbidding English people coming into North Wales. If you have a reasonable excuse anyone is perfectly entitled to go to North Wales or anywhere else, come to that.
You support the police enforcing a “law” which does not exist. You might want to reflect on what that actually means and what exactly it is you are supporting.
The cars turned back did not have a legitimate reason for coming into Wales or the national parks. Those that did were allowed through
Her daughter works as a carer - one of her daughter's work colleagues has just died of the virus - aged 30, in good health. Wasn't admitted to hospital - died very quickly at home and post mortem showed the virus.
Very shocking.
Oh gosh - so sorry to hear that. Whereabouts did this take place?
Edgware - or very close by - I don't know precisely where the person would have lived.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
But you can make the argument before the courts that the police had no lawful basis for issuing the summons, that therefore you cannot have committed the offence and that it is entirely unreasonable of the court to impose a penalty for you for not complying with an order which should never have been made and that, in addition, you will seek an order ruling the police’s guidance on this unlawful etc etc.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
A friend has been told the interest rate he will be charged is 30% for his profitable business (the bank is also asking for a PG.)
Bloody shameful.
Remarkable
Disgraceful
Are the banks not just being cautious, as we wanted them to be post-2008?
No.
+1 not at 30%, the bank is getting this money for free / at 0.1% remember..
Ok, I know I am going to be in a small minority here but...
How many of these businesses are going to go bust - even with the loan? What percentage of these debts are going to go bad? 1%? 5%? 10%? 30%?
Put it another way, when given the opportunity of a refund or a 125% future cruise credit on our cancelled cruise, which did I decide to opt for?
(Clue, I didn't fancy giving Carnival an unsecured loan event at 25% interest)
It's a broad brush stroke, but if the banks are effectively being given money (which they have to repay) at 0.1% interest, charging 30% on it implies either a) they think the chances of the recipient defaulting are close to 30%, less a per cent or two for profit. Or b) they are profiteering massively.
I think as much as a 20% contraction in GDP for the next quarter is coming. Great depression territory. Sky high unemployment. Huge government spending required. Vastly reduced tax base with which to recoup it from. This won't be a V shaped recession, either. Even those who don't lose their jobs will be staying at home, not spending, shocked. Things will get very ugly.
It is somewhat ironic that, just over a decade on from the GFC, the banks are now being lambasted for seeming to be overly cautious with lending criteria to small businesses. As opposed to the totally incautious approach they used to take, for which they were (correctly) lambasted, as it caused the country's/world's last major crisis.
I suppose the counterpoint is that, if they'd been a bit more careful then, they'd have a lot more credit with the public over being more careful now, but it doesn't seem useful to help fight this crisis in a way that might trigger the last one happening again.
Banks lending to small businesses was not part of the GFC at all. It was supposed to be part of the solution with QE, but they didnt lend it to small businesses, they just lent it to asset holders to create asset inflation.
Quite. GFC had many causes, risky lending to SME was absolutely not one of them. The divergence between what Goldman Sachs Sunak has said and what the retail banks are implementing is vast.
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
I am told the police are positively taught to say "Drop the f---ing gun" because it gets obeyed more often than Drop the gun.
It is still not excusable.
I was at a horse related event a couple of years ago at which a horse got loose and galloped towards a road gate, so I shouted Shut the gate - no response - Shut the gate - no response - Shut that f---ing gate, at which half a dozen people rushed to the gate and shut it, possibly averting a really nasty road accident. I will always regret my use of foul language.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
But you can make the argument before the courts that the police had no lawful basis for issuing the summons, that therefore you cannot have committed the offence and that it is entirely unreasonable of the court to impose a penalty for you for not complying with an order which should never have been made and that, in addition, you will seek an order ruling the police’s guidance on this unlawful etc etc.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
I think this is obvious to everyone but lawyers.
What? Only lawyers care about the law being followed, rather than incorrect interpretations of the law being presented as the law? What a bizarre view, and I say that as not a lawyer.
If people support measures beyond that which the law requires, and they certainly do, then there is no need for the police to incorrectly state or imply that certain things are unlawful when they are not. Public pressure and reminding people of the guidance will do the trick just fine.
It's not inserting complexity into cases where there are none. Inventing interpretations which are not in the law is inserting complexity into things by confusing what is or is not lawful.
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
I am told the police are positively taught to say "Drop the f---ing gun" because it gets obeyed more often than Drop the gun.
It is still not excusable.
I was at a horse related event a couple of years ago at which a horse got loose and galloped towards a road gate, so I shouted Shut the gate - no response - Shut the gate - no response - Shut that f---ing gate, at which half a dozen people rushed to the gate and shut it, possibly averting a really nasty road accident. I will always regret my use of foul language.
Well, that sounds justifiable - at least you made your request in a polite way twice. My objection is that the people might well drop the gun the first time without resorting to rudeness.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
The only complexity being added is by the police who are fundamentally incapable - as yesterday’s NPCC guidance shows - of understanding what the actual law of the land is.
And I‘m afraid people like you who seem to think that it should be ok for the police to make things up and arrest or fine people on that basis.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
The answer would be no but enforcement in this emergency is vital as there are so many who do not care and even see it as a challenge to provoke reactions
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
There is no law forbidding English people coming into North Wales. If you have a reasonable excuse anyone is perfectly entitled to go to North Wales or anywhere else, come to that.
You support the police enforcing a “law” which does not exist. You might want to reflect on what that actually means and what exactly it is you are supporting.
The cars turned back did not have a legitimate reason for coming into Wales or the national parks. Those that did were allowed through
How do you know?
Allegedly! Our local Spanish hospital has about 100 covid cases, 17 in icu, of which 90% are people from Madrid that escaped the day before the shut down. You can understand people being in support of such police action.
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
I am told the police are positively taught to say "Drop the f---ing gun" because it gets obeyed more often than Drop the gun.
Ah, that'll be why when the police barged into my house when I was 10 they shouted "Where's the f---ing gun, boy?" at me.
(Some local lads had been seen running around with an airsoft gun, the authorities were understandably miffed)
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
The answer would be no but enforcement in this emergency is vital as there are so many who do not care and even see it as a challenge to provoke reactions
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
There is no law forbidding English people coming into North Wales. If you have a reasonable excuse anyone is perfectly entitled to go to North Wales or anywhere else, come to that.
You support the police enforcing a “law” which does not exist. You might want to reflect on what that actually means and what exactly it is you are supporting.
The reaction to any dissent from the authority line in recent times has been very revealing. Burn the witch never went away
(I omitted China on the judgement that the data wasn't reliable, and South Korea because it was way, way out on its own and we already know it's doing far better than anyone else)
It's an excellent chart, thank you. Only suggestions I would make would be to plot the logarithm of the per million rate, and I'd be interested in seeing the US and Belgium (but the chart is already crowded, so difficult).
I can have a crack. US was already on it (but crowded so hard to see). Belgium added, logs taken - and I changed colours to match the original one and added the country names close to the line to aid identification.
Apologies if I'm pointing out the obvious here, but by logging the "death rate per million" you're effectively just adding vertical offsets for each country to the simple log of deaths.
The usefulness of the logged rates chart is you can compare which countries are doing better/worse "per head" in a way you can't do on the logged deaths chart, just pointing out that you don't learn any more from the slopes/curvature (eg if you're looking for signs of levelling out) from the logged rates graph than you would from the logged deaths graph.
True. I do think you get more from it (as you say), and in two ways: - The slope is the same (no extra information) - The vertical position of the slope gives extra information (as you say) - like Belgium now really stands out - The horizontal position of the slope gives other information. The logged death rate graph starts from an arbitrary point of 50 deaths in total. This is very different for different countries - 50 deaths in Belgium is a rather different thing than 50 deaths in the US (and Norway wouldn't yet even appear on the graphs if we waited for 50 deaths). And if the per capita deaths correlates quite well with per capita infections, it should be a more meaningful start point.
Yes, to be clear wasn't making a criticism! I think I missed what you're using using as your horizontal (time) origin now? As you say 50 deaths is very arbitrary...
Incidentally I did a quick negative binomial time-series regressions (ie Poisson time-series regression with overdispersion) of the death counts if anyone's interested in me sharing the results. (Not a million miles away from looking at the trendline on the logplot and trying to spot if there's a change in slope.)
I used the day after hitting 1.000 deaths per million as the start point. Still fairly arbitrary, but at least a common point per population for each of them.
BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
It’s tough isn’t it. I look at the items Amazon has delivered me since the lockdown:
- rat poison, to deal the mice that keep eating my emergency food supplies. Surely essential? - replacement mop heads so that I can keep my floors hygienically clean. Ditto. - bug spray to deal with the scale insect on my olive tree. Probably not essential. - vet bandage to stop my dog licking his injured carpal pad. Surely essential. - a new iPad charging lead to avoid the old dodgy one setting fire to my house. Essential
And, more to the point, coping with the confinement of lockdown is a lot easier with Amazon able to home deliver anything that I might need.
Amazon will do very nicely out of this crisis yet continue to avoid making serious contributions to the countries they profit from. As we all get taxed more once this is over I hope the government (and other European governments) sticks a 25% tax on all Amazon sales.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
Nope. The de facto and de jure position is that anything that is not explicitly illegal is legal. Other countries have other systems but I prefer ours thankyou very much. If the Government and Parliament (the people who make the laws) want to ban people buying Easter eggs or going out for walks then they have legislation they can enact which will bring that about. But until they do it is no business of the police making stuff up to suit themselves.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
The only complexity being added is by the police who are fundamentally incapable - as yesterday’s NPCC guidance shows - of understanding what the actual law of the land is.
And I‘m afraid people like you who seem to think that it should be ok for the police to make things up and arrest or fine people on that basis.
Technically you are spot on. In practise, have you ever been up before a magistrate? Because they don't know the law, they are not markedly intelligent or patient and they are not on your side as against the police. If you personally want to set yourself up as some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast the little tyrant of Covid 19 policing withstood that is brave and noble, but the practical advice is that the police are at least as good at getting arsy with you, as you with them.
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
Cooking bay is a much darker green. This is not cooking bay.
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
Oh. I have a bay tree in my garden and always assumed I could one day use its leaves to save replacing the packet of supermarket bay leaves that I need to buy once every decade or so. Now you’re saying I might poison myself?
It's definitely not cooking bay - which is a tree not a bush, and does not have the waviness in the leaf as well as being darker. I have a couple of bay trees in pots, but I hardly ever use it.
It looks to me like one mum chose for flower arrangements, which is partly why there is such a variety (I suspect). I wouldn't think euonymous either, but I am less sure about that.
And I think laurel leaves are a different shape, though I am more familiar with aucuba - variegated laurel.
Thank you, Cyclefree, for yet another thought-provoking header.
I'd mention there were identity cards introduced in 1940 and only scrapped in 1952. Such ID and the Ration Book were the basic means of identification and justification in the wartime community and for some years after.
My other thought is bad law leads to bad enforcement of that law. Perhaps more accurately, legislate in haste, repent at leisure.
The problem was Boris Johnson's "advice" was akin to a chocolate fireguard but what else could he do given we are a legislative democracy? There is a process which can be gone through very quickly if needed - out of the Birmingham atrocity in 1974 came the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
Nope. The de facto and de jure position is that anything that is not explicitly illegal is legal. Other countries have other systems but I prefer ours thankyou very much. If the Government and Parliament (the people who make the laws) want to ban people buying Easter eggs or going out for walks then they have legislation they can enact which will bring that about. But until they do it is no business of the police making stuff up to suit themselves.
Even if people would support them doing so (or not generally object). They're not moral police.
BBC report having a go at online retailers being open, asking are they really essential?
Yes they can be. If online retailers closed down that could have knock on effects on many things including the ability of key workers to go to work.
My wife is a key worker in healthcare. She tore her trousers she wears to work the other day - obviously couldn't go to the shops to get more because they're closed but could get two new pairs delivered.
Online delivery of new clothes can be a necessity sometimes not just a luxury.
It’s tough isn’t it. I look at the items Amazon has delivered me since the lockdown:
- rat poison, to deal the mice that keep eating my emergency food supplies. Surely essential? - replacement mop heads so that I can keep my floors hygienically clean. Ditto. - bug spray to deal with the scale insect on my olive tree. Probably not essential. - vet bandage to stop my dog licking his injured carpal pad. Surely essential. - a new iPad charging lead to avoid the old dodgy one setting fire to my house. Essential
And, more to the point, coping with the confinement of lockdown is a lot easier with Amazon able to home deliver anything that I might need.
Amazon will do very nicely out of this crisis yet continue to avoid making serious contributions to the countries they profit from. As we all get taxed more once this is over I hope the government (and other European governments) sticks a 25% tax on all Amazon sales.
UK is pushing forward with a online digital tax, despite Trump being upset about it.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
But you can make the argument before the courts that the police had no lawful basis for issuing the summons, that therefore you cannot have committed the offence and that it is entirely unreasonable of the court to impose a penalty for you for not complying with an order which should never have been made and that, in addition, you will seek an order ruling the police’s guidance on this unlawful etc etc.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
1. People reporting possible crimes is not in principle a bad thing. But it only works if the public are clear about what the actual crime is. Given that the police don’t seem to understand the law I am very wary of this initiative. It is more than likely to lead to people reporting others for doing things which are not in fact restricted eg going out more than once a day, for instance, when in fact the rules contain no such restriction. Also others cannot possibly know what the reason for someone being out is.
2. It will waste a lot of police time which could be usefully spent on dealing with other more serious crimes, which will not have stopped, or flagrant abuses of the rules eg large groups congregating in public places etc.
3. The sort of community spirit we need is one where people rally round to help those in need, look out for each other etc. If that is done it is much easier for people to say to those who appear to be taking the piss to stop it. That kind of social pressure is generally more effective. The police should be the last resort not the first port of call. The police do seem to risk giving the impression that they are rather enjoying the opportunity to throw their weight about, regardless of the law.
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
Cooking bay is a much darker green. This is not cooking bay.
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
Oh. I have a bay tree in my garden and always assumed I could one day use its leaves to save replacing the packet of supermarket bay leaves that I need to buy once every decade or so. Now you’re saying I might poison myself?
It's definitely not cooking bay - which is a tree not a bush, and does not have the waviness in the leaf as well as being darker. I have a couple of bay trees in pots, but I hardly ever use it.
It looks to me like one mum chose for flower arrangements, which is partly why there is such a variety (I suspect). I wouldn't think euonymous either, but I am less sure about that.
And I think laurel leaves are a different shape, though I am more familiar with aucuba - variegated laurel.
Would a closer in photo help?
It would. I still think it is probably a pittosporum tenuifolium but a close up would definitely help.
Clint did NOT say "Go head punk make my fucking day".
He would have if the movie were made today.
Hmm - not necessarily. Consider the series Justified. Where the hero threatens various creeps with death in a variety of low key ways. I think the most aggressive was when he flips a bullet at a suspect and tells him "The next one will be faster".
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
The US intelligence community is famous for its 'conclusions'. Envy of the world.
Who in their right mind believes the Chinese statistics?
I'm not sure whether anyone believes the entire body of Chinese statistics, but at the height of the outbreak in Wuhan the WHO sent fact finding missions who monitored what the Chinese were doing and they came to the conclusion that their reporting was adequate. Make of that what you will.
I think you're placing too much trust in the WHO.
I am not convinced by the WHO in regard to China
I think the Chinese figures are probably no further out than other countries.
My wife works on medical journals which include Chinese senior doctors.... She said that the Chinese have been particularly transparent in sharing data about all things Covid 19...but heh...why let the truth get in the way of a good old racist anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.....
CCP shills seem to love the 'It's Sinophobic to assume that a totalitarian state that run re-education death camps with the means, motive, and opportunity to cover up hundreds of thousands of deaths, would cover up 5 to 6 figure numbers of deaths' line.
In the aftermath of Covid 19....one thing far more terrifying than this virus would be a drumbeat leading us to conflict with China.....the 1930's over again, but this time with nukes aplenty
There is a difference between asking China to close wet markets and improve lab safety and nuking Beijing
Not locking up and killing people for saying that there may be a bit of medical problem might just be on the list of DontDoThisNextTimeOrWeMightGetSlightlyUpset.
Economic sanctions on China maybe, not war
Not war?? That is very measured of you H...
Not yet. The Art of War is all about timing.
Good point, I would hold out declaring war on China, at least until the time we have more troops, weaponry, ammunition and nuclear capability than they do.
Nope. The de facto and de jure position is that anything that is not explicitly illegal is legal. Other countries have other systems but I prefer ours thankyou very much. If the Government and Parliament (the people who make the laws) want to ban people buying Easter eggs or going out for walks then they have legislation they can enact which will bring that about. But until they do it is no business of the police making stuff up to suit themselves.
I agree though I think poorly worded and insufficiently considered legislation can create more problems than it seeks to remedy.
Defining what is "essential" is a problem - I have five corner shops within a quarter mile radius. In theory, I could visit all five looking to buy food and argue it's an essential visit in each instance.
I sigh when I see this sort of stuff. This is one of the better arguments against Richard Branson getting a bail out but why oh why do you put a lot of people off by swearing in it? The left seem to do this mistake a lot and it makes the poster look bitter rather than rational
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
The only complexity being added is by the police who are fundamentally incapable - as yesterday’s NPCC guidance shows - of understanding what the actual law of the land is.
And I‘m afraid people like you who seem to think that it should be ok for the police to make things up and arrest or fine people on that basis.
Technically you are spot on. In practise, have you ever been up before a magistrate? Because they don't know the law, they are not markedly intelligent or patient and they are not on your side as against the police. If you personally want to set yourself up as some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast the little tyrant of Covid 19 policing withstood that is brave and noble, but the practical advice is that the police are at least as good at getting arsy with you, as you with them.
I have been very arsy indeed with the police and won. If a policeman seeks to mislead me, he is going to regret it. I have in fact worked very closely with them in my career and have even got an award from them. So if the police behave properly I have absolutely no issue with them.
In the end, if the police want to play their part they need to do so in a way which does not risk turning people against them and be counter-productive to what we all want: the end of this virus.
They are not going to do that by adopting a sort of passive aggressive tone of “Oh ignore our law-breaking because it’s for your own good”.
The US intelligence community is famous for its 'conclusions'. Envy of the world.
I'd take the US intelligence community over the Chinese Communist party any day of the week. That you won't is more an indication on your character than how reliable US intelligence is.
They lie nearly as much as Tories, so pretty desperate.
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
Cooking bay is a much darker green. This is not cooking bay.
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
Oh. I have a bay tree in my garden and always assumed I could one day use its leaves to save replacing the packet of supermarket bay leaves that I need to buy once every decade or so. Now you’re saying I might poison myself?
It's definitely not cooking bay - which is a tree not a bush, and does not have the waviness in the leaf as well as being darker. I have a couple of bay trees in pots, but I hardly ever use it.
It looks to me like one mum chose for flower arrangements, which is partly why there is such a variety (I suspect). I wouldn't think euonymous either, but I am less sure about that.
And I think laurel leaves are a different shape, though I am more familiar with aucuba - variegated laurel.
Would a closer in photo help?
It would. I still think it is probably a pittosporum tenuifolium but a close up would definitely help.
Can one of the "experts" on here offer a little guidance?
The manufacturing PMI for March was 47.8 which on the face of it isn't that bad - yes, it represents contraction but it's not quite the "off the cliff" scenarios that have been doing the rounds.
I thought it would be about 35 - presumably the real impact of the lockdown in economic terms has only been manifest in the last third of the month so we would see the figure for this month looking much worse unless there is a notable easing of restrictions after the 15th (which seems unlikely currently).
What should we be expecting for the April PMI in a month or so, mid 30s or lower? The lowest ever recorded was 34.4 in early 2009 - that seems a benchmark of sorts. That represented a 6% GDP drop at the bottom of the V-shaped plunge that was the GFC.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
But you can make the argument before the courts that the police had no lawful basis for issuing the summons, that therefore you cannot have committed the offence and that it is entirely unreasonable of the court to impose a penalty for you for not complying with an order which should never have been made and that, in addition, you will seek an order ruling the police’s guidance on this unlawful etc etc.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
Pro bono?
My work has for the moment collapsed. I am a vulnerable pensioner. So ....
Failing, that a large supply of loo rolls, some good quality olive oil or a subscription to the London Library would do.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
But you can make the argument before the courts that the police had no lawful basis for issuing the summons, that therefore you cannot have committed the offence and that it is entirely unreasonable of the court to impose a penalty for you for not complying with an order which should never have been made and that, in addition, you will seek an order ruling the police’s guidance on this unlawful etc etc.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
I usually agree with your posts but am parting the ways on this one. Now is not the time to be nit-picking about whether the police can technically do this or that.
IMO the vast majority accept that the police are trying to enforce the government guidelines for the general good, They are guidelines therefore there will be grey areas and cussed individuals trying to dodge them by driving to North Wales on a jolly will get scant public sympathy.
Only idiots like Hitchens believe that this heralds the start of a police state.
The medics aren't the problem. The Chinese State is.
Bit like Chernobyl - the Russians on the ground were generally good guys to very high degree... The system, not so much.
There is a very good book about it, Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy, and that's one thing that comes across in the book. I highly recommend it, it's an excellent account.
The Ukrainian people on the ground, and of course many from other regions of the USSR, were highly skilled, worked incredibly hard, and were in many cases heroic. It was mostly from up the chain back in Moscow that the lies and deceit eminated.
The current government has made curtailing judicial oversight of public authority a central plank of its programme. The police are simply taking their cue from government in this regard. The state is seeking to return to a medieval age where its word is the law.
There is no way more calculated of bringing a law into disrepute than its rigid enforcement. The police seem determined to demonstrate that.
And yet they have public support.
Round here there is virtual unanimous support for their actions though the goats in Llandudno are a bit unruly
Oh come off it!
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law? Or should the police be allowed to make up the law? Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is? Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
As ever, lawyers seek to insert complexity into cases where there should be none. The de facto law of the land today is 'Take the piss during the pandemic, and bad things will happen to you'. That is as it should be, and yes, that position commands widespread public support.
The only complexity being added is by the police who are fundamentally incapable - as yesterday’s NPCC guidance shows - of understanding what the actual law of the land is.
And I‘m afraid people like you who seem to think that it should be ok for the police to make things up and arrest or fine people on that basis.
Technically you are spot on. In practise, have you ever been up before a magistrate? Because they don't know the law, they are not markedly intelligent or patient and they are not on your side as against the police. If you personally want to set yourself up as some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast the little tyrant of Covid 19 policing withstood that is brave and noble, but the practical advice is that the police are at least as good at getting arsy with you, as you with them.
I have been very arsy indeed with the police and won. If a policeman seeks to mislead me, he is going to regret it. I have in fact worked very closely with them in my career and have even got an award from them. So if the police behave properly I have absolutely no issue with them.
In the end, if the police want to play their part they need to do so in a way which does not risk turning people against them and be counter-productive to what we all want: the end of this virus.
They are not going to do that by adopting a sort of passive aggressive tone of “Oh ignore our law-breaking because it’s for your own good”.
That all sounds a million miles away from a dispute arising out of a fixed penalty notice.
The US intelligence community is famous for its 'conclusions'. Envy of the world.
Who in their right mind believes the Chinese statistics?
I'm not sure whether anyone believes the entire body of Chinese statistics, but at the height of the outbreak in Wuhan the WHO sent fact finding missions who monitored what the Chinese were doing and they came to the conclusion that their reporting was adequate. Make of that what you will.
I think you're placing too much trust in the WHO.
I am not convinced by the WHO in regard to China
I think the Chinese figures are probably no further out than other countries.
My wife works on medical journals which include Chinese senior doctors.... She said that the Chinese have been particularly transparent in sharing data about all things Covid 19...but heh...why let the truth get in the way of a good old racist anti-Chinese conspiracy theory.....
CCP shills seem to love the 'It's Sinophobic to assume that a totalitarian state that run re-education death camps with the means, motive, and opportunity to cover up hundreds of thousands of deaths, would cover up 5 to 6 figure numbers of deaths' line.
In the aftermath of Covid 19....one thing far more terrifying than this virus would be a drumbeat leading us to conflict with China.....the 1930's over again, but this time with nukes aplenty
There is a difference between asking China to close wet markets and improve lab safety and nuking Beijing
Not locking up and killing people for saying that there may be a bit of medical problem might just be on the list of DontDoThisNextTimeOrWeMightGetSlightlyUpset.
Economic sanctions on China maybe, not war
Not war?? That is very measured of you H...
Not yet. The Art of War is all about timing.
Good point, I would hold out declaring war on China, at least until the time we have more troops, weaponry, ammunition and nuclear capability than they do.
And a lot more pharma industry. For a lot of important things like antibiotics etc. we are relying either directly or indirectly on China. Not to speak of telcomms, and so forth.
What would be the likely consequences for a member of the public who happened to be well informed legally , and who declined to follow a police officer's instructions on the basis that he had no authority to order him to behave in that way - ie that he was exceeding his powers in that he was relying on guidance rather than the law of the land? Would he face arrest or a fine - or should be advised to comply and then bring an action against the officer concerned?
Under the legislation, refusing to follow the police instruction is sufficient justification for a fixed penalty, which if not paid lands you in court. For that penalty to stick, refusal to follow the instruction is sufficient, regardless of any argument you might have to justify your excursion from home.
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
But you can make the argument before the courts that the police had no lawful basis for issuing the summons, that therefore you cannot have committed the offence and that it is entirely unreasonable of the court to impose a penalty for you for not complying with an order which should never have been made and that, in addition, you will seek an order ruling the police’s guidance on this unlawful etc etc.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
I usually agree with your posts but am parting the ways on this one. Now is not the time to be nit-picking about whether the police can technically do this or that.
IMO the vast majority accept that the police are trying to enforce the government guidelines for the general good, They are guidelines therefore there will be grey areas and cussed individuals trying to dodge them by driving to North Wales on a jolly will get scant public sympathy.
Only idiots like Hitchens believe that this heralds the start of a police state.
When this is is over, there will be an attempt in the Home Office/Police ranks to hang onto some of these really useful powers.
For The Greater Good.
Michael Howard commented that it was one of the jobs of the Home Secretary to say no to the large pile of ideas that got wheeled out every time there was an emergency of some kind.
A friend has been told the interest rate he will be charged is 30% for his profitable business (the bank is also asking for a PG.)
Bloody shameful.
Remarkable
Disgraceful
Are the banks not just being cautious, as we wanted them to be post-2008?
No.
+1 not at 30%, the bank is getting this money for free / at 0.1% remember..
Ok, I know I am going to be in a small minority here but...
How many of these businesses are going to go bust - even with the loan? What percentage of these debts are going to go bad? 1%? 5%? 10%? 30%?
Put it another way, when given the opportunity of a refund or a 125% future cruise credit on our cancelled cruise, which did I decide to opt for?
(Clue, I didn't fancy giving Carnival an unsecured loan event at 25% interest)
It's a broad brush stroke, but if the banks are effectively being given money (which they have to repay) at 0.1% interest, charging 30% on it implies either a) they think the chances of the recipient defaulting are close to 30%, less a per cent or two for profit. Or b) they are profiteering massively.
I think as much as a 20% contraction in GDP for the next quarter is coming. Great depression territory. Sky high unemployment. Huge government spending required. Vastly reduced tax base with which to recoup it from. This won't be a V shaped recession, either. Even those who don't lose their jobs will be staying at home, not spending, shocked. Things will get very ugly.
It is somewhat ironic that, just over a decade on from the GFC, the banks are now being lambasted for seeming to be overly cautious with lending criteria to small businesses. As opposed to the totally incautious approach they used to take, for which they were (correctly) lambasted, as it caused the country's/world's last major crisis.
I suppose the counterpoint is that, if they'd been a bit more careful then, they'd have a lot more credit with the public over being more careful now, but it doesn't seem useful to help fight this crisis in a way that might trigger the last one happening again.
Banks lending to small businesses was not part of the GFC at all. It was supposed to be part of the solution with QE, but they didnt lend it to small businesses, they just lent it to asset holders to create asset inflation.
Yes, sorry, I wasn't clear. The world crisis was triggered primarily by lending on residential mortgages; in the UK specifically there was an exacerbating effect in that banks had also been lending on unsustainable terms to small businesses. This resulted in, or at least contributed to, several banks in the UK falling into more trouble than they needed to be in, irrespective of the credit crunch caused by the collapse of Lehmans etc.
Northern Rock was undone by credit drying up, but their retail mortgage loan book was the main underlying problem. HBOS I think was more about SME lending.
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
Cooking bay is a much darker green. This is not cooking bay.
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
Oh. I have a bay tree in my garden and always assumed I could one day use its leaves to save replacing the packet of supermarket bay leaves that I need to buy once every decade or so. Now you’re saying I might poison myself?
It's definitely not cooking bay - which is a tree not a bush, and does not have the waviness in the leaf as well as being darker. I have a couple of bay trees in pots, but I hardly ever use it.
It looks to me like one mum chose for flower arrangements, which is partly why there is such a variety (I suspect). I wouldn't think euonymous either, but I am less sure about that.
And I think laurel leaves are a different shape, though I am more familiar with aucuba - variegated laurel.
Would a closer in photo help?
It would. I still think it is probably a pittosporum tenuifolium but a close up would definitely help.
Pears and raspberries were heading past their best - but have made a cracking crumble (with a couple of top-end ginger biscuits added into the crumble).
Can one of the "experts" on here offer a little guidance?
The manufacturing PMI for March was 47.8 which on the face of it isn't that bad - yes, it represents contraction but it's not quite the "off the cliff" scenarios that have been doing the rounds.
I thought it would be about 35 - presumably the real impact of the lockdown in economic terms has only been manifest in the last third of the month so we would see the figure for this month looking much worse unless there is a notable easing of restrictions after the 15th (which seems unlikely currently).
What should we be expecting for the April PMI in a month or so, mid 30s or lower? The lowest ever recorded was 34.4 in early 2009 - that seems a benchmark of sorts. That represented a 6% GDP drop at the bottom of the V-shaped plunge that was the GFC.
We're still producing in our workshop with all clerical and CAD staff working from home. Manufacturing shouldn't be affected by the stay at home guidance so to speak, more with the global supply situation that will be biting shortly.
Comments
It is complicated but important, because sweet bay (Laurus nobilis, bay laurel) is a cooking herb whereas laurel (Prunus laurocerasus) is poisonous.
If the question is: do you support the police enforcing the law? pretty much everyone, including me, would say yes.
If the question is: do you think the police should be allowed to break the law?
Or should the police be allowed to make up the law?
Or should the police be able to mislead you about what the law is?
Or should the police be allowed to stop you doing something which is legal?
What do you think the answers might be then?
What would your answers be?
It is either laurel or pittosporum or possibly a euonymus. I will do a bit of research and come back to you.
https://twitter.com/aicky/status/1245364206658076672?s=20
Keep up comrade...
I am sure you have seen it already but Alex Wickham's article seemed potentially more on-point to me with regards to the UK, though doesn't make an in-depth comparison to Germany and is somewhat misleading in that it compares the UK only to the highest-testing countries when in fact, even among developed countries, there is quite a spread. (It also irritates me when journalists pull the old trick of "the UK is doing X tests per day, but Summuvvaland is doing Y tests per week!" which is a trick straight out of Darrell Huff...)
Wickham does seem to have done some legwork and talked to people who know something about what's happened. The article also raises some more subtle points eg you can't just compare the number of labs, since the size and efficiency of labs makes a big difference as well as the way workload is shared between groups of labs. There's a chicken-and-egg thing he doesn't really get to the bottom of, but I suspect nobody will manage to even if it gets dragged up at any future inquiry: on the one hand PHE told the modellers/strategists that its capacity to ramp up testing in the short run was limited (indeed the article concedes even countries like Germany are likely to find their testing strategy is going to have to change as the epidemic peaks and overtakes their expansion in capacity) but on the other hand the modellers/strategists, apparently in response to this limitation, chose a path that didn't require a rapid upsurge in testing capacity (potentially reducing the urgency in PHE to pursue an expansion).
The article doesn't go into any depth on the supply chain other than acknowledging they were an issue: we don't know things like were there enough machines/trained staff, what machines need which supplies (chemicals, swabs), where could those supplies be sourced and when could/should orders have been placed? We know universities have handed over PCR machines to PHE - has this created heterogeneity in kit and knock-on issues with logistics/training? These kind of questions I suspect we're more likely to get firmer answers to at some point. There's also been a substantial restructuring of the UK's public health laboratory system in recent memory, which is mentioned in Wickham's article along with some explanation for why it took place. Those restructuring decisions will have been based on plans which I'm sure are going to come in for a lot of scrutiny, but for the time being health officials seem quite bullish that they were a good move that have brought several advantages (including the possibility of a faster roll-out of a brand new test than would be achievable if the system were more scattered and broken up). Whether they'll change their tune if in retrospect it's judged they limited the UK's ability to respond, we'll have to see.
Believe you me, North Walians endorse the police stopping people coming into Wales at the border in contravention of HMG requirements as they do in enforcing the closure of our national parks.
Indeed our local mp wrote a column in our paper today headed 'We will welcome our English friends when this is all over '
I suppose the counterpoint is that, if they'd been a bit more careful then, they'd have a lot more credit with the public over being more careful now, but it doesn't seem useful to help fight this crisis in a way that might trigger the last one happening again.
- rat poison, to deal the mice that keep eating my emergency food supplies. Surely essential?
- replacement mop heads so that I can keep my floors hygienically clean. Ditto.
- bug spray to deal with the scale insect on my olive tree. Probably not essential.
- vet bandage to stop my dog licking his injured carpal pad. Surely essential.
- a new iPad charging lead to avoid the old dodgy one setting fire to my house. Essential
And, more to the point, coping with the confinement of lockdown is a lot easier with Amazon able to home deliver anything that I might need.
I don't think anyone has suggested they should not be supported in enforcing the law. Heck, the header does not even say the guidance should not be followed or the police should not mention it.
But I don't see how it makes sense to say one would not support them misleading about what the law is (intentionallyor not), but then support them in enforcing non legal matters.
It's not enforcement if there is not a law to enforce.
You support the police enforcing a “law” which does not exist. You might want to reflect on what that actually means and what exactly it is you are supporting.
I also attended a couple of Labour party conferences during that time thanks to a couple of pollsters.
I'll see if I can get added to the Downing Street pressers from now on.
We had mice in the house a couple of years ago and dealt with it with humane mouse traps and sealing the entry pounts. Poisoning is cruel and needless
The question is whether you could later seek redress because the police acted unreasonably.
Our own government believes that we our under reporting our own cases, and mortality by the lack of testing in community managed cases. I think more or less the same happened in China, but that the severe and harsh curfew measures, both physical and electronic, in China are very effective from a public health perspective, if not from a human rights one.
I'm not sure that's the current trajectory.
I do think you get more from it (as you say), and in two ways:
- The slope is the same (no extra information)
- The vertical position of the slope gives extra information (as you say) - like Belgium now really stands out
- The horizontal position of the slope gives other information. The logged death rate graph starts from an arbitrary point of 50 deaths in total. This is very different for different countries - 50 deaths in Belgium is a rather different thing than 50 deaths in the US (and Norway wouldn't yet even appear on the graphs if we waited for 50 deaths). And if the per capita deaths correlates quite well with per capita infections, it should be a more meaningful start point.
If it ever gets near the courts, the officer involved will end up on long term sick leave until 30 seconds after the case is dropped.
Prunus looks different - https://www.crocus.co.uk/plants/_/prunus-laurocerasus-rotundifolia/classid.4306/.
But we've been unable to go shopping for her presents, as have her relatives who haven't been able to see her. But I'll be damned if her birthday is not "essential". Try telling a six year old her birthday itself is cancelled.
So we've had to get her presents delivered by Amazon. Her grandparents ordered off Amazon and had their gifts sent here which we wrapped. For her birthday we video chatted with her grandparents and she was able to unwrap her presents from them on respective video chats.
A bizarre 21st century birthday but it worked and she was happy. Stop online deliveries and it would have been a nightmare and people would flout the rules because it would be unrealistic.
Incidentally I did a quick negative binomial time-series regressions (ie Poisson time-series regression with overdispersion) of the death counts if anyone's interested in me sharing the results. (Not a million miles away from looking at the trendline on the logplot and trying to spot if there's a change in slope.)
I got on a couple of them when I was editing the Wardman Wire, and I still get sent a range of pages from the Indy every day. I just rang them up and asked.
Useful for the occasions when you want to get in first in the search engines.
A well written letter to the police which will make their legal advisers sigh should do the trick. The last thing the police need is some smart-arsed lawyer taking them to court and then finding themselves restricted in what they can do with all the attendant bad publicity and costs.
They rely on people paying the fine just to get rid of it rather than being bolshy and arguing back.
However, if anyone does need a bolshy smart-arsed lawyer with time on her hands ......
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8162725/Police-urge-Britons-spill-beans-neighbours-suspected-breaching-coronavirus-lockdown.html
If people support measures beyond that which the law requires, and they certainly do, then there is no need for the police to incorrectly state or imply that certain things are unlawful when they are not. Public pressure and reminding people of the guidance will do the trick just fine.
It's not inserting complexity into cases where there are none. Inventing interpretations which are not in the law is inserting complexity into things by confusing what is or is not lawful.
And I‘m afraid people like you who seem to think that it should be ok for the police to make things up and arrest or fine people on that basis.
(Some local lads had been seen running around with an airsoft gun, the authorities were understandably miffed)
Would you agree?
It looks to me like one mum chose for flower arrangements, which is partly why there is such a variety (I suspect). I wouldn't think euonymous either, but I am less sure about that.
And I think laurel leaves are a different shape, though I am more familiar with aucuba - variegated laurel.
Would a closer in photo help?
Thank you, Cyclefree, for yet another thought-provoking header.
I'd mention there were identity cards introduced in 1940 and only scrapped in 1952. Such ID and the Ration Book were the basic means of identification and justification in the wartime community and for some years after.
My other thought is bad law leads to bad enforcement of that law. Perhaps more accurately, legislate in haste, repent at leisure.
The problem was Boris Johnson's "advice" was akin to a chocolate fireguard but what else could he do given we are a legislative democracy? There is a process which can be gone through very quickly if needed - out of the Birmingham atrocity in 1974 came the Prevention of Terrorism Act.
1. People reporting possible crimes is not in principle a bad thing. But it only works if the public are clear about what the actual crime is. Given that the police don’t seem to understand the law I am very wary of this initiative. It is more than likely to lead to people reporting others for doing things which are not in fact restricted eg going out more than once a day, for instance, when in fact the rules contain no such restriction. Also others cannot possibly know what the reason for someone being out is.
2. It will waste a lot of police time which could be usefully spent on dealing with other more serious crimes, which will not have stopped, or flagrant abuses of the rules eg large groups congregating in public places etc.
3. The sort of community spirit we need is one where people rally round to help those in need, look out for each other etc. If that is done it is much easier for people to say to those who appear to be taking the piss to stop it. That kind of social pressure is generally more effective. The police should be the last resort not the first port of call. The police do seem to risk giving the impression that they are rather enjoying the opportunity to throw their weight about, regardless of the law.
Defining what is "essential" is a problem - I have five corner shops within a quarter mile radius. In theory, I could visit all five looking to buy food and argue it's an essential visit in each instance.
In the end, if the police want to play their part they need to do so in a way which does not risk turning people against them and be counter-productive to what we all want: the end of this virus.
They are not going to do that by adopting a sort of passive aggressive tone of “Oh ignore our law-breaking because it’s for your own good”.
https://twitter.com/mattwardman/status/1245417762975035392
The manufacturing PMI for March was 47.8 which on the face of it isn't that bad - yes, it represents contraction but it's not quite the "off the cliff" scenarios that have been doing the rounds.
I thought it would be about 35 - presumably the real impact of the lockdown in economic terms has only been manifest in the last third of the month so we would see the figure for this month looking much worse unless there is a notable easing of restrictions after the 15th (which seems unlikely currently).
What should we be expecting for the April PMI in a month or so, mid 30s or lower? The lowest ever recorded was 34.4 in early 2009 - that seems a benchmark of sorts. That represented a 6% GDP drop at the bottom of the V-shaped plunge that was the GFC.
Failing, that a large supply of loo rolls, some good quality olive oil or a subscription to the London Library would do.
IMO the vast majority accept that the police are trying to enforce the government guidelines for the general good, They are guidelines therefore there will be grey areas and cussed individuals trying to dodge them by driving to North Wales on a jolly will get scant public sympathy.
Only idiots like Hitchens believe that this heralds the start of a police state.
The Ukrainian people on the ground, and of course many from other regions of the USSR, were highly skilled, worked incredibly hard, and were in many cases heroic. It was mostly from up the chain back in Moscow that the lies and deceit eminated.
For The Greater Good.
Michael Howard commented that it was one of the jobs of the Home Secretary to say no to the large pile of ideas that got wheeled out every time there was an emergency of some kind.
Northern Rock was undone by credit drying up, but their retail mortgage loan book was the main underlying problem. HBOS I think was more about SME lending.
Who needs to go out....
Manufacturing shouldn't be affected by the stay at home guidance so to speak, more with the global supply situation that will be biting shortly.