26-Nov 2022 : LAB: 50% / CON: 27% / LDEM: 9% / GRN: 4%

[steve]

@isa

In three weeks time it will be the thirty ninth anniversary of the murder of my friend Yvonne.
Yvonne and I were doing our duty when a terrorist tried to kill us both and other officers and members of the public.
Yvonne was fatally injured, I will always miss her.
Those who have so damaged the standing of a police service I was proud to be a member of tarnish the memory of Yvonne and the many other officers, several of whom I knew personally who have paid the ultimate price while protecting the people of London.

They should be ashamed.

[Danny]

Apparently Met police have abandoned rape cases because their freezers are bursting full, dont work and they lost evidence which melted. officers have reported to enquiry that off duty they deliberately avoid police because they dont trust them.

Qui custodiet ipsos custodes? nemo.

[Danny]

Mar 20, 2023 22:36:18 GMT oldnat said:

Probably means the brain drain from scotland to the national capital in England applies to teachers too. Scotland needs a bigger weighting to get staff than does London.

Though obviously, westminster government is running a shoestring service funding aschools. And that is before we get to the pressure on schools not to hire senior and therefore more expensive staff on higher pay scales, but instead always go for the cheapest trainee they can find. So in the example, whereas scotland might be employing a scale point 3 teacher (I have no idea what that means), england will be employing a less qualified one to do the same job.

News this morning reports that following the head teacher suicide after receiving an ofsted bad report, they are pausing inspections. Schools are so bad that teachers are committing suicide from the stress, so we will stop assessing how bad they are? Thats the solution?

[Danny]

Mar 20, 2023 18:40:16 GMT Mr Poppy said:

Hypothetical of course but if LDEM became the party of Rejoin (EEA or the whole shebang) and split the ABCON vote then some of the historic tactical voting might reverse.

UKIP didnt get to form a government, but they did achieve Brexit despite only about 10% of the Uk actually wanting it. Its possible libs pushing rejoin could end up causing rejoin but remaining with a tiny number of MPs. Rejoin needs a figurehead to force the major parties to accept it.

Over 18mths to go

The recent budget looked to me like a pre election preparation. Giveaway to some of ther richest, promise of jam tomorrow for some poorer, and wage rise settlements which defer agreement for another years by using one off payments this time. Might not be they plan to go early, but they are certainly preparing so they can.

Oh, and dont forget the flight of men from the teaching profession, presumably because it is no longer attractive. It has in one respect at least become a niche for women returning to work after having children looking for a careeer they can still get into so late, and noticing teaching will take them.

[Danny]

Mar 21, 2023 5:44:56 GMT steve said:

Pleased to see my party Not playing the xenophobia game with asylum seekers.
The following motion just passed at conference

Liberal Democrats know that the best way to stop these dangerous crossings is to provide safe and legal routes to sanctuary for those that need it.

Our new policy, passed by members yesterday at Conference, shows how we can do just that. It calls on the Government to:

Immediately scrap the Illegal Migration Bill.
Fix the broken asylum system by taking powers from the Home Office and establishing a new, dedicated unit to make decisions quicker and more fairly.
Provide safe and legal routes to sanctuary for refugees from all countries, including:
An expanded, properly funded resettlement scheme.
A new scheme for unaccompanied child refugees.
Reuniting unaccompanied children in Europe with family in the UK.
Humanitarian visas to allow asylum seekers to travel the UK to proceed with their claims.

Glad to be associated with people who still have a moral compass.

OK steve, now i think sending refugees to rwanda is insane and is no more than a continuation of the policy to scare away potential applicants by sending them to a hellhole no one currently a citizen here would consider acceptable. However, if you really do seriously address the millions of world refugees, where would we put them? I guess we might be able to create a scheme whereby they are only allowed to live and work in scotland, because it needs and wants immigrants?

[Dave]

Mar 20, 2023 12:26:31 GMT steve said:

When I was a newly minted Police officer  I lived for a while in Soho in central London.]

Trench? If so, I loved that place.

[Danny]

Mar 21, 2023 5:58:32 GMT steve said:

@isa
In three weeks time it will be the thirty ninth anniversary of the murder of my friend Yvonne.
Yvonne and I were doing our duty when a terrorist tried to kill us both and other officers and members of the public.
Yvonne was fatally injured, I will always miss her.
Those who have so damaged the standing of a police service I was proud to be a member of tarnish the memory of Yvonne and the many other officers, several of whom I knew personally who have paid the ultimate price while protecting the people of London.

They should be ashamed.

Yeah i see both sides of this and take onboard what you already said about not experiencing this yourself. But the report says there are a group of officers who think being police means you make the rules. As I said before, your own experience may be because of your own ability to handle this, so such officers wont behave like that in your presence. Thats no different to how kids behave in school, the same set can be as good as gold with one teacher and riot with another- because of the capability of that teacher. And another example, I know a woman who used to be a civil servant in the days that sexism was widespread, who said she had no problems, you just had to be very clear you would not tolerate it and then it wouldnt happen.

And by the same token, its clear the police have not as an organisation said it must not happen.

[steve]

Dave
It was indeed I was one of the first when It was refurbished, five minute walk from West End Central where I was stationed and over 100 pubs within a square mile!

[steve]

@danny

Eventually because of climate change we're going to face an existential crisis of failing harvests and land becoming uninhabitable.

But not yet.

Perhaps you'd like to address how a country like Lebanon with a population of just five million houses 1.5 million refugees while our Tory scumbags think we're being swamped by 40,000!

[Dave]

Mar 21, 2023 7:21:39 GMT steve said:

Dave
It was indeed I was one of the first when It was refurbished, five minute walk from West End Central where I was stationed and over 100 pubs within a square mile!

The Blue Posts is still a favourite and hasn’t changed since I used to regularly doss in Trench after another barn-storming night out . I haven’t looked in recent years but I think they demolished one of my favourite dens of iniquity years ago didn’t they? Ah, the memories .

[alec]

There seems to be some outrage over the death of a single headteacher after a poor Ofsted report. Quite right too. We should care about the wellbeing of our public servants, given the valuable roles they fulfill in society.

I scanned the posts and wider press to see the accompanying rage about the scores of teachers and school staff who have and continue to die of covid infection, but sadly there was none. By 2021 around 139 were reported as having died, but strangely there don't seem to be any recent figures kept. There was this news report about a H&S prosecution of a school that ignored covid guidance that led to a teachers death, but it seemed to have passed by without much comment. www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/teacher-covid-death-burnley-college-b2085919.html

Outrage seems to be partial, and selective, as ever.

[steve]

Dave.
They knocked it down to be replaced with " affordable housing" massively expensive flats and shops. It's still called trenchard house but I doubt it's quite the same.

[steve]

alec
I presume you got the figure from the ons data.
You should have read further.

"There were 139 deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19) in teaching and educational professionals aged 20 to 64 years registered between 9 March and 28 December 2020 in England and Wales. For both sexes, rates of death involving COVID-19 for this group were statistically significantly lower than the rate of death involving COVID-19 among those of the same age and sex, with 18.4 deaths per 100,000 males (66 deaths) and 9.8 deaths per 100,000 females (73 deaths), compared with 31.4 and 16.8 deaths per 100,000 in the population among males and females respectively."

I.e. Teachers were significantly less likely to die from or with covid than the comparable peer group by age in the general population.

[alec]

steve - hardly surprising, given that schools were closed during the main wave in that period, and also when considering that in the initial period of the pandemic, children were less capable of spreading it. Even given those factors, secondary level teachers in that data set actually had a higher death rate than the comparison population, although not statistically significant. We've stopped gathering data on teacher deaths in 2022, or at least, it's hard to find, which is par for the course. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

But you know what? I don't really care about the details. This is about attitudes.

What about if I say the following things about the headteacher who killed herself after a poor Ofsted inspection:

1) It was terrible what we expected teachers to do during lockdowns. She never recovered.
2) The rate of suicide among head teachers is actually lower than the rest of the population, so you should move on.
3) She obviously had something wrong in her head and would probably have killed herself over something else soon anyway, so we shouldn't worry about it.
4) Very few headteachers kill themselves. Far more die in road accidents, so it isn't a problem.

Wonder how that would go down on twitter, UKPR, et al?

It's what covid victims, living and dead, are having to put up with on a constant basis.

[Mr Poppy]

Mar 20, 2023 21:01:41 GMT c-a-r-f-r-e-w said:

Mar 20, 2023 13:14:38 GMT Mr Poppy said:

Opinion piece relating to LAB's complacency and new 3word slogan of Rishi+Hunt's "sticking plaster politics" - a slogan they might regret IF/when the sticking plasters continue to work.

well I’ve been using “sticking plaster politics” for a good while and won’t likely regret using it, because even if sometimes they work, they are usually just sticking plasters. Mind you I used it about some of Labour’s policies too, so it’s a bit of a double-take to see them using it

(Haven’t seen “cuckoo politics” taking off yet, but you never know…)

LDEM were part of the coalition 2010-15 but those cuckoos haven't found a new nest yet. Starmer might prefer to feed the Midwing Cuckoos a few red briefcases rather than rely on LAB's SCG MP faction though 

Perhaps if you add a third word your slogan might catch on. Slogans need to hit exactly three words to work these days. "Vote Leave" was so 2016 and with inflation then you need three words these days:

"Stay at Home" (which Starmer might adopt for Corbynite/istas into GE'24)
"Make Brexit Work" (which Rishi ought to be using and perhaps will by GE'24)
(Brexit was/is a) "Catalyst for Change" (Hunt almost mentioned it but CON+LAB seem to avoid wanting to talk about Brexit - other than agreeing to finished the unfinished business tomorrow)
"Stop the Boats" (Cooper only has it as an 'aim' but both parties using that one)
"New Model Tories" (yet to catch on   )

[alec]

Met Police in for something of a kicking this morning.

I recall in the dim and distant, some agitation from our RoC contingent, who were keen to take aim at Mayor of London Sadiq Khan for forcing fragrant Cressida Dick from office, on the back of consistent failures in the Met. Conservatives and their outriders in the press and on the forums expressed outrage and were out to get Khan.

Wonder if we'll see them slapping him on the back today for being so far ahead of the game?

[Mr Poppy]

Mar 20, 2023 22:06:09 GMT matt126 said:

...in an election you would expect the Lib Dem share to be more lumpy than 2019. The Lib Dems polled 11.6% in 2019.They are now polling 7-8%. In 2019 Lib Dem VI generally increased by 3% from previous election. This was due to Anti Corbyn And pro Eu factors. You would expect that 3% plus little bit more to go back to Labour, with Lib Dems still performing strongly in their small number of target seats

Repost of Voter Migration 2022 (which does indeed show 3% of LDEM'19 -> LAB VI)

www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/pseph_trans2022.html

"The Liberal Democrats have not made much progress since the last election. Although they have gained some support from the Conservatives, and gained one voter from the pool of non-voters, that has not been enough to compensate for their losses to Labour"

I'm not going over the LDEM's lumpiness again but in a lot of 'Red Wall' seats there are very few LDEM voters left to move to LAB. Elsewhere (eg most of SW.England) then LAB are now more likely to be the best placed ABCON party but I'd be surprised if LDEM give up their former heartland without a fight and simply settle for a very lumpy (and very limited) batch of seats - their current ones plus a few extras that were near misses in GE'19.

Mind you, with Sir Ed Davey as leader, maybe 20ish MPs is best they should hope for. Perhaps Davey hopes that might get him a red briefcase from new adopted parents in either GE'24 or more plausibly GE'29?

[Danny]

Mar 21, 2023 7:25:51 GMT steve said:

Perhaps you'd like to address how a country like Lebanon with a population of just five million houses 1.5 million refugees while our Tory scumbags think we're being swamped by 40,000!

Thats easy. lebanon doesnt thave a choice, they are stuck with the refugees. In britain we have the capacity to exclude those people, and that is exactly what we have done, by choice.

Although having said that, we here have been a lot more welcoming of Ukrainian refugees. Quite a lot of them. And we havnt put them in camps. Of course we could build new towns for millions of refugees to live in, but we arent even willing to do that for the people already here. We have a deliberate policy of housing shortage in the Uk for Uk citizens, let alone new arrivals. Helps with the policy of levelling up...to the rich.

Though I'd disagree there arent too many people in the UK for the land area etc.

[Danny]

Mar 21, 2023 7:30:34 GMT alec said:

There seems to be some outrage over the death of a single headteacher after a poor Ofsted report. Quite right too. We should care about the wellbeing of our public servants, given the valuable roles they fulfill in society.

I scanned the posts and wider press to see the accompanying rage about the scores of teachers and school staff who have and continue to die of covid infection, but sadly there was none.

Happily most teachers are under pension age so safe from covid.  Approximately half of all trained teachers have abandoned the profession while still alive. Absences from  stress are massive up to and including regular instances of teachers crying in class because they cannot cope. All schools will have experienced this. Its a far far bigger problem for staff than covid.

By 2021 around 139 were reported as having died,

Hmm. Dont I remember some funny stats in 2020? All part of the government propaganda campaign deliberately designed to make people fear covid? There are about half a million teachers employed in English schools and a million staff overall. Given the average age of a covid death at 83 and the total of all covid deaths in the Uk, that number dying seems rather unlikely.

but strangely there don't seem to be any recent figures kept.

Not strange at all if the propaganda campaign has ended, then?

[neilj]

All this palaver about the Met Police this morning, don't these people read the Daily Mail, if they did they'd realise the real problem is wokeness...

[alec]

This may excite some - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-65015217

[shevii]

Mar 20, 2023 22:06:09 GMT matt126 said:

The polls are interesting with large differences in the Labour lead. Curiously the Labour VI in them all is very similar in them all 44-47% yet there is huge differences with the other parties. Con 26/35/20/29 Lib Dem 11/7/9/8 Green 6/13/6 reform 5/6/7. Maybe there is sampling errors , prompting differences, and different accounting for those who say they are undecided/ will not vote. With local elections soon it might increase the smaller parties vote VI's short term as they tend to collect more votes in these elections.

in an election you would expect the Lib Dem share to be more lumpy than 2019. The Lib Dems polled 11.6% in 2019.They are now polling 7-8%. In 2019 Lib Dem VI generally increased by 3% from previous election. This was due to Anti Corbyn And pro Eu factors. You would expect that 3% plus little bit more to go back to Labour, with Lib Dems still performing strongly in their small number of target seats

How close the next election is depends on the economy. There are signs that inflationary pressures are falling with UK gas prices today 94.25 lowest since june 21. If these pressures ease and the Tories show a bit more competence and dont self destruct they will get closer to Labour before the election given how undecideds are having a big affect on their poll ratings

In the distant past we'd have had quite a few contributors who would have been able to dig deep into the tables and weightings (possibly a couple left but perhaps not in the same detail as 10 years ago) but my gut feeling from brief looks at the tables is that mostly the current movement is down to movement in the Tory don't knows rather than any direct movement from Lab back to Con.  So just the voters who were probably going to end up in the Tory column anyway with, say, a 30% absolute minimum vote under almost any circumstances.

It's difficult- Yougov is probably the most easy to understand and they have the raw figures and weighted figures (excluding don't knows) but then the weighted figures include getting a fair sample as well as likelihood to vote so you can't take the raw figures as accurate until adjusted but the weighted figures include other adjustments based on their methodology. 

I think the Lab lead has fallen 2-3 points in the last 3 months but it still seems to be mostly around the Tory don't knows rather than any genuine shift from Con to Lab and then back again.  So currently just what would have been expected with don't knows drifting back as there has been less bad news, but it won't be nearly enough for the Tories unless they start winning back some of the people who were Con and now saying Lab and that's a very different issue from just winning back their remaining don't knows.

Lib Dems main problem in their lumpy vote translating into more seats is that they aren't really in that strong a position in the seats you might think they had a chance of the ABT vote (I guess mostly the 50 seats they held pre Clegg meltdown plus some new blue wall) and in many cases having to jump from 3rd to 1st even if they are the only ones likely to beat the Tories in those seats, so it won't be that obvious to the electorate who the ABT vote should go to.  A lot of potential ABT seats may be missed by both Lab and Lib Dem because no-one was a clear second and there's unlikely to be the same sort of dynamics as the by elections where one party takes it easy.

[Dave]

Mar 21, 2023 0:36:32 GMT RAF said:

Mar 20, 2023 23:16:20 GMT @isa said:

Just checking out the Press Preview on Sky News. Not often the Grauniad and the Mail front pages are united on one main issue, but the Met has managed to bring it about. The force's current constitution is surely unsustainable.

Does anyone seriously believe anything will change? The current Commissioner can't even accept that institutional racism exists - not just in the Met, he doesn't believe institutional racism exists at all.

I'm not sure Rowley does believe it to be honest but suspect that he feels he has to say it.  He is repeating the same mistake that Cressida Dick made, with the short-term objective of keeping the troops onside over-riding the survival chances of the Met.  Maybe he has his head in the sand and still feels that rather like those banks in 2008, the Met is too big to fail.  Just as likely, he's calculating that if he if can mount a rear-guard action and get to retirement, before what increasingly feels like the inevitable demise of the Met, then he will have had a result.      

[oldnat]

Rallings & Thrasher on the English locals

www.lgcplus.com/politics/governance-and-structure/rallings-thrasher-tory-losses-could-top-1000-seats-20-03-2023/

I don't pretend to much understanding of the variety of systems there, but presumably the total number of seats changing hands will dominate reporting.

The effect of having to show approved photographic ID will be interesting.

[steve]

Perfect headline in the Mirror regarding the lying duplicitous ex Prime minister.

" Last chance buffoon "

[oldnat]

Mar 21, 2023 10:01:25 GMT alec said:

This may excite some - www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-65015217

It was exciting when Scottish Ministers approved the SSE Coire Glas scheme 3 years ago, and encouraging when Drax submitted their Ben Cruachan expansion  plans to ScotGov at the end of 2022.

Both firms have embarked on exploratory works, but the lack of assurances from UKGov about the future structure of the electricity market has prevented final implementation. With Scotland's on-shore wind energy costing just 3.7p per kWh, it would have been rather useful to have had these storage schemes coming on stream earlier.

www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/scotland-electricity

[davwel]

I observe BBC Radio 4 devoting considerable time to the problems of the London Met police, but I wish they would give similar attention to their own problems of wrong thinking, bias, complacency, inconsistency, leaders not fulfilling the intentions that those at the top announce.

I bore folk here by reporting instances of bias so often, and wish I didn`t have to, or feel it necessary, to keep to basic standards of life in the UK. But complaints have gone on for years, and instead of the problems geting sorted they are getting worse. Nothing short of a removal of the complacent staff and structure will solve.

[davwel]

And SSE have money to spend, judging from the increased dividend and share allocation announced to us a week or so ago.

[oldnat]

Mar 21, 2023 11:13:21 GMT davwel said:

And SSE have money to spend, judging from the increased dividend and share allocation announced to us a week or so ago.

Indeed. Not only have they been coining it in as an energy producer, but also due to owning the distribution grid in the northern part of Scotland. Their profits from that being enhanced by the transmission price being based on the requirements of the E&W "National" Grid to supply the energy poor areas in the south.

[steve]

Dave

I suspect the Met is too large to be broken up however more area or district control is a possibility.

The other elephant in the room is if people are running around saying how shit existing officers are who exactly do they expect to replace them with.