James Bambury

A lot of time and capability resource is wasted by reassessing things repeatedly because of short term political whims and/or austerity brain meaning there's suddenly not enough money.

New ones appear to have gone up, possibly early this morning.

This is not the first protest group doing property damage of that kind of nature in the acts 25 year existence either and there's some fairly good reasons why even braverman wasn't stupid enough to try to proscribe a group like JSO.

Which (if found guilty) is basically all property damage with a smattering of incidental violence. Even if it scrapes the statutory definition under TA2000, the vast majority of what could fall under 'serious property damage' does not fall under what most people consider to be terrorism.

The etymology of palavras > palaver is a curious one I only found about after starting to learn portuguese.

Not fixing the engine is a guaranteed electoral disaster.

Same applies to the can't increase taxes nonsense as well. Plenty that can be done that would yes irritate voters but everything still being broken because taxes weren't raised to secure spending room will be far far worse.

Well messaging has changed somewhat on one instance of a wider issue.
One swallow does not make a summer etc.

Think a bit more evidence is needed to conclude that they definitely realise the issue yet.

Issue is there are plenty of previous direct action protest groups who'd also count on damage. Was flagged when act was originally going through parly. The claim was it was necessary to cover the more recent IRA bombings where advanced warning avoided any casualties and not for protest groups.

Yes, it's influence the gov OR intimidate (a section of) the public. And yes the main claim here is serious damage, both the aircraft and the attacks on elbit in Bristol and Glasgow.

The jtac assessment did however consider 'elbit employees' could be a section of the public though.

Pedestrians have zero crumple zone and are suffering as a result of this vehicle bloat, entirely fair that it is discouraged.

not with that tacky bling grille!

But even then, it still creates policy instability with short termism prioritised and much stronger ideological swings back and forth that just lead to inefficiency undoing the other party's changes.

15? 24 perhaps no?

Anyway I somewhat arbitrarily went with that as that was when the Jenkins commission report recommending change got punted into the very long grass.

The picture doesn't really change if you look further. FPTP at best provides presentational stability at some points in time.

Proportionality almost always offers more stability.

The idea that FPTP leads to stable strong governments is not backed up by any evidence.

What would the UK look like had Blair actually stuck to his 1997 manifesto promise of electoral reform?

They were already looking tatty and rather sad this morning. Cheap temu nonsense is not going survive Bristol Autumnal weather very long.

Cost free snake oil perhaps.

A non London English city finally does a congestion charge of reasonable coverage.

Still not a fan of the 100 days per year exemptions though. Needlessly complicated and not sure the distributional impact is great.

Sam: correctly states need to look at trends not single polls

Comments: linking drops/gains of single polls within random sampling error to recent events 🤦‍♂️

happened and the met wouldn't look ridiculous.

Contrast police scotland who turned a blind eye today and some other forces in other areas in previous weeks and no-one really heard anything about it.

The met, far too subservient to political whims of the home sec, has made it's own problem here.

It's a bunch of mostly old people (who are fully aware of the consequences and don't appear to want sympathy) sitting on the grass holding signs. Quite ludicrous to think they're a possible national security threat.

If they'd turned a blind eye at the first protest these numbers would never have

Here, a choice has been made to reallocate a large number of shifts that could've been dealing with burglaries, thefts, muggings and traffic offences.

All of which have far more harmful outcomes than a bunch of mostly OAPs holding signs.

Except that's not actually true in practice is it? Demand for policing more than consumes the present supply (let alone the rest of the justice system) and so choices are constantly made about where those resources are focused and what isn't prioritised.

Which raises the question of whether this is leadership incompetence in the police to deprioritise addressing crimes with actual victims in favour of mostly old people sat with sign*, or a breakdown in their claimed operational independence.

*and Streisand effecting the whole matter in the process

Eh? Obvious nonsense, the police are always at discretion over arrests and where to direct an ultimately constrained force; this is observed daily.

It's a choice to spend these shifts here rather than on the backlog of phone/bike muggings, burglaries and motor vehicle crime.

But it might work for us meme from arrested development. "well did it work for those people?" "No, it never does, I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but..." "...but it might work for us."

Feedback from McSweeney and co

Yea, looking at this they do ask possible times after but not a fan of the way the questionnaires are strung out like this. Would rather have all info first.

The pearl clutching over this seems a bit ridiculous.

Curious how it will play out but the attack doesn't seem to work that well in interviews and the wider can't trust because of past actions line is undermined by starmer's u turns across a breadth of values and pledges.

Perhaps I missed the line but actually flipping through the episode on iPlayer he doesn't appear to be saying anything MMTish.

A soft front end is largely irrelevant if the pedestrian gets knocked over onto the asphalt and/or crushed under the SUV.

EuroNCAP: "We have many cases where the SUV is better for pedestrians than the small car."

Better when over half the points come from a test that assumes a crash dynamic that is physically impossible because of the front end height!

Ludicrous statement from them.