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Truss once again topping the CONHome ratings – politicalbetting.com

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  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,256
    MattW said:

    Selebian said:

    MattW said:

    Selebian said:

    I was back in Rochdale yesterday managing the removers as my parents are moving up here (after 41 years in the same house). Whilst I've seen how busy the town is getting over the years, it really hit home yesterday with absurd traffic levels.

    Quite simply there are too many cars, too many houses, too many people. For 20 years the council have allowed houses to be built and built and built along the Rochdale > Littleborough road to the point where its now ludicrously busy.

    New houses means you need new roads. New schools. New infrastructure. But there has been none of that. Just people piled on top of people so that you can barely move. Yes I know my perspective has shifted having moved to the country. But at which point do councils have a requirement to actually stop and plan rather than just let developments go up everywhere?

    This is one of the problems. I've posted before about the likelihood of houses being built on the fields behind our house. I'm (really*) not against that in principle, but it does require upgrading facilities. It needs a new road in from the bypass. It needs at least a local shop or two. It needs a school or drastic expansion of the nearest school. The town would benefit from management of the floodplain (which only floods 1-2 times per year) to put in some nice parkland/playing fields (the town lacks this, just a few small play parks) and some good cycling/walking infrastructure to get from the new houses to the town centre in the most direct way. Those - even some of those - could make the development a net plus for us. The proposal is however houses only.

    *I'll be a bit sad about it. There's a barn owl will lose its home/hunting ground, the deer will no longer wander through in the early morning, the hares won't be running across the field... But we do need houses and the flood plain means that the houses won't be that close and won't really impact on us in terms of privacy etc. It will be a less nice view, but I'd trade that if it led to new amenities for the town.
    The LA have the ability (working with the Trafffic Authority) to really push active travel.

    There are all kinds of possibilities, and things that can be made requirements. You (or somebody) need to get stuck in with the Council. The Council has a very short institutional memory for good practice.

    Places like Nottingham, and Chesterfield, are doing quite remarkable things.

    You need a group of enough to lobby every councillor at the relevant Local Gov levels, and to keep on for a long time.

    Have a look at the infrastructure section of the Chesterfield Cycle Campaign site.
    https://chesterfieldcc.org.uk/#

    This is the sort of thing a non-sectarian Green Party should be for.
    Thanks also. There's scope here to do something quite exciting, linking up with existing cycle routes/bridleways. Unfortunately a lot of the opposition here is of the NIMBY variety, opposed to any development on the site, so I'm not sure whether there's a group that can be pulled together to push for an active travel component. Maybe local running/cycling/equestrian clubs... I'll have to check.
    I really encourage on that, but be warned - it is a vocation.

    And your windows of opportunity are often the 3 week comment period on Planning Apps.
    Yep, I'd need to find a good local retired person to take it on :wink:
  • AslanAslan Posts: 1,673
    Fishing said:

    Cookie said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    There is an argument that a Clarke-led opposition in 2001 would have allowed Blair to do what he wanted to and go into the Euro.
    Obviously Clarke would have been my choice over Hague, but I'm a pro European social democrat not a Tory. Clarke's views on the EU made it impossible for him to lead the Tories.
    I'm not sure Blair would have got the euro past Brown or HMT/the BOE to be honest, but there is certainly an interesting counterfactual history where we joined. I suspect we would have blown the whole thing up.
    I wasn't in favour of joining the Euro, but an interesting counterfactual is that UK membership of The Euro might have made it more successful and it might have been very prosperous for us, seeing as we dominate the financial world. The Euro could have been a British driven project, which I guess would have been KC's viewpoint.
    No the Euro would have been a disaster for us as it's a system rigged in favour of surplus countries and against debtor countries, who bear the burden of any adjustment. Once the first crisis struck, we'd have been Greece or Italy on steroids, and too big to bail out.

    We escaped that disaster against Blair's wishes and only through the judgement and good instincts of the British people.
    Yes, Blair could have screwed us. As on over spending, he had terrible economic judgement. Thank goodness he made up for it with his foreign policy wisdom.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    Charles said:

    The top of those rankings is a real horror show. Apart from Ben Wallace, who I have never heard of, Nadhim Zahawi is the first in the list who is not a genuine fruitcake or appalling second rate hack. When did the politicians in this country become so poor quality?

    July 4, 1387. At 12.36
    By chance - I honestly had no idea - the Count of Eu died in July 1387, poisoned by his sister.

    I’m sure there’s an allegory there.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517

    Sandpit said:

    HYUFD said:

    Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.

    Time to legalise them instead.

    Cannabis at most, certainly not hard drugs like heroin
    Definitely legalise heroin. It’s not difficult to be a functional heroin addict, with a good quality product and treatment options - yet it’s the most likely drug to be cut with all sorts of crap by the black market, and turns lives upside-down because of the dependency on the dealers.
    Heroin is a very important medical drug used liberally by the NHS – many mothers will have had it during childbirth. I'm told it's pretty safe when clean and uncut, assuming the dosage is correct. Weirdly, lots of people don't seem to realise that diamorphine is heroin (the latter was originally a brandname which became generic, like tarmac).
    I'm getting rather specialist here, but most tarmac used on roads nowadays isn't technically Tarmacadam; it's asphalt concrete, and there are 1,001 different types.

    (The main difference is that Tarmacadam used tar as the binding agent; asphalt uses bitumen. To confuse matters more, most Tarmacadam nowadays is actually bitmac, which is the Macadam aggregate bound together with asphalt as a halfway house between the two.)
  • CatManCatMan Posts: 2,722
    edited October 2021
    carnforth said:


    Any train going through the tunnel must be secure, so every passenger must still go through security at Glasgow just as at St Pancras.

    Which is stupid, as most vehicles that go through the tunnel on the train aren't checked.

  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    edited October 2021
    On topic.

    Poor Michael Green. What’s he done to offend the party faithful?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited October 2021

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.

    On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
    I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
    Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.

    New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).

    Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.

    Ed beating David had huge consequences
  • ping said:

    On topic.

    Poor Michael Green. What’s he done to offend the party faithful?

    All that nationalisation he's undertaking and the cancellation of HS2 in the North.

    It is pissing off lots of people.
  • malcolmgmalcolmg Posts: 41,674

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    Hague was absolutely crap, he had not a clue.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703

    ping said:

    On topic.

    Poor Michael Green. What’s he done to offend the party faithful?

    All that nationalisation he's undertaking and the cancellation of HS2 in the North.

    It is pissing off lots of people.
    Yes, the cancelling of HS2 in the north runs contrary to the so called levelling up agenda.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616

    tlg86 said:

    Isn't the problem with legalising everything is that it rather undermines the regulation of drugs (i.e. including prescription drugs) in general? Why shouldn't someone get hooked on painkillers?

    People are already hooked on legal painkillers. One of the ancillary problems of scheduling drugs is that the scheduling has little or no basis in science. e.g. MDMA, which is extremely safe compared to other legal and illegal drugs, is Class A, whereas alcohol, one of the most dangerous and debilitating drugs, is entirely legal.

    People know the law is an ass, which is one reason why millions ignore it.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210
    The big difference is that rich people have doctors with degrees and all that shit, writing completely, 100% legal prescriptions for the piles of pills they want. Hence the modern celebrity overdose is usually a "conflict in their prescribed medications".

    Poorer people just have to put up with what Mossy's inheritors are flogging this week, probably still in the same pub carpark.
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    edited October 2021
    Fk me

    Natural gas futures now up at 299.61p/therm for Dec delivery.

    Average energy bills from April looking to be ~£2k.

    Hope PB’ers have long fixes
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,611
    edited October 2021

    ping said:

    On topic.

    Poor Michael Green. What’s he done to offend the party faithful?

    All that nationalisation he's undertaking and the cancellation of HS2 in the North.

    It is pissing off lots of people.
    I'm no great fan of Michael Green, but he's been a decent transport secretary – not least for having the cojones to admit that rail franchising is a failure, and to propose an alternative.

    Successive governments, Labour and Tory, have avoided the issue and my bet is that Great British Railways will be popular – the public want one arse to kick (i.e. the government) not a flotilla of quasi-privatised chiselling franchisees whose entire gameplan is based on blaming Network Rail, and each other.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited October 2021
    malcolmg said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    Hague was absolutely crap, he had not a clue.
    He was probably the most intelligent Tory leader since WW2 though, which just goes to show being very intelligent does not necessarily mean you will win general elections
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Taz said:

    ping said:

    On topic.

    Poor Michael Green. What’s he done to offend the party faithful?

    All that nationalisation he's undertaking and the cancellation of HS2 in the North.

    It is pissing off lots of people.
    Yes, the cancelling of HS2 in the north runs contrary to the so called levelling up agenda.
    It's worth repeating that people always think HS2 is about speed and it isn't it's about increased capacity and that will massively increase capacity as by removing trains running at different speeds from a line you can double the capacity on it.
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410
    edited October 2021
    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.
  • kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    edited October 2021
    ping said:

    On topic.

    Poor Michael Green. What’s he done to offend the party faithful?

    Stopped people jetting off to Torremolinos/Nice/Bhutan?
  • AnabobazinaAnabobazina Posts: 19,611

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.

    FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    Note how low the PM’s rating is, even amongst his own supporters.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835
    edited October 2021

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    How a naturally occurring life form in its indigenous setting can be deemed "illlegal" boggles my mind.

    Edit. As it does Anabobazina I see.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    HYUFD said:

    malcolmg said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    Hague was absolutely crap, he had not a clue.
    He was probably the most intelligent Tory leader since WW2 though, which just goes to show being very intelligent does not necessarily mean you will win general elections
    He got the job when his ability had ran ahead of his maturity. Big mistake.

    Wes Streeting, look and learn.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,080
    malcolmg said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    Hague was absolutely crap, he had not a clue.
    Sadly neither is an actual impediment to getting the gig.
  • kle4kle4 Posts: 91,392
    dixiedean said:

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    How a naturally occurring life form in its indigenous setting can be deemed "illlegal" boggles my mind.
    Nature is mankind's b*tch.
  • gealbhangealbhan Posts: 2,362
    edited October 2021
    What’s the point of looking at a survey every month that has Nadine Dorries +52 and Shapps +3?

    If you asked the question who in the Tory party can’t give a decent speech answer wouldn’t look any different than that chart.
  • NorthofStokeNorthofStoke Posts: 1,758

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    Was it his accent? I quite liked his accent which was reasonably well spoken with a slight Yorkshire hint, not too dissimilar to Harald Wilson. Angela Rayner on the other hand sounds terrible to most southern ears I would guess.
    And to many northern ears I would also guess.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616

    kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,878
    darkage said:

    eek said:

    darkage said:

    Got to laugh at Patel announcing more 'increased sentences'. This seems to be a recurring trick to fool the public: they change the law to increase the theoretical maximum sentence, normally to life imprisonment. But little actually changes in the courts, as the sentencing guidelines remain largely unchanged. Its similar to what labour did, longer jail sentences were introduced at the same time as automatic release half way through, so no effective change.

    My first thought when they announced money to allow more electronic tags this morning was that money would be way better spent getting people through court rather than afterwards.
    Despite moaning about the courts yesterday, I don't agree with that one.

    The issue at the minute is the revolving door so people get [eventually] through the courts and end up back on the streets and back ultimately before the courts again.

    If people could go through the courts once and be genuinely rehabilitated and not end up back before the courts again . . . that'd be worth more than almost any other investment.
    Does anyone actually get rehabilitated by going to prison? There is a language of rehabilitation, but in the eyes of the public prison is there for punishment.

    Taking the example of Anne Sacoolas, there is a great desire to see her extradited, tried, and sent to jail for a long time. But what purpose would that truly serve? This is all about a public thirst for punishment.

    I'm not sure there is a great desire to see her serve a long sentence? I think she should be extradited and stand trial and if guilty given the appropriate sentence. For an accident, where she behaved well after the event (did not leave the scene etc) I doubt it would be a lengthy sentence. I'd argue (as a non expert) that she was driving without due care and attention, but presumably would be charged with causing death by dangerous driving?
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410
    edited October 2021

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.

    FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
    Yes!

    Although the foragers were seemingly focussed on the iconic Psilocybe semilanceata. Some of the community are concerned enough they've produced an interactive map of its distribution, so as not to be caught out.

    https://www.magicmushroommap.com/map
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616

    darkage said:

    eek said:

    darkage said:

    Got to laugh at Patel announcing more 'increased sentences'. This seems to be a recurring trick to fool the public: they change the law to increase the theoretical maximum sentence, normally to life imprisonment. But little actually changes in the courts, as the sentencing guidelines remain largely unchanged. Its similar to what labour did, longer jail sentences were introduced at the same time as automatic release half way through, so no effective change.

    My first thought when they announced money to allow more electronic tags this morning was that money would be way better spent getting people through court rather than afterwards.
    Despite moaning about the courts yesterday, I don't agree with that one.

    The issue at the minute is the revolving door so people get [eventually] through the courts and end up back on the streets and back ultimately before the courts again.

    If people could go through the courts once and be genuinely rehabilitated and not end up back before the courts again . . . that'd be worth more than almost any other investment.
    Does anyone actually get rehabilitated by going to prison? There is a language of rehabilitation, but in the eyes of the public prison is there for punishment.

    Taking the example of Anne Sacoolas, there is a great desire to see her extradited, tried, and sent to jail for a long time. But what purpose would that truly serve? This is all about a public thirst for punishment.

    I'm not sure there is a great desire to see her serve a long sentence? I think she should be extradited and stand trial and if guilty given the appropriate sentence. For an accident, where she behaved well after the event (did not leave the scene etc) I doubt it would be a lengthy sentence. I'd argue (as a non expert) that she was driving without due care and attention, but presumably would be charged with causing death by dangerous driving?
    A lot of the "minor" crime such as burglary is committed by a very small number of people working very, very hard.

    I recall a case where they sent a burglar to prison and burglaries went down 25% over big chuck of Wiltshire while he was away. When he got out, they went back up. He was committing a dozen burglaries a day - waiting for the commuters to head off, then doing a bunch of houses, one after the other.

    So, if you warehouse a select group of criminals, then you can make a big difference in crime.
  • kle4 said:

    dixiedean said:

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    How a naturally occurring life form in its indigenous setting can be deemed "illlegal" boggles my mind.
    Nature is mankind's b*tch.
    And we're smacking it up like nobody's biz.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,957
    edited October 2021
    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332
  • kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
    "Britain is Booming. Don't let Labour blow it."


  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,140

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.

    FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
    Not so long since one could get a free ticket to Australia for being found in possession of a pheasant or rabbit found in your own garden.

    Admittedly introduced species. But the same was true of various native species.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,835

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    I see the Romanian government has fallen.
  • williamglennwilliamglenn Posts: 47,787
    dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    Your fears of cholera are unfounded.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616

    kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
    "Britain is Booming. Don't let Labour blow it."


    Photos of that vintage always remind me of this one

    image
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,878

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    Plus a fair few can do serious harm or kill, so be very careful around mushrooms.
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,342

    algarkirk said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    HYUFD said:

    Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.

    Time to legalise them instead.

    Cannabis at most, certainly not hard drugs like heroin
    Definitely legalise heroin. It’s not difficult to be a functional heroin addict, with a good quality product and treatment options - yet it’s the most likely drug to be cut with all sorts of crap by the black market, and turns lives upside-down because of the dependency on the dealers.
    If you legalise anything more people will do it and try it. That means more people will try harder drugs like heroin and cocaine just because they can.

    You can still keep the treatment options for those who are heroin addicts now
    Both legalisation and criminalisation are terrible policies, but one is likely to be worse than the other. There is no good policy available in a free society. I think decriminalisation would be worth a try.

    A third variant, never yet tried, is to make possession and use the really big offence, not dealing. There will always be career criminals to run the big operations, and there will always be replacements available. So arguably the sane option is to attack demand. Most new users are idiots rather than career criminals. How much demand would there be if possession and use alone carried a very long prison sentence?

    I would actually focus treatment on users and toughen sentences for dealers and suppliers of hard drugs ie tackle the problem at source
    The sentences for the big dealers are already extraordinarily long. It appears to make no difference. This is because there is always a supply of career criminals, though small in number (huge in impact of course). But how many new users would start if the threat was a very long sentence just for possession of individual quantities?

    Society is entitled to make these sorts of judgements as to how serious actions are, and to change its mind.

    I don't really want to live in a society where a young person gets a custodial sentence for trying a puff on a spliff thanks.
    Quite. Nor do I. It's one of the various options, none of which we want to live with because all have intolerable aspects. That's why it is hard.

    But if you actually want to minimise something you will have more success aiming at a large group of people who are not career criminals than by only aiming at the career criminals.

    Societies can differ radically. In the UK possessing a firearm will often mean along time in prison. In much of the US it will get you street cred among Republicans.

    With drugs, if there isn't demand there won't be supply. So attack demand.
    Similar with theft. if there are no handlers of stolen goods there won't be much theft. Which may be why handling sentences are high.

  • SandyRentoolSandyRentool Posts: 20,393

    kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
    Why would you want a load of scrap steel from an old German submarine?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,140
    edited October 2021

    kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
    "Britain is Booming. Don't let Labour blow it."


    At least in the UK we don't have badges for atomic energy in the Scouting Movement, but see what happens when people [edit] with the same wish as Malmesbury get their wish and try it out in the garden shed:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCwWX_9grrE
  • Another reason Shapps is unpopular, getting rid of ICE vehicles from 2030.

    Quite a few people don't realise that applies to NEW vehicles, not existing ones.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    tlg86 said:

    Isn't the problem with legalising everything is that it rather undermines the regulation of drugs (i.e. including prescription drugs) in general? Why shouldn't someone get hooked on painkillers?

    People are already hooked on legal painkillers. One of the ancillary problems of scheduling drugs is that the scheduling has little or no basis in science. e.g. MDMA, which is extremely safe compared to other legal and illegal drugs, is Class A, whereas alcohol, one of the most dangerous and debilitating drugs, is entirely legal.

    People know the law is an ass, which is one reason why millions ignore it.

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11660210
    MDMA is pretty much a case study of the dangers of banning substances.

    Over time, the ‘underground pharma’ industry has produced much stronger MDMA pills, and also played a game of cat and mouse with authorities, by developing drugs which aren’t quite MDMA but produce a similar euphoria - then conducting uncontrolled clinical trials on tens of thousands of people, often mixing with other drugs.

    Would have been much easier to just sell the stuff in pharmacies, with dosage and use instructions.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164

    Another reason Shapps is unpopular, getting rid of ICE vehicles from 2030.

    Quite a few people don't realise that applies to NEW vehicles, not existing ones.

    Any polling on that? I wonder how many people are aware of the ban at all, might not be on too many people's radar at this point.

    Of course, they'll start to notice much sooner than 2030 as manufacturers change their behaviour.
  • tlg86 said:

    Another reason Shapps is unpopular, getting rid of ICE vehicles from 2030.

    Quite a few people don't realise that applies to NEW vehicles, not existing ones.

    Any polling on that? I wonder how many people are aware of the ban at all, might not be on too many people's radar at this point.

    Of course, they'll start to notice much sooner than 2030 as manufacturers change their behaviour.
    Just anecdotes, I'm a few Tory activist WhatsApp groups, and it is something that has popped up a few times.
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746
    edited October 2021
    Sandpit said:

    darkage said:

    eek said:

    darkage said:

    Got to laugh at Patel announcing more 'increased sentences'. This seems to be a recurring trick to fool the public: they change the law to increase the theoretical maximum sentence, normally to life imprisonment. But little actually changes in the courts, as the sentencing guidelines remain largely unchanged. Its similar to what labour did, longer jail sentences were introduced at the same time as automatic release half way through, so no effective change.

    My first thought when they announced money to allow more electronic tags this morning was that money would be way better spent getting people through court rather than afterwards.
    Despite moaning about the courts yesterday, I don't agree with that one.

    The issue at the minute is the revolving door so people get [eventually] through the courts and end up back on the streets and back ultimately before the courts again.

    If people could go through the courts once and be genuinely rehabilitated and not end up back before the courts again . . . that'd be worth more than almost any other investment.
    Does anyone actually get rehabilitated by going to prison? There is a language of rehabilitation, but in the eyes of the public prison is there for punishment.

    Taking the example of Anne Sacoolas, there is a great desire to see her extradited, tried, and sent to jail for a long time. But what purpose would that truly serve? This is all about a public thirst for punishment.

    The justice system needs to be seen to operate fairly. That requires both a punishment and rehabilitation aspect to any given sentence.

    In the case you mention, the lady killed someone, and was to be prosecuted for manslaughter. Society agrees that people who kill people, even if that outcome was not their intention, deserve to lose their liberty for a period of time as punishment. Causing death by dangerous driving is usually 10 years or thereabouts, less in practice with good behaviour.
    Sending someone to jail for 10 years for something like this is utterly idiotic. It may be what the public want, but they are idiots. It is vengeance over justice. The same people continuously partake in dangerous and careless driving on the roads, routinely fail to observe speed limits, and all this results in continuous near misses; and this is observable on every school run. When the government pander to this type of nonsense, it really is the undoing of civilised society.




  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616

    kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
    Why would you want a load of scrap steel from an old German submarine?
    Boom Boom

    So we are going to discuss about how there was no Uranium on U235, but there was lots of U238 on U-234. But not much U235....
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    kinabalu said:

    How come the Magnificent Muscly Man is so low in these ratings? Is he not loved by his own?

    Yes, I thought the same. We're always told, with some justification, that Boris's lovable rogue persona tickles the fancy of vast swathes of the country. And yet the most ardent Tories in this poll seem not to be as enamoured as the voters. I can only guess that the Tories polled are skewed to the fiscally dry, traditional values branch of the party.
    They must have no sense of humour. I mean, how can anybody resist this sort of thing? -

    https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1445104926431006722?t=1p6lV3D-iT_E417kB2JYwg&s=19

    So fortunate we are in these challenging times to have this man at the helm.
    He spends a few seconds making a terrible build back batter pun . . . and leftwingers ensure its viewed millions of times sharing his build back better message.

    How productive were those few seconds? No wonder he's Prime Minister.
    I know exactly why he's Prime Minister. It's for the same reason Benny Hill got to number one with "Ernie".
    Chasing a half-naked Barbara Windsor around the garden, slightly speeded up, to the accompaniment of Yakety Sax?
  • FarooqFarooq Posts: 10,775
    Taz said:

    Farooq said:

    Taz said:

    Farooq said:

    Taz said:

    Sandpit said:

    Breaking

    Insulate Britain apologising for their actions but will carry on blocking roads

    They really have lost the plot and their cause

    Lock them up Patel

    Terrorism: the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government, with the goal of furthering political, social, or ideological objectives.
    Not seen them using violence or threatening people.

    Their direct action is no more than the Suffragettes did.

    Terrorism my arse
    They are using threats, of further blockades, to coerce. The definition doesn’t specify violence or threats against people.

    The action has the risk of damaging the economy which they need to thrive to fund their crazy demands.
    So by your definition, even a Mayday carnival is terrorism.
    Go back to bed and sleep it off.
    Ha ha, Clearly not but if you want to misunderstand it fill your boots Scrappy.. Oh, and it wasn’t my definition it was someone else’s upthread. Their action just happens to fit the definition.
    It doesn't. Not by a long way. It's really quite silly to think it does.
    Instead of responding like an obnoxious asshole, which seems to be your M.O., given this is a discusson group why not just offer a counterpoint ?

    I refer to your prior comment.
    My counterpoint is that calling a protest "terrorism" is ridiculous and does nothing but demean the person who claims it is.
    It's really no more complicated than that.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616
    Nigelb said:

    I see the Romanian government has fallen.

    Were they.... Romainers?
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410
    algarkirk said:

    algarkirk said:

    HYUFD said:

    algarkirk said:

    HYUFD said:

    Sandpit said:

    HYUFD said:

    Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.

    Time to legalise them instead.

    Cannabis at most, certainly not hard drugs like heroin
    Definitely legalise heroin. It’s not difficult to be a functional heroin addict, with a good quality product and treatment options - yet it’s the most likely drug to be cut with all sorts of crap by the black market, and turns lives upside-down because of the dependency on the dealers.
    If you legalise anything more people will do it and try it. That means more people will try harder drugs like heroin and cocaine just because they can.

    You can still keep the treatment options for those who are heroin addicts now
    Both legalisation and criminalisation are terrible policies, but one is likely to be worse than the other. There is no good policy available in a free society. I think decriminalisation would be worth a try.

    A third variant, never yet tried, is to make possession and use the really big offence, not dealing. There will always be career criminals to run the big operations, and there will always be replacements available. So arguably the sane option is to attack demand. Most new users are idiots rather than career criminals. How much demand would there be if possession and use alone carried a very long prison sentence?

    I would actually focus treatment on users and toughen sentences for dealers and suppliers of hard drugs ie tackle the problem at source
    The sentences for the big dealers are already extraordinarily long. It appears to make no difference. This is because there is always a supply of career criminals, though small in number (huge in impact of course). But how many new users would start if the threat was a very long sentence just for possession of individual quantities?

    Society is entitled to make these sorts of judgements as to how serious actions are, and to change its mind.

    I don't really want to live in a society where a young person gets a custodial sentence for trying a puff on a spliff thanks.
    Quite. Nor do I. It's one of the various options, none of which we want to live with because all have intolerable aspects. That's why it is hard.

    But if you actually want to minimise something you will have more success aiming at a large group of people who are not career criminals than by only aiming at the career criminals.

    Societies can differ radically. In the UK possessing a firearm will often mean along time in prison. In much of the US it will get you street cred among Republicans.

    With drugs, if there isn't demand there won't be supply. So attack demand.
    Similar with theft. if there are no handlers of stolen goods there won't be much theft. Which may be why handling sentences are high.

    Seems to me there's quite a few more consumers than dealers or producers. If you are going down this road surely the rate determining step is the flow of drugs across the borders? Unless of course were going for full employment via police numbers.
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.

    The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.

    Maybe he'll get away with it.
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    edited October 2021
    If I’ve got my maths right, wholesale gas is currently ~10p/kwh
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,763
    algarkirk said:

    Taz said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?

    A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
    A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
    We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.

    There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.

    Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?

    I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
    The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
    I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).

    The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.

    This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    edited October 2021
    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    "the sister-in-law of a friend of mine"

    Peak PB anecdata.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    On the contrary, legal drugs come with ingredients labels and usage instructions.

    The sort of drugs you buy on street corners and in nightclubs, not so much.
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.

    The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.

    Maybe he'll get away with it.
    I'm not an economist but my friends who are tell me that when you've got huge government debts one thing that is useful is high inflation to partially inflate the debt away.

    Perhaps he sees inflation as a win/win scenario for him.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    On the contrary, legal drugs come with ingredients labels and usage instructions.

    The sort of drugs you buy on street corners and in nightclubs, not so much.
    You're completely missing the point. Perhaps legalising and correctly labelling hard drugs would be a good idea. The government isn't going to do it.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571

    kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
    Why would you want a load of scrap steel from an old German submarine?
    I think he just proved his point about criticality...
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    If there had been genuinely no inflation since 2000 then your property that you bought in 2000 would now be worth the same as you bought it in 2000 for.

    Based on the bank of England's inflation calculator a property bought in 2000 for £100,000 would now be worth £172,134.56

    Colour me sceptical that lines up with what's really happened. Is it?

    We've not had inflation in recent years, so long as you exclude the costs that have been going up as being part of the inflation basket.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,080
    Alistair said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Sandpit said:

    HYUFD said:

    Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.

    Time to legalise them instead.

    Cannabis at most, certainly not hard drugs like heroin
    Definitely legalise heroin. It’s not difficult to be a functional heroin addict, with a good quality product and treatment options - yet it’s the most likely drug to be cut with all sorts of crap by the black market, and turns lives upside-down because of the dependency on the dealers.
    Definitely legalise cocaine too.

    It is a piece of piss for anyone who wants to get any of these drugs, to do so.

    A law that can't be enforced is not a good law. All you're doing is pushing people into the grateful arms of criminals.

    Tax them and try to eradicate their use via education and treatment instead.
    Don't see how that works. Are you going to legalise the whole supply chain all the way back to licensed, legal growers in Colombia? If you don't you are sponsoring untold misery and death all the way up the chain. If you do, is the Colombian government going to be very happy with that?

    And btw the young Freud was markedly unpopular with contemporary medics for causing an explosion in cocaine use and associated civic problems - all at a time when the stuff was 100% legal everywhere.
    Yes legalise the entire supply chain, that's the entire point. If you're not legalising the entire supply chain the entire thing is pointless.

    I don't care if the Colombian government is happy or not.
    The UK cannot legalise activities in Colombia. Your whole case collapses if the Colombian government is unhappy.
    You don't have to grow the plants in Colombia.
    Domestic shupply chain required. See Canada.

    Imagine Medolmsey Road, Consett as the key source for Ganja for the Netherlands.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571

    Nigelb said:

    I see the Romanian government has fallen.

    Were they.... Romainers?
    Lettuce not descend to those levels.
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    If there had been genuinely no inflation since 2000 then your property that you bought in 2000 would now be worth the same as you bought it in 2000 for.

    Based on the bank of England's inflation calculator a property bought in 2000 for £100,000 would now be worth £172,134.56

    Colour me sceptical that lines up with what's really happened. Is it?

    We've not had inflation in recent years, so long as you exclude the costs that have been going up as being part of the inflation basket.
    This was a property I bought in London in 2000, sold in 2007, the profit alone allowed me to buy a mansion oop North.
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.

    The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.

    Maybe he'll get away with it.
    That was the last government to deal with inflation yes.

    We've had inflation since then, it simply hasn't been dealt with, by defining it as "not inflation" by excluding it from the basket of goods measured.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    TOPPING said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    "the sister-in-law of a friend of mine"

    Peak PB anecdata.
    Until we hear from the first cousin, once removed, of @Leon 's Uber driver.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616
    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    Some of arguments in favour of legalising drugs are purity and strength issues.

    1) Many deaths have been caused by horribly toxic impurities used to dilute drugs for illegal sale
    2) Many deaths have been caused by varying strength of illegal drugs. The classic is for a new dealer to setup and start selling 80% heroin to his customers who have been buying 20%
    3) Some of the worst illegal drugs are attempts to get round restrictions in the illegal drug market.

    Legalised drugs, with defined strength, ingredients etc could fix all 3
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    Some of arguments in favour of legalising drugs are purity and strength issues.

    1) Many deaths have been caused by horribly toxic impurities used to dilute drugs for illegal sale
    2) Many deaths have been caused by varying strength of illegal drugs. The classic is for a new dealer to setup and start selling 80% heroin to his customers who have been buying 20%
    3) Some of the worst illegal drugs are attempts to get round restrictions in the illegal drug market.

    Legalised drugs, with defined strength, ingredients etc could fix all 3
    Presumably, we'd need much tougher sentencing for POSSESSION of illegal drugs? Logically, if you can buy it legally, there should be no excuse for possessing it illegally. Or would we be fine with unlicensed drug dealing?
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    If there had been genuinely no inflation since 2000 then your property that you bought in 2000 would now be worth the same as you bought it in 2000 for.

    Based on the bank of England's inflation calculator a property bought in 2000 for £100,000 would now be worth £172,134.56

    Colour me sceptical that lines up with what's really happened. Is it?

    We've not had inflation in recent years, so long as you exclude the costs that have been going up as being part of the inflation basket.
    This was a property I bought in London in 2000, sold in 2007, the profit alone allowed me to buy a mansion oop North.
    I can imagine that.

    I'd be curious without wanting to pry too much if you were to check something like Zoopla and see what percentage change there has been in that property between 2000 and to-date.

    Has there really been no inflation?

    Housing costs are the largest element of a household's budget nowadays, larger even than food, and yet we define it as not part of the basket of goods and therefore magically there's no inflation.

    Pure ostrich-in-sand to say there's no inflation.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    DavidL said:

    algarkirk said:

    Taz said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    Their demand is every house in UK is fully insulated? Putting aside the cost and the practicalities of delivering, how much CO2 would this actually save? It's a generally laudable goal but is it a screaming must all be done in next year emergency priority?

    A better target might be get on a build more nuclear so we can switch from gas faster?
    A better target might have been to get on and build more wind turbines (and insulate more houses) when, less than a decade ago, people like Boris Johnson were claiming that they couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding and people like Anne-Marie Trevelyan were denying the existence of climate change altogether. If we had a government made up of people who accepted reality, we wouldn't need XR!
    We don’t need them. We have a govt who accepts this. Wind turbines have been going up offshore for quite a while now and New ones in the pipeline. Complaining about what people used to think when the science wasn’t as settled as it is now is futile.

    There is no battle, all mainstream parties accept this. The Tories do. Trevelyan does.

    Who, in the Current govt on the climate issue, does not Accept the need to take action ?

    I got my house insulated, paid by the govt, a while ago. There are schemes and the govt is taking action.
    The science was well settled a decade ago. Indeed, it's been known since the 1980s that CO2 emissions were an urgent problem. The reason we're in a mess now is not because of XR, Greenpeace and Co; it's because of the refusal of governments, particularly right-wing governments, to act on the advice of the scientists.
    I am very doubtful whether this is a left/right wing government issue. It is a politics issue. The most totalitarian governments, traditionally seen as left (like China - though who knows what left or right would mean) seem to struggle immensely with the realities of the issue. The most social democrat of regimes produce directly and indirectly oceans of CO2 (Canada, Norway etc).

    The more interesting question is this: When will climate realists and climate idealists agree that for all sorts of reasons the CO2 amount in the air is going to reach levels science regards as unacceptable, and this is already baked in. CO2 is not only continuing going into the air, the amount going in is increasing yearly. We are nowhere near the required trajectory. Nor shall we be.

    This is so obviously so that it just amazes me that there is so much focus on cutting carbon emissions and so little on carbon dioxide extraction.
    There is work being done on both.
    It's just that the latter is a harder technical problem in terms of both cost and energy.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    tlg86 said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    On the contrary, legal drugs come with ingredients labels and usage instructions.

    The sort of drugs you buy on street corners and in nightclubs, not so much.
    You're completely missing the point. Perhaps legalising and correctly labelling hard drugs would be a good idea. The government isn't going to do it.
    Your comparison was about someone who died, because what they consumed wasn’t sufficiently well labelled.

    That’s an argument for selling drugs in pharmacies, rather than on street corners.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    ping said:

    If I’ve got my maths right, wholesale gas is currently ~10p/kwh

    I'm fixed at 4.08p/kwh with a standing charge of 26.77p/day for the next 2 years. At an estimated 12,447 kwh that's a £541.44 saving on wholesale cost.

    No wonder SSE pulled their v8 tariff so quickly.
  • tlg86 said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    Some of arguments in favour of legalising drugs are purity and strength issues.

    1) Many deaths have been caused by horribly toxic impurities used to dilute drugs for illegal sale
    2) Many deaths have been caused by varying strength of illegal drugs. The classic is for a new dealer to setup and start selling 80% heroin to his customers who have been buying 20%
    3) Some of the worst illegal drugs are attempts to get round restrictions in the illegal drug market.

    Legalised drugs, with defined strength, ingredients etc could fix all 3
    Presumably, we'd need much tougher sentencing for POSSESSION of illegal drugs? Logically, if you can buy it legally, there should be no excuse for possessing it illegally. Or would we be fine with unlicensed drug dealing?
    If drugs are legalised then the unlicensed trade becomes an issue for agencies related to HMRC like the unlicensed trade in alcohol and tobacco. And those guys can be more ruthless in getting their results.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571

    dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.

    The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.

    Maybe he'll get away with it.
    I'm not an economist but my friends who are tell me that when you've got huge government debts one thing that is useful is high inflation to partially inflate the debt away.

    Perhaps he sees inflation as a win/win scenario for him.
    And also when you've got huge non government debts.
    So win/win/win for Boris ?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616
    tlg86 said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    Some of arguments in favour of legalising drugs are purity and strength issues.

    1) Many deaths have been caused by horribly toxic impurities used to dilute drugs for illegal sale
    2) Many deaths have been caused by varying strength of illegal drugs. The classic is for a new dealer to setup and start selling 80% heroin to his customers who have been buying 20%
    3) Some of the worst illegal drugs are attempts to get round restrictions in the illegal drug market.

    Legalised drugs, with defined strength, ingredients etc could fix all 3
    Presumably, we'd need much tougher sentencing for POSSESSION of illegal drugs? Logically, if you can buy it legally, there should be no excuse for possessing it illegally. Or would we be fine with unlicensed drug dealing?
    Probably regulate it via the existing pharmacy licensing and controls setups.

    Try opening your own pharmacy. Even to sell legal drugs. Without all the permits.

    The main effect would be as with legal alcohol - nearly no-one bothers with the illegal stuff. Yes, there is a certain amount of counterfeiting and illegal distilling, but the amount is tiny.
  • dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.

    The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.

    Maybe he'll get away with it.
    That was the last government to deal with inflation yes.

    We've had inflation since then, it simply hasn't been dealt with, by defining it as "not inflation" by excluding it from the basket of goods measured.
    Yup. And so the PM has two choices.

    One is to accept that the music has reached a point where it ought to stop, even though stopping the music will inevitably make him unpopular. Foolishly or not, rising house prices win re-election, static house prices make it dicey, falling house prices are followed by changes of government.

    The other choice is to try and keep the tune playing a bit longer, like the final scenes of Tom and Jerry's "Cat Concerto";

    https://youtu.be/CtLpv6huG3A

    Even though that will just make the eventual adjustment even worse.

    You know how BoJo flows. Which choice do you think he will make?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,140

    dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    If there had been genuinely no inflation since 2000 then your property that you bought in 2000 would now be worth the same as you bought it in 2000 for.

    Based on the bank of England's inflation calculator a property bought in 2000 for £100,000 would now be worth £172,134.56

    Colour me sceptical that lines up with what's really happened. Is it?

    We've not had inflation in recent years, so long as you exclude the costs that have been going up as being part of the inflation basket.
    This was a property I bought in London in 2000, sold in 2007, the profit alone allowed me to buy a mansion oop North.
    I can imagine that.

    I'd be curious without wanting to pry too much if you were to check something like Zoopla and see what percentage change there has been in that property between 2000 and to-date.

    Has there really been no inflation?

    Housing costs are the largest element of a household's budget nowadays, larger even than food, and yet we define it as not part of the basket of goods and therefore magically there's no inflation.

    Pure ostrich-in-sand to say there's no inflation.
    Eh? CPI does now (a recent change, admittedly). Or so I read this:

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/methodologies/consumerpriceinflationincludesall3indicescpihcpiandrpiqmi
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,164
    edited October 2021
    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    On the contrary, legal drugs come with ingredients labels and usage instructions.

    The sort of drugs you buy on street corners and in nightclubs, not so much.
    You're completely missing the point. Perhaps legalising and correctly labelling hard drugs would be a good idea. The government isn't going to do it.
    Your comparison was about someone who died, because what they consumed wasn’t sufficiently well labelled.

    That’s an argument for selling drugs in pharmacies, rather than on street corners.
    That's as maybe, but some might argue that the new law is putting too much pressure on food producers.

    The point I was making is that the government is always under pressure to protect people.

    Legalising hard drugs does not do that. It's a version of the trolley problem. "You sold my 18 year-old daughter* heroin, and look what you did to her."

    * oh yeah, presumably there will be age restrictions...
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.

    The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.

    Maybe he'll get away with it.
    I'm not an economist but my friends who are tell me that when you've got huge government debts one thing that is useful is high inflation to partially inflate the debt away.

    Perhaps he sees inflation as a win/win scenario for him.
    Is he very, very old? That works fine for governments which do not issue substantial amounts of index linked debt.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,616
    MattW said:

    Alistair said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    Sandpit said:

    HYUFD said:

    Don't agree with Patel talking about tougher sentences for drugs whatsoever.

    Time to legalise them instead.

    Cannabis at most, certainly not hard drugs like heroin
    Definitely legalise heroin. It’s not difficult to be a functional heroin addict, with a good quality product and treatment options - yet it’s the most likely drug to be cut with all sorts of crap by the black market, and turns lives upside-down because of the dependency on the dealers.
    Definitely legalise cocaine too.

    It is a piece of piss for anyone who wants to get any of these drugs, to do so.

    A law that can't be enforced is not a good law. All you're doing is pushing people into the grateful arms of criminals.

    Tax them and try to eradicate their use via education and treatment instead.
    Don't see how that works. Are you going to legalise the whole supply chain all the way back to licensed, legal growers in Colombia? If you don't you are sponsoring untold misery and death all the way up the chain. If you do, is the Colombian government going to be very happy with that?

    And btw the young Freud was markedly unpopular with contemporary medics for causing an explosion in cocaine use and associated civic problems - all at a time when the stuff was 100% legal everywhere.
    Yes legalise the entire supply chain, that's the entire point. If you're not legalising the entire supply chain the entire thing is pointless.

    I don't care if the Colombian government is happy or not.
    The UK cannot legalise activities in Colombia. Your whole case collapses if the Colombian government is unhappy.
    You don't have to grow the plants in Colombia.
    Domestic shupply chain required. See Canada.

    Imagine Medolmsey Road, Consett as the key source for Ganja for the Netherlands.
    You could poly tunnel coca plants in the UK, pretty easily. Same for MJ.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    edited October 2021
    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.

    On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
    I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
    Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.

    New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).

    Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.

    Ed beating David had huge consequences
    Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.

    My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?

    Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.

    So, that cheered me up no end.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited October 2021
    tlg86 said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    On the contrary, legal drugs come with ingredients labels and usage instructions.

    The sort of drugs you buy on street corners and in nightclubs, not so much.
    You're completely missing the point. Perhaps legalising and correctly labelling hard drugs would be a good idea. The government isn't going to do it.
    It is not happening anyway. 76% of voters think the sale and possession of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine should remain a criminal offence, only 7% support legalisation of them.

    Only 40% of voters do support continued criminalisation of soft drugs like cannabis though, albeit 57% of Conservative voters think the sale and possession of cannabis should remain illegal

    https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/63aaoe9j9t/InternalResults_180524_Drugs_w.pdf
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.

    FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
    Yes!

    Although the foragers were seemingly focussed on the iconic Psilocybe semilanceata. Some of the community are concerned enough they've produced an interactive map of its distribution, so as not to be caught out.

    https://www.magicmushroommap.com/map
    I would like to know what's behind that map, I think it's just temperature and rainfall. Not startlingly useful.
  • According to the Land Registry the average house price in June 1999 was £75,995

    According to the Bank of England inflation calculator £75,995 in 1999 would be £134,682.94 by 2020.

    No inflation in the past two decades is a lie, pure and simple, told by those who aren't paying for increasing costs.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,703
    HYUFD said:

    tlg86 said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    On the contrary, legal drugs come with ingredients labels and usage instructions.

    The sort of drugs you buy on street corners and in nightclubs, not so much.
    You're completely missing the point. Perhaps legalising and correctly labelling hard drugs would be a good idea. The government isn't going to do it.
    It is not happening anyway. 76% of voters think the sale and possession of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine should remain a criminal offence, only 7% support legalisation of them.

    Only 40% of voters do support continued criminalisation of soft drugs like cannabis though, though 57% of Conservative voters think the sale and possession of cannabis should remain illegal

    https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/63aaoe9j9t/InternalResults_180524_Drugs_w.pdf
    Give it time. Attitudes will change.
  • pingping Posts: 3,724
    edited October 2021

    dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    The last time a government really had to deal with inflation was John Major's time as Chancellor and PM. And Major's fate will be seared into BoJo's mind.

    The temptation for any politician- let alone a Power Of Optimism one like Bozza- to hope it will just go away must be huge.

    Maybe he'll get away with it.
    That was the last government to deal with inflation yes.

    We've had inflation since then, it simply hasn't been dealt with, by defining it as "not inflation" by excluding it from the basket of goods measured.
    Yup. And so the PM has two choices.

    One is to accept that the music has reached a point where it ought to stop, even though stopping the music will inevitably make him unpopular. Foolishly or not, rising house prices win re-election, static house prices make it dicey, falling house prices are followed by changes of government.

    The other choice is to try and keep the tune playing a bit longer, like the final scenes of Tom and Jerry's "Cat Concerto";

    https://youtu.be/CtLpv6huG3A

    Even though that will just make the eventual adjustment even worse.

    You know how BoJo flows. Which choice do you think he will make?
    I think the asset transfer from the young to the old will continue indefinitely. Why should it stop?

    Obviously, it’s deeply immoral, but the political logic indicates it can keep on going for some time yet.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.

    On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
    I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
    Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.

    New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).

    Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.

    Ed beating David had huge consequences
    Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.

    My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?

    Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.

    So, that cheered me up no end.
    You just want congratulations for the hole-in-one, don’t you? ;)

    Hope you got your name on the board in the clubhouse, and hope the bar bill didn’t do too much damage to your credit card!
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,571
    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.

    On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
    I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
    Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.

    New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).

    Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.

    Ed beating David had huge consequences
    Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.

    My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?

    Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.

    So, that cheered me up no end.
    This year's Physics Nobel for "groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems' will appeal to you, then ?

    Scientific Background on the Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
    https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2021/10/sciback_fy_en_21.pdf
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410
    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.

    On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
    I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
    Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.

    New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).

    Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.

    Ed beating David had huge consequences
    Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.

    My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?

    Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.

    So, that cheered me up no end.
    Ah but were you just playing out a predetermined act in the play that is Kinabalu?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    edited October 2021
    Taz said:

    HYUFD said:

    tlg86 said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    How do those advocating legalising drugs feel about this...

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58756597

    The rules - known as "Natasha's Law" - require full ingredient and allergen labelling on all food made on premises and pre-packed for direct sale.

    The inquest heard the baguette contained sesame - which Natasha was allergic to - baked into the dough, but the ingredient was not listed on the packaging.

    Pret did not label "artisan" baguettes as containing sesame seeds despite six allergic reaction cases in the year before Natasha died, the inquest heard.

    The regulations Natasha's law, all food retailers will be required to display full ingredient and allergen labelling on every food item made on the premises and pre-packed for direct sale - including sandwiches, cakes and salads.

    Previously, non pre-packaged fresh food made on the premises did not need to be individually labelled with allergen or ingredient information.


    Personally it doesn't bother me, and it certainly seems poor that a big company like Pret didn't go further than required when it came to labelling.

    However, if I were hugely allergic to something, it would take a lot for me to eat something prepared by someone else.

    Anyway, the sister-in-law of a friend of mine used to do catering for parties as a side job and used make Christmas cakes and mince pies etc. in December. She isn't doing it any more because the regulations are just not worth the hassle.

    This is why I think all the talk of legalising drugs is pure fantasy. There is too much pressure on the state to protect people. Legalising hard drugs does not do that, even if in aggregate we may get better outcomes (I'm sceptical, but still).

    On the contrary, legal drugs come with ingredients labels and usage instructions.

    The sort of drugs you buy on street corners and in nightclubs, not so much.
    You're completely missing the point. Perhaps legalising and correctly labelling hard drugs would be a good idea. The government isn't going to do it.
    It is not happening anyway. 76% of voters think the sale and possession of hard drugs like heroin and cocaine should remain a criminal offence, only 7% support legalisation of them.

    Only 40% of voters do support continued criminalisation of soft drugs like cannabis though, though 57% of Conservative voters think the sale and possession of cannabis should remain illegal

    https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/63aaoe9j9t/InternalResults_180524_Drugs_w.pdf
    Give it time. Attitudes will change.
    On cannabis maybe, not on heroin.

    Even 56% of 18 to 24s in that poll think sale and possession of heroin and cocaine should remain a criminal offence
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    kinabalu said:

    Adam Boulton of Sky has just got Insulate Britain to admit their plans would cost between half and one trillion pounds over 10 years

    Without a concrete commitment to half a trillion plus spent on their pet project they'll continue to blockade roads.

    People need to be imprisoned if they continue with this. Let them demonstrate from prison.
    You really need to control this libertarian streak of yours, Philip.
    It is a new political philosophy: Thompsonian Libertarianism. Non-intervention in things Philip agrees with. High handed authoritarianism for people he doesn't like!

    Got to agree with him regarding these holier-than-thou twats blocking the roads though. Lock up up!!
    Trouble is that freedom for me, authoritarianism for thee has been a potent vote winner in all sorts of times and all sorts of places. And not just on the right.

    The only problem is that it doesn't work as a programme for a happy nation, because there's no agreement on who the mes and thees are.
    I wat freedom
    You want excess liberty
    He has been given 30 days

    Now, about those silly rules stopping me buying the 125 kilos of U235 I want for my criticality experiments in my shed.
    Why would you want a load of scrap steel from an old German submarine?
    Fascinatingly and relevantly, if it sank pre 1945 you would want it as a source of

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

    Much harvested from the wrecks in Scapa Flow.
  • PhilPhil Posts: 1,919

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.

    FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
    As I recall, the legal position used to be that you could pick the mushroom, but “processing” them into any other form (i,.e. drying, cooking etc) would turn you into someone possessing or selling class A drugs.

    Which led at one point to plod trying to prosecute someone for selling class A drugs on the grounds that putting mushrooms into a plastic bag counted as “processing”. IIRC they lost that particular case.

    (I have no idea whether this is still the legal position!)
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    kinabalu said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    HYUFD said:

    O/T: some hope for Conservatives in that Johnson only scores just above Priti Patel, but the real shocker is the two most swivelly of swivelly-eyed nutjobs, Frost and Rees-Mogg right up at the top. The modern Conservative Party clearly still has more extremists in it than Labour under Corbyn if so many want to endorse these two!

    Neither Frost or JRM are as bad as Jezza.

    But.

    The people at the top of the list are the ones who make the Conservatives feel good about themselves, who tell the activists what they want to hear. In that sense, they are the mirror image of Corbyn.

    In some ways, fair enough. But at some point, all parties need someone to remind them that not everyone thinks like them, or they can't have what they want. To give him his due, BoJo does that with greenery.

    But who in the professional wing of the Conservative Party is left who is prepared to stand up to the activists?
    Look, the Tories have been in power for 11 years now.

    After 10 years in power all parties get a bit bored and less fresh and full of ideas. The activists too start to want a leader who is ideologically purer rather than to just stay in power for the sake of it.

    Labour however has been out of power for over a decade, so it is they whose leadership needs to stand up to activists more than the Tories
    Labour are out of power precisely because of your comments

    However, the conservative party's desire for power is much more pragmatic
    Was it so pragmatic when it picked Hague over Clarke after the 1997 defeat following 18 years in power and then followed that by picking IDS over Clarke and Portillo?

    Hague wasn't such an unreasonable choice if you ask me, I think he just got the job too young and was unfairly discriminated against by the electorate on the basis of his northern accent. But picking IDS was lunacy.
    You can also add picking Home over Butler in 1963.

    On the Labour side similarly picking Foot over Healey in 1980, Ed Miliband over David Miliband in 2010 and Corbyn over Burnham in 2015
    I think Miliband vs Miliband is a less extreme example, and I'm not only saying that because I voted for Ed!
    Had David won Cameron would likely not have got a majority in 2015, the Tory-LD coalition would probably have continued, there would have been no EU referendum in 2016 and no Brexit.

    New PM Osborne would be settling down to No 10 having narrowly beaten Corbyn in 2020 despite UKIP getting 20% of the vote (or else David Miliband could have stayed Labour leader having only narrowly lost and beaten Osborne and now be in No 10).

    Boris meanwhile would be finishing his biography of Shakespeare not running the country.

    Ed beating David had huge consequences
    Doesn't everything have huge consequences though? I think so. Apologies for a quick diversion but I got to pondering this the other week when I had a hole in one at golf. It happened at 11.37 am on Wednesday 22nd Sept. The 12th hole, 162 yards, 7 iron, sweet spot, high with a touch of fade, landed on, rolled and ... IN.

    My first and I'm sure last. I'm only an average player, about an 18, don't play that much, so you don't expect it to ever happen, it's massively unlikely. Such a buzz it was. Made me feel special, picked out by fate, as if I'd won the lottery or something. But as I continued to think about it, my thoughts took a bleaker turn. Rather than winning lotteries I started to think about other unlikely "special" things, such as plane crashes and bizarre diseases. If I could have a hole in one, if I was the sort who father fate was taking an interest in, could I also be in line for one of these?

    Had to stop that train of thought and the way I did so was by considering it from another angle. My shot went into the hole only because everything at the time and prior to it was just so. A fraction of a millimetre different on the clubface, a smidgen more or less force, a different golfball, the tiniest scintilla of a change in the wind or atmospheric pressure, not wearing a glove, wearing a different sweater or trousers, wearing y fronts instead of boxers, a traffic jam on the drive to the club, an apple instead of a banana for breakfast, then the night before etc, keep going back and back and further back, all the way to the womb and even before that - point being, any change at all would have meant no hole in one. My life led inexorably to the moment and the moment was created by my life. More than this, it was created by the whole of history since I live not in isolation but in deep nexus with all else.

    So, that cheered me up no end.
    Ah but were you just playing out a predetermined act in the play that is Kinabalu?
    Many worlds quantum theory, which is probably correct, says an infinite number of Kinabalus just missed that hole in one.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    "Some 216,000 children - mostly boys - have been sexually abused by clergy in the French Catholic Church since 1950, a damning new inquiry has found."

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58801183

    My anger at this is volcanic.

    I have zeros respect for the Catholic church now. There's been too much of this shit, whether in Ireland, France, the UK, Australia etc.

    (And yes, I know other churches had significant issues as well. A pox on all of them. But the scale of abuse in the Catholic church was/is something else.)
  • Carnyx said:

    dixiedean said:

    I'm now officially worried about inflation.

    PM strikingly dismissive about fears over inflation...

    Concerns are "unfounded", he told @BethRigby

    People have been "worried about inflation for a long time, it hasn't materialised" he told @bbclaurak

    "We've seen inflationary pressures come & go", he told @Peston


    https://twitter.com/LOS_Fisher/status/1445365796251832332

    There is an entire generation of politicians who treat inflation like some bogeyman from the past. Like cholera or smallpox.
    The only time I have ever seen my father ever worried about money/finances was Black Wednesday when interest rates went through the roof, and I've always known combating inflation is increasing interest rates.

    It was the primary reason I was dubious about taking a mortgage in 2000 at the age of 21.
    If there had been genuinely no inflation since 2000 then your property that you bought in 2000 would now be worth the same as you bought it in 2000 for.

    Based on the bank of England's inflation calculator a property bought in 2000 for £100,000 would now be worth £172,134.56

    Colour me sceptical that lines up with what's really happened. Is it?

    We've not had inflation in recent years, so long as you exclude the costs that have been going up as being part of the inflation basket.
    This was a property I bought in London in 2000, sold in 2007, the profit alone allowed me to buy a mansion oop North.
    I can imagine that.

    I'd be curious without wanting to pry too much if you were to check something like Zoopla and see what percentage change there has been in that property between 2000 and to-date.

    Has there really been no inflation?

    Housing costs are the largest element of a household's budget nowadays, larger even than food, and yet we define it as not part of the basket of goods and therefore magically there's no inflation.

    Pure ostrich-in-sand to say there's no inflation.
    Eh? CPI does now (a recent change, admittedly). Or so I read this:

    https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/methodologies/consumerpriceinflationincludesall3indicescpihcpiandrpiqmi
    It measures "owner occupiers housing costs". Which it weights at 16% of the basket.

    Good luck finding somewhere to rent spending 16% of average takehome pay on rent. 😂
  • MightyAlexMightyAlex Posts: 1,410
    IshmaelZ said:

    As we're on drug policy. ..

    The mushroom season is now in full swing for all you budding mycologists!

    The little brown sods are springing up valley and down dale. However unknowingly grab a handful of the wrong ones and you're now possessing a class A substance. Of course it is a substance with some of the lowest known risks both to society and the individual but of course we are where we are thanks to the 2005 act.

    Now speaking for myself, even the innocent amateur mycologist stumbling around the Dales may feel a little shifty with a bag of unknown specimens. As there's actually quite a few varieties of LBMs with interesting properties and some of which we are unsure of either way.

    Has anyone ever been arrested/charged for foraging a fungus which grows naturally and widely across the UK? I'm sure they have been, but the entire concept seems completely weird, from a legal standpoint.

    FWIW it's illegal to forage any mushrooms at all in Epping Forest, not a million miles away from me in London – the forest was being harvested by foragers working for London restaurants so the authorities clamped down with a £5,000 maximum fine.
    Yes!

    Although the foragers were seemingly focussed on the iconic Psilocybe semilanceata. Some of the community are concerned enough they've produced an interactive map of its distribution, so as not to be caught out.

    https://www.magicmushroommap.com/map
    I would like to know what's behind that map, I think it's just temperature and rainfall. Not startlingly useful.
    They claim to work with:

    'growth records with data on habitat (e.g. land cover, elevation, soil acidity) and weather (e.g. temperature, rainfall).'

    Not only that but a 'trained' statistical model is mentioned.
  • felixfelix Posts: 15,124
    Nigelb said:

    Nigelb said:

    I see the Romanian government has fallen.

    Were they.... Romainers?
    Lettuce not descend to those levels.
    Cos it's getting silly?
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    ping said:

    Fk me

    Natural gas futures now up at 299.61p/therm for Dec delivery.

    Average energy bills from April looking to be ~£2k.

    Hope PB’ers have long fixes

    I am knitting a blanket and I have a half-knit jumper to complete.

    The current seasonal forecast is that a mild early winter is more likely than normal. Let's hope it's very mild.
This discussion has been closed.