“Strong sense within loyalists and unionists that no one is listening to them + nobody in authority in Whitehall been honest with them about the consequences of Brexit. The most immediate step is therefore for the government, at the highest level, to be seen to take an interest."
This is a direct consequence of NI unionists not having a Brexit policy, and opposing their best option under T May. They NEVER say what they want, only what they don't. Their position is now dangerous and untenable.
They became addicted to the "ULSTER SAYS NO" mentality.
Jesus fecking Christ, i bet they paid a six or seven figure amount to consultants to come up with this name change.
Intention to Change Name - Standard Life Aberdeen plc to become Abrdn plc
Standard Life Aberdeen plc ("the Company") today announces its intention to change its name to "Abrdn plc". The new Abrdn name (pronounced "Aberdeen") will be part of a modern, agile, digitally-enabled brand that will also be used for all the Company's client-facing businesses globally.
The new brand identity marks the next stage in the reshaping of the business and future-focused growth strategy. The Company is focused on three interrelated growth vectors: global asset management (Investments), technology platforms for UK financial advisers and their customers (Adviser), and UK savings and wealth (Personal).
The rebranding roll-out process for the new name and associated visual identity will begin in the summer and progress through 2021, alongside implementation of a full stakeholder engagement plan to manage the transition.
Stephen Bird, Chief Executive, said:
"Our new brand Abrdn builds on our heritage and is modern, dynamic and, most importantly, engaging for all of our client and customer channels. It is a highly-differentiated brand that will create unity across the business, replacing five different brand names that have each been operating independently. Our new name reflects the clarity of focus that the leadership team are bringing to the business as we seek to deliver sustainable growth."
A subsequent announcement will be made when the Company's name change becomes effective with a revised stock ticker. This is expected to take place prior to the publication of the Company's half year results in August 2021. Until such an announcement is made, trading will continue under the existing ticker. No action is required on the part of any equity holders with respect to their rights as an equity holder.
If you were wondering what happened to all the e's in Aberdeen - they took them. Then partied....
Brands love doing this nonsense. Ernst & Young thought it was very clever to shorten to EY, and Liverpool Victoria to LVE - for a "Lve life" meme.
It makes you want to vomit, doesn't it?
Ooh, a rare chance to agree with PB's warrior on woke!
PB is now called PLTCLBTTNG
As others have said, my big problem with it is that it is very 2010.
I didn't really understand Quilter as a rebrand for Old Mutual (or rather, part of Old Mutual), but it does feel a bit more 2018.
As with Standard Life, OLD Mutual has some negative connotations to potential and existing customers, so they said let us come up with a new name that reassures people, blanket wasn't an option so they went for the maker of blankets and quilts.
(I believe the name change was driven as much by the desire for a single unified platform for the various OM companies.)
I have no problem at all with Standard Life, and I found the name both grounding and reassuring.
I like Scottish Widows too, and I have no desire to be either Scottish or a Widow.
The name summons up a wonderful lawyer's phrase about trusts 'The wistful savings of a vanished hand'.
Installed Liz Truss and got trade deals with many other nations.
Installed Rishi Sunak and got furlough to get us through the economic crisis.
Led the country through a global pandemic
Got a world beating vaccine program.
Britain is the first major economy in the west to come out of the pandemic as a result.
And according to Leon he saved football.
I know that gnashes your teeth but if that's incompetence long may it continue.
Some counter-arguments.
1,2&3. No argument here: Johnson got Brexit done. At the price of f*cking up NI of course, but that was always the triangle of Brexit - one of freedom of movement, no border between NI & Ireland no border inside the UK. Johnson’s government chose the wall inside the UK between NI & the rest. It remains to be seen how this works out.
4. Liz Truss has thus far rolled over a bunch of existing trade deals. Meanwhile the /actual/ new trade deal negotiations (with Australia) are not exactly going to plan, are they?
5. Furlough? Sunak has zip to do with making Furlough happen; the real story here is how one of the most effective bureaucracies in the UK government (HMRC) & it’s ability to get money where it was needed as fast as possible saved the day. He’s very good at trying to take credit for the policy of course. Sadly, his eat-out-to-help-out campaign in the summer was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands later in the year, so even if we do give some credit to Sunak, we’re going to have to put those on the other side of the ledger.
6. I mean, technically. I guess Johnson was in charge, for all that was worth: How did we do? Worst excess death rate in North America + Western Europe.
7. Yup. Huge win for the government here: The reason our excess death rate isn’t far, far worse. The government has been saved from having to face up to the full scale of their incompetence by the success of the vaccine rollout.
8. Great. Again, so long as you regard the 150k+ dead are are mere rounding error as Boris (let the bodies pile up, I don’t care) Johnson apparently does.
9. I personally could not give a flying monkeys about football
Johnson has been a lucky general. The vaccines worked & the pandemic will pass into historical memory.
4. Yes they are going to plan. Should have a new deal very soon with Australia, plus CPTPP is looking closer, plus over the weekend we gained observer status with ASEAN and more is going on. Truss is a hard worker, infinitely better than the odious Liam Fox who had the department before her. Surely even you must acknowledge that?
5. Rather petty to deny any credit to the people who came up with the scheme. Yes the rollout has been great, and credit to HMRC for that, but that's an exception normally.
The UK is unusual in having data up to April already so the death toll is going to continue to rise in many nations but not here, but already UK's death toll is tied with the USA and below Poland, Portugal, Italy and others.
The UK will almost certainly end the pandemic with a lower excess death toll than many nations in Western Europe and the USA.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
I'm going to stand up for the senior person here. Imagine you are the post office and your IT team say you need to have a new system so that you can more easily identify theft and fraud. That is introduced and goes pick this up. You ask your IT department to confirm standard of proof and this is sufficient to get convictions in a court of law
This sounds to me like a tragic mistake. I don't know the details of the case but people often say they are innocent when they are not.
This is absolutely tragic for those prosecuted and jailed, and they should be compensated but it may not be the chief execs fault.
I appreciate that there are no villains who don't say it wasn't me guv but the telling thing was that on account of the PO being judge and jury they didn't disclose key information. Such as the evidence their own prosecution dept was using, and also that there were many people in the same boat but each was told "it's only you".
That to me speaks of a larger, corporate-level problem.
Plus their own investigators (Second Sight) told them there was a problem so actually all "their" people weren't saying it's ok.
And Vennells should always be asking "what did we miss" if she's any kind of a true leader and not just a passenger.
“Strong sense within loyalists and unionists that no one is listening to them + nobody in authority in Whitehall been honest with them about the consequences of Brexit. The most immediate step is therefore for the government, at the highest level, to be seen to take an interest."
I take it they've written an equally strong letter to the European Union as well?
Why would they do that? The EU aren't responsible for the hiving off of NI from the UK. That was our choice.
The EU have shamelessly weaponised Northern Ireland and the peace process to try to force the UK to accept a soft Brexit. They have made precisely zero concessions to the Unionists in the province in doing so in the hope that emotional and political blackmail would so the rest.
We are now seeing the consequences.
They are fully responsible for destabilising the peace process, even though I doubt these Remainiac ultras cannot see it, and I hold their approach beneath contempt.
Well the border has to go somewhere - we knew that from the start. We decided to leave, we had to provide the solution. We had options - roll over existing arrangements until a technical solution to an open border could be created, stay aligned (as we are...) to EEA standards to remove the need for checks, or put the border down the Irish Sea.
We chose the latter. You can hold the opinions of this leave voter beneath contempt if you like, but I never hear from you frothers any practical alternative that isn't the EU fully capitulating and abolishing its external border.
The EU "fully capitulating and abolishing its external border" is also what is known as a compromise since we'd be abolishing ours in Ireland too.
Its the only proper solution that respects the peace process.
That you find it unthinkable just shows how far you've swallowed their spin.
It does tickle me how Boris’s detractors seize on every little thing, thinking that the millions of voters will care as much as they do.
I don’t like everything he’s done, far from it. But he will win another majority with ease. It would be better for his opponents’ blood pressure to just have a relaxing pub lunch than get worked about what Dommo or Boris said to someone about someone or something.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if Bozo lashed out and said what’s being reported . Last year we had the reported Operation Last Gasp and previously Fxck Business.
Not sure why he decided to pick a fight with Cummings who has always been a vindictive nasty individual . The comments are believable in a way they wouldn’t have been with a different PM .
AIUI F*ck Business that was a single source rumour, never substantiated, from a source within the EU negotiating team, repeated endlessly like members of the Natural Law Party reiterating their belief in Health Policy by Yogic Flying.
I'd love to hear a firmer source for that if you have one.
A good time to drop anti-Brexit campaign memes?
The quote about coitus with business, was in reference to two or three high-profile pro-remain campaign groups, who were making nuisances of themselves during the Brexit negotiations.
No it fecking wasn't, I know someone who was there when Boris Johnson said it. It was about companies, not Pro Remain groups.
I'd also like to remind you that Boris Johnson refused to deny he had said it on several occasions.
Boris Johnson has refused to deny claims he used an expletive when asked about business concerns about Brexit.
The foreign secretary is reported to have used the swear word at a diplomatic gathering last week.
Asked about this in the Commons, he said he may have "expressed scepticism about some of the views of those who profess to speak up for business".
“Strong sense within loyalists and unionists that no one is listening to them + nobody in authority in Whitehall been honest with them about the consequences of Brexit. The most immediate step is therefore for the government, at the highest level, to be seen to take an interest."
I take it they've written an equally strong letter to the European Union as well?
Why would they do that? The EU aren't responsible for the hiving off of NI from the UK. That was our choice.
The EU have shamelessly weaponised Northern Ireland and the peace process to try to force the UK to accept a soft Brexit. They have made precisely zero concessions to the Unionists in the province in doing so in the hope that emotional and political blackmail would so the rest.
We are now seeing the consequences.
They are fully responsible for destabilising the peace process, even though I doubt these Remainiac ultras cannot see it, and I hold their approach beneath contempt.
Well the border has to go somewhere - we knew that from the start. We decided to leave, we had to provide the solution. We had options - roll over existing arrangements until a technical solution to an open border could be created, stay aligned (as we are...) to EEA standards to remove the need for checks, or put the border down the Irish Sea.
We chose the latter. You can hold the opinions of this leave voter beneath contempt if you like, but I never hear from you frothers any practical alternative that isn't the EU fully capitulating and abolishing its external border.
The EU "fully capitulating and abolishing its external border" is also what is known as a compromise since we'd be abolishing ours in Ireland too.
Its the only proper solution that respects the peace process.
That you find it unthinkable just shows how far you've swallowed their spin.
I suppose that as we were prepared to bin off part of the UK that we probably should have expected them to be just as mad.
The compromise solution was a techno-border. We proposed it. The EU asked if such technology currently existed, we said won't take long. The EU then asked if we would maintain the status quo for that short period and the people proposing it suddenly found objections. Because there is no techno-border solution that currently exists.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if Bozo lashed out and said what’s being reported . Last year we had the reported Operation Last Gasp and previously Fxck Business.
Not sure why he decided to pick a fight with Cummings who has always been a vindictive nasty individual . The comments are believable in a way they wouldn’t have been with a different PM .
The fact Cummings is saying he recorded confidential meetings seems bizarre - highly illegal but also gives an indication of how he was running/supporting the place. No wonder civil servants loathed him
Is it actually illegal?
(I have no idea - hence the question!)
It is very odd if he has in his personal possession emails from his work let alone audio recordings, especially if the latter were taken without the knowledge or consent of others. Work product belongs to the employer not the employee and it would normally be a breach of internal policies to take stuff home and keep it, as it appears he has done.
“Strong sense within loyalists and unionists that no one is listening to them + nobody in authority in Whitehall been honest with them about the consequences of Brexit. The most immediate step is therefore for the government, at the highest level, to be seen to take an interest."
I take it they've written an equally strong letter to the European Union as well?
Why would they do that? The EU aren't responsible for the hiving off of NI from the UK. That was our choice.
The EU have shamelessly weaponised Northern Ireland and the peace process to try to force the UK to accept a soft Brexit. They have made precisely zero concessions to the Unionists in the province in doing so in the hope that emotional and political blackmail would so the rest.
We are now seeing the consequences.
They are fully responsible for destabilising the peace process, even though I doubt these Remainiac ultras cannot see it, and I hold their approach beneath contempt.
Well the border has to go somewhere - we knew that from the start. We decided to leave, we had to provide the solution. We had options - roll over existing arrangements until a technical solution to an open border could be created, stay aligned (as we are...) to EEA standards to remove the need for checks, or put the border down the Irish Sea.
We chose the latter. You can hold the opinions of this leave voter beneath contempt if you like, but I never hear from you frothers any practical alternative that isn't the EU fully capitulating and abolishing its external border.
The EU "fully capitulating and abolishing its external border" is also what is known as a compromise since we'd be abolishing ours in Ireland too.
Its the only proper solution that respects the peace process.
That you find it unthinkable just shows how far you've swallowed their spin.
I suppose that as we were prepared to bin off part of the UK that we probably should have expected them to be just as mad.
The compromise solution was a techno-border. We proposed it. The EU asked if such technology currently existed, we said won't take long. The EU then asked if we would maintain the status quo for that short period and the people proposing it suddenly found objections. Because there is no techno-border solution that currently exists.
No techno-border will ever exist unless both parties are willing to compromise to create it. Necessity is the mother of invention.
You don't wait for technologies to exist, you decide that's what you're doing and then you create it - and have alternatives until you have done so.
It is very odd if he has in his personal possession emails from his work let alone audio recordings, especially if the latter were taken without the knowledge or consent of others. Work product belongs to the employer not the employee and it would normally be a breach of internal policies to take stuff home and keep it, as it appears he has done.
Installed Liz Truss and got trade deals with many other nations.
Installed Rishi Sunak and got furlough to get us through the economic crisis.
Led the country through a global pandemic
Got a world beating vaccine program.
Britain is the first major economy in the west to come out of the pandemic as a result.
And according to Leon he saved football.
I know that gnashes your teeth but if that's incompetence long may it continue.
Some counter-arguments.
1,2&3. No argument here: Johnson got Brexit done. At the price of f*cking up NI of course, but that was always the triangle of Brexit - one of freedom of movement, no border between NI & Ireland no border inside the UK. Johnson’s government chose the wall inside the UK between NI & the rest. It remains to be seen how this works out.
4. Liz Truss has thus far rolled over a bunch of existing trade deals. Meanwhile the /actual/ new trade deal negotiations (with Australia) are not exactly going to plan, are they?
5. Furlough? Sunak has zip to do with making Furlough happen; the real story here is how one of the most effective bureaucracies in the UK government (HMRC) & it’s ability to get money where it was needed as fast as possible saved the day. He’s very good at trying to take credit for the policy of course. Sadly, his eat-out-to-help-out campaign in the summer was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands later in the year, so even if we do give some credit to Sunak, we’re going to have to put those on the other side of the ledger.
6. I mean, technically. I guess Johnson was in charge, for all that was worth: How did we do? Worst excess death rate in North America + Western Europe.
7. Yup. Huge win for the government here: The reason our excess death rate isn’t far, far worse. The government has been saved from having to face up to the full scale of their incompetence by the success of the vaccine rollout.
8. Great. Again, so long as you regard the 150k+ dead are are mere rounding error as Boris (let the bodies pile up, I don’t care) Johnson apparently does.
9. I personally could not give a flying monkeys about football
Johnson has been a lucky general. The vaccines worked & the pandemic will pass into historical memory.
4. Yes they are going to plan. Should have a new deal very soon with Australia, plus CPTPP is looking closer, plus over the weekend we gained observer status with ASEAN and more is going on. Truss is a hard worker, infinitely better than the odious Liam Fox who had the department before her. Surely even you must acknowledge that?
5. Rather petty to deny any credit to the people who came up with the scheme. Yes the rollout has been great, and credit to HMRC for that, but that's an exception normally.
Come on, since when did ministers come up with a scheme like this? It was conceived, planned & implemented by HMRC, with Sunak’s sign off. Does he get some credit? Sure. Not very much though.
The UK is unusual in having data up to April already so the death toll is going to continue to rise in many nations but not here, but already UK's death toll is tied with the USA and below Poland, Portugal, Italy and others.
The UK will almost certainly end the pandemic with a lower excess death toll than many nations in Western Europe and the USA.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
I'm going to stand up for the senior person here. Imagine you are the post office and your IT team say you need to have a new system so that you can more easily identify theft and fraud. That is introduced and goes pick this up. You ask your IT department to confirm standard of proof and this is sufficient to get convictions in a court of law
This sounds to me like a tragic mistake. I don't know the details of the case but people often say they are innocent when they are not.
This is absolutely tragic for those prosecuted and jailed, and they should be compensated but it may not be the chief execs fault.
It goes way beyond that though. I am not sure if it was Vennells in the post at the time but, having commissioned an external inquiry to investigate the claims, the Post Office then decided to scrap it literally the day before it was due to report, seized all the evidence and suppressed the whole thing. That is not an innocent mistake, especially when at that stage people were being jailed. Needless top say the report was going to say there was clear evidence that the failings were in the Computer system and that there had been a clear miscarriage of justice.
At every stage the PO has tried to prevent proper investigation into this and that is utterly shameful and, in my view, approaches perversion of the course of justice.
It wouldn’t be a surprise if Bozo lashed out and said what’s being reported . Last year we had the reported Operation Last Gasp and previously Fxck Business.
Not sure why he decided to pick a fight with Cummings who has always been a vindictive nasty individual . The comments are believable in a way they wouldn’t have been with a different PM .
The fact Cummings is saying he recorded confidential meetings seems bizarre - highly illegal but also gives an indication of how he was running/supporting the place. No wonder civil servants loathed him
Is it actually illegal?
(I have no idea - hence the question!)
It is very odd if he has in his personal possession emails from his work let alone audio recordings, especially if the latter were taken without the knowledge or consent of others. Work product belongs to the employer not the employee and it would normally be a breach of internal policies to take stuff home and keep it, as it appears he has done.
Boris Johnson / Dominic Cummings and internal policies.
Those are 2 phrases which really don't go well together.
And if you think about what Cummings was brought in to do - ignoring standard practice seems almost expected behaviour.
Mr. Pioneers, isn't there meant to be a trusted trader scheme that the EU has signed up for but doesn't want to implement (apparently because there are more companies than they anticipated)?
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
Proof that the Welsh rollout >>>>>>> Scottish rollout.
Scotland and Wales both publish delivery data...
As of Monday 19 April:
total number of doses allocated: 4,429,780 total number of doses delivered: 3,935,850 and is the cumulative amount delivered by 23:59 18 April 2021. Doses in arms recorded on the 20th : 3,547,319
2,551,890 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been allocated to Wales. 2,375,310 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been delivered to Wales. and is the cumulative amount delivered by 23:59 on 18 April 2021. Welsh doses in arms on the 21st : 2,309,974
Does anyone know why the vaccines they are now releasing in just single years (i.e. 44 today) please?
I'm 43y 8m old and had been eagerly anticipating the 40-44 age group opening up. To find now I am 4 months too young is somewhat frustrating to say the least!
Website issues - it's probably easier to do it day by day over this week rather than watching it all fall over as it did when the 45-49 group all tried to get booked in at the same minute.
Have you tried the website though? It may let you book
I've been checking several times/day for the last week in anticipation of 40-44 opening on the backend before they updated the frontend and announced it.
I can see now if your 44th birthday is before 1st July that you're ok. So I'm actually just 2 months too old. Very annoying.
I will continue to check a few times/day just in case.
Mr. Pioneers, isn't there meant to be a trusted trader scheme that the EU has signed up for but doesn't want to implement (apparently because there are more companies than they anticipated)?
I believe so - we wanted to use it as a catch-all for all companies and all business which is not what it does.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Installed Liz Truss and got trade deals with many other nations.
Installed Rishi Sunak and got furlough to get us through the economic crisis.
Led the country through a global pandemic
Got a world beating vaccine program.
Britain is the first major economy in the west to come out of the pandemic as a result.
And according to Leon he saved football.
I know that gnashes your teeth but if that's incompetence long may it continue.
Some counter-arguments.
1,2&3. No argument here: Johnson got Brexit done. At the price of f*cking up NI of course, but that was always the triangle of Brexit - one of freedom of movement, no border between NI & Ireland no border inside the UK. Johnson’s government chose the wall inside the UK between NI & the rest. It remains to be seen how this works out.
4. Liz Truss has thus far rolled over a bunch of existing trade deals. Meanwhile the /actual/ new trade deal negotiations (with Australia) are not exactly going to plan, are they?
5. Furlough? Sunak has zip to do with making Furlough happen; the real story here is how one of the most effective bureaucracies in the UK government (HMRC) & it’s ability to get money where it was needed as fast as possible saved the day. He’s very good at trying to take credit for the policy of course. Sadly, his eat-out-to-help-out campaign in the summer was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands later in the year, so even if we do give some credit to Sunak, we’re going to have to put those on the other side of the ledger.
6. I mean, technically. I guess Johnson was in charge, for all that was worth: How did we do? Worst excess death rate in North America + Western Europe.
7. Yup. Huge win for the government here: The reason our excess death rate isn’t far, far worse. The government has been saved from having to face up to the full scale of their incompetence by the success of the vaccine rollout.
8. Great. Again, so long as you regard the 150k+ dead are are mere rounding error as Boris (let the bodies pile up, I don’t care) Johnson apparently does.
9. I personally could not give a flying monkeys about football
Johnson has been a lucky general. The vaccines worked & the pandemic will pass into historical memory.
4. Yes they are going to plan. Should have a new deal very soon with Australia, plus CPTPP is looking closer, plus over the weekend we gained observer status with ASEAN and more is going on. Truss is a hard worker, infinitely better than the odious Liam Fox who had the department before her. Surely even you must acknowledge that?
5. Rather petty to deny any credit to the people who came up with the scheme. Yes the rollout has been great, and credit to HMRC for that, but that's an exception normally.
The UK is unusual in having data up to April already so the death toll is going to continue to rise in many nations but not here, but already UK's death toll is tied with the USA and below Poland, Portugal, Italy and others.
The UK will almost certainly end the pandemic with a lower excess death toll than many nations in Western Europe and the USA.
Observer with ASEAN is virtually meaningless...... its about as effective as the Arab League, some FCDO wallah is there for photos, a handshake and a plaque
Does anyone know why the vaccines they are now releasing in just single years (i.e. 44 today) please?
I'm 43y 8m old and had been eagerly anticipating the 40-44 age group opening up. To find now I am 4 months too young is somewhat frustrating to say the least!
Website issues - it's probably easier to do it day by day over this week rather than watching it all fall over as it did when the 45-49 group all tried to get booked in at the same minute.
Have you tried the website though? It may let you book
I've been checking several times/day for the last week in anticipation of 40-44 opening on the backend before they updated the frontend and announced it.
I can see now if your 44th birthday is before 1st July that you're ok. So I'm actually just 2 months too old. Very annoying.
I will continue to check a few times/day just in case.
If your birthday is actually in the first few days of September this is the pay-off for the considerable advantages you had in your early educational years.
Installed Liz Truss and got trade deals with many other nations.
Installed Rishi Sunak and got furlough to get us through the economic crisis.
Led the country through a global pandemic
Got a world beating vaccine program.
Britain is the first major economy in the west to come out of the pandemic as a result.
And according to Leon he saved football.
I know that gnashes your teeth but if that's incompetence long may it continue.
Some counter-arguments.
1,2&3. No argument here: Johnson got Brexit done. At the price of f*cking up NI of course, but that was always the triangle of Brexit - one of freedom of movement, no border between NI & Ireland no border inside the UK. Johnson’s government chose the wall inside the UK between NI & the rest. It remains to be seen how this works out.
4. Liz Truss has thus far rolled over a bunch of existing trade deals. Meanwhile the /actual/ new trade deal negotiations (with Australia) are not exactly going to plan, are they?
5. Furlough? Sunak has zip to do with making Furlough happen; the real story here is how one of the most effective bureaucracies in the UK government (HMRC) & it’s ability to get money where it was needed as fast as possible saved the day. He’s very good at trying to take credit for the policy of course. Sadly, his eat-out-to-help-out campaign in the summer was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands later in the year, so even if we do give some credit to Sunak, we’re going to have to put those on the other side of the ledger.
6. I mean, technically. I guess Johnson was in charge, for all that was worth: How did we do? Worst excess death rate in North America + Western Europe.
7. Yup. Huge win for the government here: The reason our excess death rate isn’t far, far worse. The government has been saved from having to face up to the full scale of their incompetence by the success of the vaccine rollout.
8. Great. Again, so long as you regard the 150k+ dead are are mere rounding error as Boris (let the bodies pile up, I don’t care) Johnson apparently does.
9. I personally could not give a flying monkeys about football
Johnson has been a lucky general. The vaccines worked & the pandemic will pass into historical memory.
4. Yes they are going to plan. Should have a new deal very soon with Australia, plus CPTPP is looking closer, plus over the weekend we gained observer status with ASEAN and more is going on. Truss is a hard worker, infinitely better than the odious Liam Fox who had the department before her. Surely even you must acknowledge that?
5. Rather petty to deny any credit to the people who came up with the scheme. Yes the rollout has been great, and credit to HMRC for that, but that's an exception normally.
Come on, since when did ministers come up with a scheme like this? It was conceived, planned & implemented by HMRC, with Sunak’s sign off. Does he get some credit? Sure. Not very much though.
The UK is unusual in having data up to April already so the death toll is going to continue to rise in many nations but not here, but already UK's death toll is tied with the USA and below Poland, Portugal, Italy and others.
The UK will almost certainly end the pandemic with a lower excess death toll than many nations in Western Europe and the USA.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
+++++++++
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
And she's a minister of religion. Presumably gave sermons about truth and so on.
Mr. Pioneers, isn't there meant to be a trusted trader scheme that the EU has signed up for but doesn't want to implement (apparently because there are more companies than they anticipated)?
I believe so - we wanted to use it as a catch-all for all companies and all business which is not what it does.
Yep the EU didn't believe there was x,000 companies all of whom could be trusted which I suspect tells you a lot more about the EU then it does about the UK..
I'm looking at something similar at the moment and the issue is that you need the honest companies (99% of them) to do something so that the 1% left have zero excuse for the lies they currently make use of.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
@Phil has already answered. The lawyers at the PO involved in this have some very serious questions to answer. They appear to have broken every rule relating to disclosure in criminal cases.
Installed Liz Truss and got trade deals with many other nations.
Installed Rishi Sunak and got furlough to get us through the economic crisis.
Led the country through a global pandemic
Got a world beating vaccine program.
Britain is the first major economy in the west to come out of the pandemic as a result.
And according to Leon he saved football.
I know that gnashes your teeth but if that's incompetence long may it continue.
Some counter-arguments.
1,2&3. No argument here: Johnson got Brexit done. At the price of f*cking up NI of course, but that was always the triangle of Brexit - one of freedom of movement, no border between NI & Ireland no border inside the UK. Johnson’s government chose the wall inside the UK between NI & the rest. It remains to be seen how this works out.
4. Liz Truss has thus far rolled over a bunch of existing trade deals. Meanwhile the /actual/ new trade deal negotiations (with Australia) are not exactly going to plan, are they?
5. Furlough? Sunak has zip to do with making Furlough happen; the real story here is how one of the most effective bureaucracies in the UK government (HMRC) & it’s ability to get money where it was needed as fast as possible saved the day. He’s very good at trying to take credit for the policy of course. Sadly, his eat-out-to-help-out campaign in the summer was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands later in the year, so even if we do give some credit to Sunak, we’re going to have to put those on the other side of the ledger.
6. I mean, technically. I guess Johnson was in charge, for all that was worth: How did we do? Worst excess death rate in North America + Western Europe.
7. Yup. Huge win for the government here: The reason our excess death rate isn’t far, far worse. The government has been saved from having to face up to the full scale of their incompetence by the success of the vaccine rollout.
8. Great. Again, so long as you regard the 150k+ dead are are mere rounding error as Boris (let the bodies pile up, I don’t care) Johnson apparently does.
9. I personally could not give a flying monkeys about football
Johnson has been a lucky general. The vaccines worked & the pandemic will pass into historical memory.
4. Yes they are going to plan. Should have a new deal very soon with Australia, plus CPTPP is looking closer, plus over the weekend we gained observer status with ASEAN and more is going on. Truss is a hard worker, infinitely better than the odious Liam Fox who had the department before her. Surely even you must acknowledge that?
5. Rather petty to deny any credit to the people who came up with the scheme. Yes the rollout has been great, and credit to HMRC for that, but that's an exception normally.
Come on, since when did ministers come up with a scheme like this? It was conceived, planned & implemented by HMRC, with Sunak’s sign off. Does he get some credit? Sure. Not very much though.
The UK is unusual in having data up to April already so the death toll is going to continue to rise in many nations but not here, but already UK's death toll is tied with the USA and below Poland, Portugal, Italy and others.
The UK will almost certainly end the pandemic with a lower excess death toll than many nations in Western Europe and the USA.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
You might be wasting your metaphoric breath arguing with Philip. He is like a Trump supporting Q-Anon supporter.
In case you didn't know, in Philip's keyboard warrior world, Boris Johnson (like Trump, Johnson's populist alter-ego and model for behaviour) can do no wrong and is waging a covert war with the baby-eating Europeans. Boris is his saviour. Philip used to like Cummings, and defended him on many occasions, but Cummings is now the equivalent of Pence and must have been infiltrated by the alt-left. Cummings's opinion on Boris Johnson's competence is therefore questionable as he has now developed a taste for said baby eating. Philip is very certain of all these things, not because he has any real point of reference, but because he is, well, certain.
Does anyone know why the vaccines they are now releasing in just single years (i.e. 44 today) please?
I'm 43y 8m old and had been eagerly anticipating the 40-44 age group opening up. To find now I am 4 months too young is somewhat frustrating to say the least!
Website issues - it's probably easier to do it day by day over this week rather than watching it all fall over as it did when the 45-49 group all tried to get booked in at the same minute.
Have you tried the website though? It may let you book
I've been checking several times/day for the last week in anticipation of 40-44 opening on the backend before they updated the frontend and announced it.
I can see now if your 44th birthday is before 1st July that you're ok. So I'm actually just 2 months too old. Very annoying.
I will continue to check a few times/day just in case.
44 here. Received text 5 minutes ago. Booked 1st jab this coming Thursday, along with the 2nd jab in July. All worked perfectly.....
ALEX Salmond has said Scotland should borrow “as much as we possibly can” while dismissing the SNP’s economic plans as mere “motherhood and apple pie”.
The head of the pro-independence Alba Party said the country could take on debt “at no cost” because of record low-interest rates then “roll over that debt” when required.
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
I’m not ignoring the vaccines. They are the bright spot in this wasteland. They have saved the government from the consequences of it’s own actions, for which all of us should be grateful - it could have been so much worse.
Does anyone know why the vaccines they are now releasing in just single years (i.e. 44 today) please?
I'm 43y 8m old and had been eagerly anticipating the 40-44 age group opening up. To find now I am 4 months too young is somewhat frustrating to say the least!
Website issues - it's probably easier to do it day by day over this week rather than watching it all fall over as it did when the 45-49 group all tried to get booked in at the same minute.
Have you tried the website though? It may let you book
I've been checking several times/day for the last week in anticipation of 40-44 opening on the backend before they updated the frontend and announced it.
I can see now if your 44th birthday is before 1st July that you're ok. So I'm actually just 2 months too old. Very annoying.
I will continue to check a few times/day just in case.
If your birthday is actually in the first few days of September this is the pay-off for the considerable advantages you had in your early educational years.
No, last few days of August! I was always the youngest. I never thought of it as a problem, gave me something to work hard towards.
I noticed I said 2 months too old previously. I meant 2 months too young!
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
And she's a minister of religion. Presumably gave sermons about truth and so on.
She is also stepping away from her ministry while the investigation is on-going. I am trying to establish if she is still on the CoE's ethical investment advisory committee.
Seems clear to me that the government's management of the pandemic has been mixed: some good bits some bad bits. Generally the bad bits concentrated in last spring and last autumn, and the good bits this spring as well as with vaccination procurement. I would say the performance was on the whole quite poor until this January but looks to have ended better than it might have.
Go on social media and you are presented with essentially two options: a. The government has made a stunning success of things, anything that went wrong last year was mere teething troubles and besides, vaccines are the only thing that matters; b. The government is both malign and incompetent and directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
I think the government did a fantastic job in realising that a vaccine needed to be commissioned. Thanks to Hancock watching Contagion he said! After they commissioned it all of the work was done by the drug companies and the university researchers who did the actual work.
It is the stealing of the credit for their work to be handed to the PM that is wrong. Had the PM been an integral part of the operation - project managing the researchers for example, then him sharing in their glory would be ok. When my teams have done mega work I always ensure they get the credit knowing that I don't need to blow my own trumpet as me assembling / managing the team that did the work is already known.
With the PM and you lot it is the reverse. Screw the researchers. It was all Boris. The man who commissions the X-prize should get all the credit for the people who did the actual work and made the actual breakthroughs....
Interesting that Cummings has gone from public enemy number 1 to the fountain of original truth.
Yet again Labour make themselves look stupid.
"That lying bastard Dominic Cummings who you can't trust because he didn't follow the Covid rules, has now said something bad about Boris so we think their should be an independent inquiry"
5. Come on, since when did ministers come up with a scheme like this? It was conceived, planned & implemented by HMRC, with Sunak’s sign off. Does he get some credit? Sure. Not very much though.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
5. The buck stops with the people in charge. Yes Civil Servants will often offer an array of choices, but its Sunak's policy that he announced. You're being really petty denying that.
6, 7 & 8. That data, like the Economist data, shows the UK is not the worst in the west. You might want to read the data that's actually there. The fact that we have vaccines before other countries is because of the decisions made by this government, so you need to look at the big picture.
That and the Headland is nice but don't look in the opposite direction and even fans of 1960s brutalist architecture won't like the town centre.
It's the RN Museum. I once gave a presentation on Sea Harrier ops there. All ribald yarns of runs ashore in exotic ports were strictly haram so the audience had to make do with the mostly true story of how we once got 4 simulated AIM-120 kills against Marham wing Tornados in under 2 seconds.
What you can't see in the picture is the other side of it. Across the street there is a reeking Burger King full of smacked up chavs and an Asda where benzoed out teenage mothers with Croydon facelifts push their little shit machines around in prams.
You paint a very vivid picture. I bet your presentations are awesome.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
Does anyone know why the vaccines they are now releasing in just single years (i.e. 44 today) please?
I'm 43y 8m old and had been eagerly anticipating the 40-44 age group opening up. To find now I am 4 months too young is somewhat frustrating to say the least!
Website issues - it's probably easier to do it day by day over this week rather than watching it all fall over as it did when the 45-49 group all tried to get booked in at the same minute.
Have you tried the website though? It may let you book
I've been checking several times/day for the last week in anticipation of 40-44 opening on the backend before they updated the frontend and announced it.
I can see now if your 44th birthday is before 1st July that you're ok. So I'm actually just 2 months too old. Very annoying.
I will continue to check a few times/day just in case.
If your birthday is actually in the first few days of September this is the pay-off for the considerable advantages you had in your early educational years.
No, last few days of August! I was always the youngest. I never thought of it as a problem, gave me something to work hard towards.
I noticed I said 2 months too old previously. I meant 2 months too young!
Yes, if it worked as a challenge fine. There does seem to be some evidence, though, that children born later in the school year have to run that bit faster, early on anyway, to catch up. They are also less likely to be in sports teams.
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
It does tickle me how Boris’s detractors seize on every little thing, thinking that the millions of voters will care as much as they do.
I don’t like everything he’s done, far from it. But he will win another majority with ease. It would be better for his opponents’ blood pressure to just have a relaxing pub lunch than get worked about what Dommo or Boris said to someone about someone or something.
I know what you mean, one little thing, even Hitler built the motorways and Mussolini got the trains working on time, they can't all be bad....
Installed Liz Truss and got trade deals with many other nations.
Installed Rishi Sunak and got furlough to get us through the economic crisis.
Led the country through a global pandemic
Got a world beating vaccine program.
Britain is the first major economy in the west to come out of the pandemic as a result.
And according to Leon he saved football.
I know that gnashes your teeth but if that's incompetence long may it continue.
Some counter-arguments.
1,2&3. No argument here: Johnson got Brexit done. At the price of f*cking up NI of course, but that was always the triangle of Brexit - one of freedom of movement, no border between NI & Ireland no border inside the UK. Johnson’s government chose the wall inside the UK between NI & the rest. It remains to be seen how this works out.
4. Liz Truss has thus far rolled over a bunch of existing trade deals. Meanwhile the /actual/ new trade deal negotiations (with Australia) are not exactly going to plan, are they?
5. Furlough? Sunak has zip to do with making Furlough happen; the real story here is how one of the most effective bureaucracies in the UK government (HMRC) & it’s ability to get money where it was needed as fast as possible saved the day. He’s very good at trying to take credit for the policy of course. Sadly, his eat-out-to-help-out campaign in the summer was directly responsible for the deaths of thousands later in the year, so even if we do give some credit to Sunak, we’re going to have to put those on the other side of the ledger.
6. I mean, technically. I guess Johnson was in charge, for all that was worth: How did we do? Worst excess death rate in North America + Western Europe.
7. Yup. Huge win for the government here: The reason our excess death rate isn’t far, far worse. The government has been saved from having to face up to the full scale of their incompetence by the success of the vaccine rollout.
8. Great. Again, so long as you regard the 150k+ dead are are mere rounding error as Boris (let the bodies pile up, I don’t care) Johnson apparently does.
9. I personally could not give a flying monkeys about football
Johnson has been a lucky general. The vaccines worked & the pandemic will pass into historical memory.
4. Yes they are going to plan. Should have a new deal very soon with Australia, plus CPTPP is looking closer, plus over the weekend we gained observer status with ASEAN and more is going on. Truss is a hard worker, infinitely better than the odious Liam Fox who had the department before her. Surely even you must acknowledge that?
5. Rather petty to deny any credit to the people who came up with the scheme. Yes the rollout has been great, and credit to HMRC for that, but that's an exception normally.
The UK is unusual in having data up to April already so the death toll is going to continue to rise in many nations but not here, but already UK's death toll is tied with the USA and below Poland, Portugal, Italy and others.
The UK will almost certainly end the pandemic with a lower excess death toll than many nations in Western Europe and the USA.
Observer with ASEAN is virtually meaningless...... its about as effective as the Arab League, some FCDO wallah is there for photos, a handshake and a plaque
That's true but its a step on the way to getting CPTPP membership which will not be meaningless at all.
Interesting that Cummings has gone from public enemy number 1 to the fountain of original truth.
I am loathed to believe him but if he's got audio recordings then who am I to argue? And BoJo has spent his entire career lying, I think I trust BoJo less to be honest.
You are not loathed, CHB. Some of us are quite fond of you.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
Does anyone know why the vaccines they are now releasing in just single years (i.e. 44 today) please?
I'm 43y 8m old and had been eagerly anticipating the 40-44 age group opening up. To find now I am 4 months too young is somewhat frustrating to say the least!
Website issues - it's probably easier to do it day by day over this week rather than watching it all fall over as it did when the 45-49 group all tried to get booked in at the same minute.
Have you tried the website though? It may let you book
I've been checking several times/day for the last week in anticipation of 40-44 opening on the backend before they updated the frontend and announced it.
I can see now if your 44th birthday is before 1st July that you're ok. So I'm actually just 2 months too old. Very annoying.
I will continue to check a few times/day just in case.
44 here. Received text 5 minutes ago. Booked 1st jab this coming Thursday, along with the 2nd jab in July. All worked perfectly.....
Not for me it didn't. NHS England sent me the text having not updated their records that I am no longer in England...
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
I would hope they will be used by someone.
If the Dutch don't want them they should be donated to those who do.
They are fully responsible for destabilising the peace process
Fuck off
People like you voted for it, not the EU
Temper temper. Couldn’t you have found a pithy post on Twitter to submit ? People voted to leave the EU. The peace process issues are a consequence of the deal the govt got. The unionist politicians, as others have said, played their hand poorly are are the ones to blame as are diehard remain who yielded no compromise when they lost their vote.
Interesting that Cummings has gone from public enemy number 1 to the fountain of original truth.
Yet again Labour make themselves look stupid.
"That lying bastard Dominic Cummings who you can't trust because he didn't follow the Covid rules, has now said something bad about Boris so we think their should be an independent inquiry"
Cummings producing the documents and recordings of the meetings will be the decider. Cummings lied through his teeth once about the preposterous Barnard Castle Eye Test. So he's a liar. Liar lies endlessly including telling NutNut that he didn't have [ ] with [ ]. So I wouldn't trust either of them, except that we know that Cummings is a data geek and has proof.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
To be fair to Mr (?) tlg86, the consequence of answering his question in the negative, especially if the word 'now' was included in the question, would be 'what's the common factor then?' The answer was the computer. After all, in the years, (say) 1960-1990 how many sub-postmasters were prosecuted for theft?
Yes, if it worked as a challenge fine. There does seem to be some evidence, though, that children born later in the school year have to run that bit faster, early on anyway, to catch up. They are also less likely to be in sports teams.
The sports is an interesting one. I didn't really have any sporting ability so I wasn't in any sports teams but you're right that age may well have been a factor. I discovered I was a very good 5-a-side goalie as a teenager and went from being last picked to first picked for teams overnight. Too late for it to go anywhere. One of my regrets in life so far, but a fairly minor one in all honesty.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
Oh, I think most understand the need. They'll even say, perhaps even believe, that they welcome being told such things. But in reality?
It seems depressingly common that you get what I'd call organisational dissonance - where the culture and practice is one way even as they genuinely believe it is another way (contrasted with those that know they pay lip service).
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
It was "Jesus Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey". Best line of the show!
Interesting that Cummings has gone from public enemy number 1 to the fountain of original truth.
Yet again Labour make themselves look stupid.
"That lying bastard Dominic Cummings who you can't trust because he didn't follow the Covid rules, has now said something bad about Boris so we think their should be an independent inquiry"
Couldn't you say exactly the same in reverse about the Conservatives?
"Dominic has explained that he merely went to Barnard Castle as a keen amateur optician and, as a shrewd judge of character, Boris has decided he is physically incapable of lying so that is an end to the matter... until he says anything against Boris, at which point he's a dastardly fraudster and no further inquiry is needed."
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
Or a conspiracy to cover up the initial cockup. Which steadily grew in size.
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
I’m not ignoring the vaccines. They are the bright spot in this wasteland. They have saved the government from the consequences of it’s own actions, for which all of us should be grateful - it could have been so much worse.
But this isn’t true either. The government has done well in other areas. eg After a dodgy start we have possibly the best testing in the world, certainly by scale. We also have excellent gene sequencing - again world class. These two are hugely important for the future as we seek to contain variants
I suppose you could argue “yes but that’s thanks to scientists not Boris” - but then many of the early errors - “don’t wear masks”, “no point in closed borders” - were likewise thanks to science. Bad science from foolish scientists
The government is either responsible for the entire pandemic response, or it isn’t. You can’t cherry pick the bits you prefer, just because they make Boris look worse (or better)
The truth is mixed. The UK started the Plague Year really badly but has ended (God willing, inshallah, fingers X’d) really well. People remember endings more than beginnings - see last night’s Oscars - so the government will probably get more credit than it deserves. Now we wait for the economic aftermath
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
So the EU is going to sue AZ for failing to deliver a product that they aren't even using?! Send them to India right now.
This time into failings at Greater Manchester Police, the police force which managed to lose 80,000 crimes in one year. This raises questions not just about the police force but also about political oversight which is the responsibility of the Mayor.
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
I’m not ignoring the vaccines. They are the bright spot in this wasteland. They have saved the government from the consequences of it’s own actions, for which all of us should be grateful - it could have been so much worse.
But this isn’t true either. The government has done well in other areas. eg After a dodgy start we have possibly the best testing in the world, certainly by scale. We also have excellent gene sequencing - again world class. These two are hugely important for the future as we seek to contain variants
I suppose you could argue “yes but that’s thanks to scientists not Boris” - but then many of the early errors - “don’t wear masks”, “no point in closed borders” - were likewise thanks to science. Bad science from foolish scientists
The government is either responsible for the entire pandemic response, or it isn’t. You can’t cherry pick the bits you prefer, just because they make Boris look worse (or better)
The truth is mixed. The UK started the Plague Year really badly but has ended (God willing, inshallah, fingers X’d) really well. People remember endings more than beginnings - see last night’s Oscars - so the government will probably get more credit than it deserves. Now we wait for the economic aftermath
The government is responsible for *commissioning* the vaccine, not for the development or roll-out of the vaccine. I credit Matt Hancock for his foresight in getting in early with "we're going to need a vaccine". But that we got AZ/Oxford done at the speed we did? How is that down to Boris Johnson...?
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
This is the crucial point - it's very hard for an individual employee to go against the institution. They risk losing their job AND being ignored. When the dam finally breaks, it becomes clear an awful lot of people were aware about what was going on, and kept their heads down.
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
In the light of what is unfolding in India, that is stomach-turning.
The shambolic, duplicitous, idiotic, deeply destructive behaviour of the EU and its member states, vis a vis Astra Zeneca, must never be forgotten. Truly Shameful
This time into failings at Greater Manchester Police, the police force which managed to lose 80,000 crimes in one year. This raises questions not just about the police force but also about political oversight which is the responsibility of the Mayor.
I blame "H". The OGC have the fingers into everything.
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
Why?
The UK won't use a very large proportion of the AZ doses we ordered either. Mostly because AZ are still finding it really difficult to produce their vaccine in bulk; by the time they do, most Europeans will have been dosed up with something else.
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
The initial advice on masks was certainly wrong but given the country has been masked up since last summer they're certainly not the magic bullet some claimed they would be.
A couple of mistakes which were made and still not recognised are:
1) The failure to emphasise ventilation.
2) The obsession of shutting down unessential but safe outdoor activities - golf courses, botanical gardens etc.
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
Maybe send them to India or Brazil, if they really don’t want them?
More morons trying to play politics with vaccines, when the pandemic is worse today than it’s ever been. If you’ve convinced your own people not to want jabs, send them to people who might appreciate not dying.
The tories have an essentially imperialist view of Australia and Truss got a sandy quim when they didn't fall into line like a dutiful colony.
The UK-EU discussions seem entirely about insulting each other and people cheered on the side they supported as though the attitude helped negotiations, so maybe that's just how things go these days.
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
It was "Jesus Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey". Best line of the show!
I love the way in which the show has become a parody of itself, yet manages somehow to stay a fairly compelling drama.
Yes, if it worked as a challenge fine. There does seem to be some evidence, though, that children born later in the school year have to run that bit faster, early on anyway, to catch up. They are also less likely to be in sports teams.
The sports is an interesting one. I didn't really have any sporting ability so I wasn't in any sports teams but you're right that age may well have been a factor. I discovered I was a very good 5-a-side goalie as a teenager and went from being last picked to first picked for teams overnight. Too late for it to go anywhere. One of my regrets in life so far, but a fairly minor one in all honesty.
One of Malcolm Gladwell's books discusses this. Children born soon after the cut-off [point for each year are more likely to be bigger and stronger than this born shortly before it. Our eldest son was two months premature, and seemed to be a slow developer. However, when we realised we had to knock two months off his age since birth to get the correct figure for age since conception his development was more timely.
5. Come on, since when did ministers come up with a scheme like this? It was conceived, planned & implemented by HMRC, with Sunak’s sign off. Does he get some credit? Sure. Not very much though.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
5. The buck stops with the people in charge. Yes Civil Servants will often offer an array of choices, but its Sunak's policy that he announced. You're being really petty denying that.
6, 7 & 8. That data, like the Economist data, shows the UK is not the worst in the west. You might want to read the data that's actually there. The fact that we have vaccines before other countries is because of the decisions made by this government, so you need to look at the big picture.
Edited to clean up.
It’s interesting that you’ve dropped all the NI/UK border issues on Brexit from your response Philip.
Anyway. On 4, I look forward to seeing Truss actually deliver something new. Until then, I don’t regard rolling over existing trade deals as much of an achievement.
On 5: A simple question: if a /different/ chancellor had been in charge, do you think the policy options shown to them would have been any different? If not, then why should Sunak take credit for picking the obvious policy choice from the menu on offer? If on the other hand Furlough was his personal policy, worked out in advance then I’m all ears & will be delighted to retract my previous statements & extend full credit.
6,7,8: My “the West” has a historical bias admittedly, I should probably include Portugal, which has done worse than we have in excess deaths / million population. Still, we exceed every other G7 nation, every nation in western Europe (except Portugal) + North America in excess deaths / head population. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the government’s pandemic response, is it?
If all these places were much of a muchness, then we could just say that we did about as badly as anyone else, yet we /know/ that other countries have done vastly better & have refused to learn from them. There-in lies the fault.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
To be fair to Mr (?) tlg86, the consequence of answering his question in the negative, especially if the word 'now' was included in the question, would be 'what's the common factor then?' The answer was the computer. After all, in the years, (say) 1960-1990 how many sub-postmasters were prosecuted for theft?
The issue with that argument is how many might have been caught had systems been computerised then?
The subject really does boil down to why did PO end up in this situation and the answer is they trusted their spent so much money on their IT system that they completely trusted it.
After all it was a very expensive system and they had been told it was expensive because it worked.
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
I’m not ignoring the vaccines. They are the bright spot in this wasteland. They have saved the government from the consequences of it’s own actions, for which all of us should be grateful - it could have been so much worse.
But this isn’t true either. The government has done well in other areas. eg After a dodgy start we have possibly the best testing in the world, certainly by scale. We also have excellent gene sequencing - again world class. These two are hugely important for the future as we seek to contain variants
I suppose you could argue “yes but that’s thanks to scientists not Boris” - but then many of the early errors - “don’t wear masks”, “no point in closed borders” - were likewise thanks to science. Bad science from foolish scientists
The government is either responsible for the entire pandemic response, or it isn’t. You can’t cherry pick the bits you prefer, just because they make Boris look worse (or better)
The truth is mixed. The UK started the Plague Year really badly but has ended (God willing, inshallah, fingers X’d) really well. People remember endings more than beginnings - see last night’s Oscars - so the government will probably get more credit than it deserves. Now we wait for the economic aftermath
The government is responsible for *commissioning* the vaccine, not for the development or roll-out of the vaccine. I credit Matt Hancock for his foresight in getting in early with "we're going to need a vaccine". But that we got AZ/Oxford done at the speed we did? How is that down to Boris Johnson...?
That is largely down to luck that a similar vaccine had been in development for years, and could be repurposed. As was the case with Pfizer and Moderna.
It underlines the case for governments which give long term support to basic research. Expecting detailed scientific nouse from government is a bit silly.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
To be fair to Mr (?) tlg86, the consequence of answering his question in the negative, especially if the word 'now' was included in the question, would be 'what's the common factor then?' The answer was the computer. After all, in the years, (say) 1960-1990 how many sub-postmasters were prosecuted for theft?
It sounds like they’d convinced themselves - with little evidence - that there was a massive theft problem, and the funky new computer system was going to expose the scale of the problem.
My Boris to leave April 2021-June 2021 is looking a lot less red than when I placed it. I may cash out now and eat the much smaller loss.
Conversely, the unrealized profit on my long at 1.8 on 'Johnson to still be PM on 1st July 2022' is suddenly just one half of what it was. I might hold my nerve or I might cover back my stake. Not sure.
Top up.
Yes, that's normally the way to go. Against the OTT market reaction.
The initial advice on masks was certainly wrong but given the country has been masked up since last summer they're certainly not the magic bullet some claimed they would be.
I assumed the initial advice on not wearing face masks was given because the Gov't thought they wouldn't be worn correctly and endlessly touched. That and the supply was limited but they couldn't say it. As I had some FFP2 dust masks to hand I didn't follow it and masked up in shops before it was the official advice...
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
Maybe send them to India or Brazil, if they really don’t want them?
More morons trying to play politics with vaccines, when the pandemic is worse today than it’s ever been. If you’ve convinced your own people not to want jabs, send them to people who might appreciate not dying.
You can't send doses of vaccine that don't currently exist.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
And it's especially hard if you've been there a long time - I find it easier to point stuff out because I have enough money to live with the consequences of being asked to clear my desk.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
I found it easier the longer I had been there - partly because I had established my credibility and toughness (the first time I called out some serious bad behaviour it did not go down well but I had my boss's backing and just kept going. The individual concerned was later put in front of one of the Parliamentary committees on Banking Misbehaviour and had a very uncomfortable time claiming not to know anything), partly because there was external pressure on the organisation ie a regulator and partly because of the context. It was obvious that banks were cocking a lot up even if many did not want to admit how widespread it was.
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
Or a conspiracy to cover up the initial cockup. Which steadily grew in size.
I think that is most likely and from personal experience of being involved in several campaigns involving public sector cockups it seems to be the norm in the public sector. I find it difficult to understand why people can't just hold their hands up when mistakes are made. We all make them.
Most of the 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines ordered by the Netherlands to fight the coronavirus will go unused, the head of the Dutch public health institute’s vaccination department has said.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
It was "Jesus Mary and Joseph and the wee donkey". Best line of the show!
I love the way in which the show has become a parody of itself, yet manages somehow to stay a fairly compelling drama.
Not much incentive to join the OCG, you either get bumped off by one of your own or killed by the police in a shoot out.
I also love the way that corrupt prison officers seem to be able to swap prisons with ease so they can intimidate or murder prisoners (and never get caught).
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
Or a conspiracy to cover up the initial cockup. Which steadily grew in size.
I think that is most likely and from personal experience of being involved in several campaigns involving public sector cockups it seems to be the norm in the public sector. I find it difficult to understand why people can't just hold their hands up when mistakes are made. We all make them.
It is the sensible approach as it won’t stay hidden forever and it just reduces the potential damage.
In this case the damage was destroyed careers, destroyed lives and worst case people,took,their own lives.
"The Prime Minister knowingly killed thousands of his own people and he must now be removed from office."
A great example of the hysteria that clouds the minds of Johnson’s haters. When you accuse a mainstream politician of murdering tens of thousands of his own people you just come over as a nut.
We had a prolific thread header writer (ex of this parish) who used to say the exact same thing as well.
So much of it derives from an intense irritation at being defeated by someone whose values and policies they despise.
They also believe that they are more intelligent and deserving that him so it’s just not right that he is popular
The Tories *should* win Pools. Should. However, with the press mood swinging pretty firmly, I wonder if external factors will come into play.
LOCAL FACTORS: Collapse of Labour across Teesside, Labour civil war in Hartlepool, Brexit, Dr Paul being an arch-remainer, Dr Paul being at best disingenuous over the hospital, Tory Mayor to sweep re-election, Tory PCC likely to win both on the same day as the byelection, Tory cash flowing into seats with new Tory MPs so time for Pools to get its own bribe money.
But...
NATIONAL FACTORS: 1. Let the Bodies Pile High. I have been making this point for ages that Liar had let tens of thousands die as an act of government policy. Now it is on the front page of the Hate Mail and apparently Cummings has audio recordings to prove it. The Mail will pile on this extensively, it will be almost constant revelations until Cummings rocks up to the committee with the hard evidence. 2. Brexit isn't exactly working. Interesting piece from Cornish fishermen in the Grauniad directly quoting betrayed Tories no longer voting Tory 3. ESL-gate. Despite Leon's frothing about Boris saving Football, it appears that he had green-lit the ESL and then lied about it. I expect more will come out on that front - especially if the bill for the English clubs piles up as is being threatened.
So who knows where this goes. I described it as a "nailed on Tory win" and had it been last Thursday I think it would have been. A week on Thursday? A toss-up.
Final point. Don't take the lack of Tory candidates as being indicative of a lack of Tory activists. There is no point the Tories running candidates against Tory independents and potentially letting Labour back in. They flood target seats with activists from all over - the one and only time a Tory knocked on my Thornaby door they had been brought up from Surrey. The same was true in 2017 and 2015.
On ESL the conversation was between Woodward and a SPAD with Boris doing a drop ins. Both no10 and Woodward have denied that ESL was discussed (and in a Mandy Rice-Davies approach Woodward said he couldn’t have discussed it as he didn’t know about it)
Fab. So having gone behind the PM's back to give assurances directly contrary to the PM's views, will the PM now sack the CoS for such an egregious mistake? Downing Street green lit the destruction of football. If he doesn't sack him he supports him and his actions.
Both sides have said ESL was not discussed at the meeting.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
And she's a minister of religion. Presumably gave sermons about truth and so on.
She is also stepping away from her ministry while the investigation is on-going. I am trying to establish if she is still on the CoE's ethical investment advisory committee.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
What interests me is what happened to the cash.
AIUI Horizon booked the income from the transaction but then said that the cash had never been paid in.
The postmasters said that they had paid the cash in but the system didn’t recognise that.
So that means there should have been more cash in the PO bank account than the Horizon balance sheet showed? So what did the auditors do to reconcile?
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
What interests me is what happened to the cash.
AIUI Horizon booked the income from the transaction but then said that the cash had never been paid in.
The postmasters said that they had paid the cash in but the system didn’t recognise that.
So that means there should have been more cash in the PO bank account than the Horizon balance sheet showed? So what did the auditors do to reconcile?
The amounts may have been sizeable for some of the postmasters, but added up were tiny rounding errors when it comes to the national volume of post office transactions.
"She basically instructed her team to reassure her that everything was OK. And now relies on the defence that, at the time, no-one told her that anything was wrong That’s no defence, and there much surely be at least one whistleblower in the PO IT or audit departments who tried to say something at the time.
The correct answer is almost always a cock-up rather than a conspiracy, but the more one reads about this case, the more it looks like a conspiracy that ruined hundreds of lives and requires people be held accountable."
Looks to me like the CPS are also seriously at fault here.....
The CPS were never involved: due to a quirk of history the Post Office has it’s own prosecuting team of lawyers & these were all private prosecutions carried out by the PO itself.
I did not know that, very interesting.
AIUI, from the broadcasts and from Private Eye, as a result of the PO's 'independence' the police weren't involved either.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
And hopefully someone in the plod might have asked “is it likely you’d have quite so many criminals working for you?”
The question which should have been asked but was't was this: "Has there actually been a crime?" Because this is the key fact here: there was no fraud. The computer system created a crime which did not exist.
I’d still like to see her and others prosecuted for, appropriately, theft and false accounting against the subpostmasters.
It is hard to see this as decency when she has been so reticent until now. And she still hangs onto well paid positions at Dunelm and Morrisons. I rather suspect she is starting to realise that the calls for her to be prosecuted and stripped of her honour, coming from MPs and members of the Lords, might actually come to something.
How would she apologise without affecting the live case?
(No idea how that relates to legal restrictions.)
It's a fair point that acting earlier might have been seen as affecting the case. But the outcome of the case was never really in doubt, and hanging on to all her positions for so long was very clearly in her self interest.
The BBC radio documentary on the Post Office Scandal is well worth a listen. It was clear that Vennells put huge pressure on her team to give her the answers she wanted (emails show she said things like "I need to be able to say that the system data is reliable"), rather than making any genuine attempt to investigate, so it was very difficult for anyone lower down in the organisation to step up and admit the source and scale of the problem. For that alone, she carries a lot of responsibilty.
It does sound like that Vennells didn't attempt to process an even handed investigation here. Mind you, this is not dissimilar to the way the Police work. They get someone in the frame, find (or manufacture) evidence to support their view and suppress any contradictory evidence. The CPS then ignore the rights and wrongs are just concerend with the chances of conviction.
Good investigators are hard to find. Not least because they need to have nerves of steel to resist precisely this sort of pressure. They are the one set of people who really need to speak truth to power within companies.
It’s quite amazing, that no-one wanted to be the person to bang on Vennells’ door and tell her there was an almighty screw-up - even as people were being jailed and others were committing suicide.
Oh I'd have had no difficulty. I've had to tell plenty of senior people things they really really don't want to hear. But it's not an easy position to be in and having the sort of team and people who understand that this is what their job involves is not common, not least because not many organisations understand the need for this.
What interests me is what happened to the cash.
AIUI Horizon booked the income from the transaction but then said that the cash had never been paid in.
The postmasters said that they had paid the cash in but the system didn’t recognise that.
So that means there should have been more cash in the PO bank account than the Horizon balance sheet showed? So what did the auditors do to reconcile?
The amounts may have been sizeable for some of the postmasters, but added up were tiny rounding errors when it comes to the national volume of post office transactions.
Isn't that EXACTLY how to hide a skimming operation from a few lines of code in umpteen millions? The rounding error...
Comments
5. Rather petty to deny any credit to the people who came up with the scheme. Yes the rollout has been great, and credit to HMRC for that, but that's an exception normally.
6, 7 & 8: You're acting under a misapprehension and mistaken belief that the UK's data is bad? "Worst in North America and Western Europe"? That's just not true. Categorically, 100% untrue: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
The UK is unusual in having data up to April already so the death toll is going to continue to rise in many nations but not here, but already UK's death toll is tied with the USA and below Poland, Portugal, Italy and others.
The UK will almost certainly end the pandemic with a lower excess death toll than many nations in Western Europe and the USA.
That to me speaks of a larger, corporate-level problem.
Plus their own investigators (Second Sight) told them there was a problem so actually all "their" people weren't saying it's ok.
And Vennells should always be asking "what did we miss" if she's any kind of a true leader and not just a passenger.
Its the only proper solution that respects the peace process.
That you find it unthinkable just shows how far you've swallowed their spin.
I don’t like everything he’s done, far from it. But he will win another majority with ease. It would be better for his opponents’ blood pressure to just have a relaxing pub lunch than get worked about what Dommo or Boris said to someone about someone or something.
And the excess death toll is about 30,000 lower than that number. 🤦♂️
The compromise solution was a techno-border. We proposed it. The EU asked if such technology currently existed, we said won't take long. The EU then asked if we would maintain the status quo for that short period and the people proposing it suddenly found objections. Because there is no techno-border solution that currently exists.
Now I know the poilice haven't that good a track record on investigations sometimes, but they are, I think, more likely to take the unlikely....... the XXXXX machine doesn't work into account than the PO 'investigators' did. And they might have asked more searching questions of Fujitsu.
You don't wait for technologies to exist, you decide that's what you're doing and then you create it - and have alternatives until you have done so.
Well, if you say so, it must be true... Come on, since when did ministers come up with a scheme like this? It was conceived, planned & implemented by HMRC, with Sunak’s sign off. Does he get some credit? Sure. Not very much though. Source: https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386938 (FT Coronavirus tracker). UK total excess deaths.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
At every stage the PO has tried to prevent proper investigation into this and that is utterly shameful and, in my view, approaches perversion of the course of justice.
Those are 2 phrases which really don't go well together.
And if you think about what Cummings was brought in to do - ignoring standard practice seems almost expected behaviour.
Scotland and Wales both publish delivery data...
As of Monday 19 April:
total number of doses allocated: 4,429,780
total number of doses delivered: 3,935,850 and is the cumulative amount delivered by 23:59 18 April 2021.
Doses in arms recorded on the 20th : 3,547,319
2,551,890 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been allocated to Wales.
2,375,310 doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been delivered to Wales. and is the cumulative amount delivered by 23:59 on 18 April 2021.
Welsh doses in arms on the 21st : 2,309,974
Scottish efficiency: 90.12%
Welsh efficiency : 97.2%
I can see now if your 44th birthday is before 1st July that you're ok. So I'm actually just 2 months too old. Very annoying.
I will continue to check a few times/day just in case.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
+++++++++
Ridiculous. A nation’s pandemic response must be seen in the round. In its totality. From quarantine to PPE to lockdown to testing to sequencing to vaccines to recovery funding. All must be included in any reckoning. And of these responses, vaccines seem to be one of the most important: the only real escape route (we hope) once the virus takes a hold
Ignoring vaccines so you can paint the British government in a less flattering way is as dumb as a Tory partisan glibly passing over those early errors - mask advice, failed quarantine - to exult in the rollout of jabs
In short, what you are saying is: the incompetent UK government has only been been saved by the fact the UK government is competent
I'm looking at something similar at the moment and the issue is that you need the honest companies (99% of them) to do something so that the 1% left have zero excuse for the lies they currently make use of.
Again, the UK government has been saved by the vaccines from the consequences of their own incompetence (Boris saves Christmas! Give me strength...). Yes, we’re probably going to end up with a lower excess death rate than the rest of Europe going forwards, but the history of the last year has been /dire/. Worst in the West. That’s us.
You might be wasting your metaphoric breath arguing with Philip. He is like a Trump supporting Q-Anon supporter.
In case you didn't know, in Philip's keyboard warrior world, Boris Johnson (like Trump, Johnson's populist alter-ego and model for behaviour) can do no wrong and is waging a covert war with the baby-eating Europeans. Boris is his saviour. Philip used to like Cummings, and defended him on many occasions, but Cummings is now the equivalent of Pence and must have been infiltrated by the alt-left. Cummings's opinion on Boris Johnson's competence is therefore questionable as he has now developed a taste for said baby eating. Philip is very certain of all these things, not because he has any real point of reference, but because he is, well, certain.
ALEX Salmond has said Scotland should borrow “as much as we possibly can” while dismissing the SNP’s economic plans as mere “motherhood and apple pie”.
The head of the pro-independence Alba Party said the country could take on debt “at no cost” because of record low-interest rates then “roll over that debt” when required.
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/19257956.salmond-scotland-borrow-much-possible-rebuild-covid/?ref=twtrec
I’m not ignoring the vaccines. They are the bright spot in this wasteland. They have saved the government from the consequences of it’s own actions, for which all of us should be grateful - it could have been so much worse.
I noticed I said 2 months too old previously. I meant 2 months too young!
Go on social media and you are presented with essentially two options: a. The government has made a stunning success of things, anything that went wrong last year was mere teething troubles and besides, vaccines are the only thing that matters; b. The government is both malign and incompetent and directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
It is the stealing of the credit for their work to be handed to the PM that is wrong. Had the PM been an integral part of the operation - project managing the researchers for example, then him sharing in their glory would be ok. When my teams have done mega work I always ensure they get the credit knowing that I don't need to blow my own trumpet as me assembling / managing the team that did the work is already known.
With the PM and you lot it is the reverse. Screw the researchers. It was all Boris. The man who commissions the X-prize should get all the credit for the people who did the actual work and made the actual breakthroughs....
"That lying bastard Dominic Cummings who you can't trust because he didn't follow the Covid rules, has now said something bad about Boris so we think their should be an independent inquiry"
5. The buck stops with the people in charge. Yes Civil Servants will often offer an array of choices, but its Sunak's policy that he announced. You're being really petty denying that.
6, 7 & 8. That data, like the Economist data, shows the UK is not the worst in the west. You might want to read the data that's actually there. The fact that we have vaccines before other countries is because of the decisions made by this government, so you need to look at the big picture.
Edited to clean up.
Telegraph live blog
For the love of God, Jesus, Mary and the wee donkey.
Some of us are quite fond of you.
I don't think many people within the organisation were in a position to do that - and that is a problem that is virtually impossible to fix.
If the Dutch don't want them they should be donated to those who do.
The answer was the computer.
After all, in the years, (say) 1960-1990 how many sub-postmasters were prosecuted for theft?
I wish Labour had a leader who could find a well crafted line that could get the newsrooms buzzing
It seems depressingly common that you get what I'd call organisational dissonance - where the culture and practice is one way even as they genuinely believe it is another way (contrasted with those that know they pay lip service).
"Dominic has explained that he merely went to Barnard Castle as a keen amateur optician and, as a shrewd judge of character, Boris has decided he is physically incapable of lying so that is an end to the matter... until he says anything against Boris, at which point he's a dastardly fraudster and no further inquiry is needed."
Which steadily grew in size.
I suppose you could argue “yes but that’s thanks to scientists not Boris” - but then many of the early errors - “don’t wear masks”, “no point in closed borders” - were likewise thanks to science. Bad science from foolish scientists
The government is either responsible for the entire pandemic response, or it isn’t. You can’t cherry pick the bits you prefer, just because they make Boris look worse (or better)
The truth is mixed. The UK started the Plague Year really badly but has ended (God willing, inshallah, fingers X’d) really well. People remember endings more than beginnings - see last night’s Oscars - so the government will probably get more credit than it deserves. Now we wait for the economic aftermath
This time into failings at Greater Manchester Police, the police force which managed to lose 80,000 crimes in one year. This raises questions not just about the police force but also about political oversight which is the responsibility of the Mayor.
When the dam finally breaks, it becomes clear an awful lot of people were aware about what was going on, and kept their heads down.
The shambolic, duplicitous, idiotic, deeply destructive behaviour of the EU and its member states, vis a vis Astra Zeneca, must never be forgotten. Truly Shameful
This thread has been withdrawn due to side effects
The UK won't use a very large proportion of the AZ doses we ordered either.
Mostly because AZ are still finding it really difficult to produce their vaccine in bulk; by the time they do, most Europeans will have been dosed up with something else.
I imagine they'll go in the global pot.
Nations > 5 million pop that are likely as accurate as our ONS
Denmark
UAE
Austria
Czechia
Singapore
Israel
Hong Kong
Interestingly the CFR in Singapore specifically is 0.04% which is much lower than any other high test nation.
Whole bunch of African countries including Nigeria near the bottom...
A couple of mistakes which were made and still not recognised are:
1) The failure to emphasise ventilation.
2) The obsession of shutting down unessential but safe outdoor activities - golf courses, botanical gardens etc.
More morons trying to play politics with vaccines, when the pandemic is worse today than it’s ever been. If you’ve convinced your own people not to want jabs, send them to people who might appreciate not dying.
Our eldest son was two months premature, and seemed to be a slow developer. However, when we realised we had to knock two months off his age since birth to get the correct figure for age since conception his development was more timely.
Anyway. On 4, I look forward to seeing Truss actually deliver something new. Until then, I don’t regard rolling over existing trade deals as much of an achievement.
On 5: A simple question: if a /different/ chancellor had been in charge, do you think the policy options shown to them would have been any different? If not, then why should Sunak take credit for picking the obvious policy choice from the menu on offer? If on the other hand Furlough was his personal policy, worked out in advance then I’m all ears & will be delighted to retract my previous statements & extend full credit.
6,7,8: My “the West” has a historical bias admittedly, I should probably include Portugal, which has done worse than we have in excess deaths / million population. Still, we exceed every other G7 nation, every nation in western Europe (except Portugal) + North America in excess deaths / head population. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the government’s pandemic response, is it?
If all these places were much of a muchness, then we could just say that we did about as badly as anyone else, yet we /know/ that other countries have done vastly better & have refused to learn from them. There-in lies the fault.
The subject really does boil down to why did PO end up in this situation and the answer is they trusted their spent so much money on their IT system that they completely trusted it.
After all it was a very expensive system and they had been told it was expensive because it worked.
It underlines the case for governments which give long term support to basic research. Expecting detailed scientific nouse from government is a bit silly.
That and the supply was limited but they couldn't say it.
As I had some FFP2 dust masks to hand I didn't follow it and masked up in shops before it was the official advice...
The Post Office had no external regulator, Ministers were ineffective, the senior leadership believed IT could never go wrong, their internal staff saw themselves as acting only in the interests of the PO and being judge, jury and prosecutor in your own cause is a recipe for disaster. Plus a large dose of cowardice by lots of people - a very common factor in all these situations. Lots of people will fail to do the right thing because they are scared for their jobs, cannot afford to lose them etc etc. Individually they may not be bad people but the consequence of their inaction is that bad things happen.
https://twitter.com/hitcockbottom/status/1386520856768122880?s=21
I also love the way that corrupt prison officers seem to be able to swap prisons with ease so they can intimidate or murder prisoners (and never get caught).
Love it though.
In this case the damage was destroyed careers, destroyed lives and worst case people,took,their own lives.
RIP Tory lead
https://www.churchofengland.org/about/leadership-and-governance/ethical-investment-advisory-group
AIUI Horizon booked the income from the transaction but then said that the cash had never been paid in.
The postmasters said that they had paid the cash in but the system didn’t recognise that.
So that means there should have been more cash in the PO bank account than the Horizon balance sheet showed? So what did the auditors do to reconcile?