Gloucester Saint

There’s some truth in this, and some expectation management, I still remember (and laugh at) the Smith and Jones Intershitty sketch. The one big improvement which can made if gotten right is on cost and the ticketing system. It’s horrifically expensive under the current mess of a ticketing framework to travel any distance on the faster lines which is also where the environmental benefits stack up in getting people out of cars. I drove to work for years because of this (through some dreadful traffic) but in moving here have found a way of commuting to the Midlands using a free car park and split tickets on fast rail routes. Takes planning and organisation, far more than it should, but it works. The local franchises such as West Midlands Rail I’d probably leave be tbh, but the nationals and biggest regionals - LNER (which makes surpluses and runs better in public hands and loses money in commercial), Cross Country, Arriva, SWT and GWR work better nationalised as their margins are so much tighter than the local ones and maintenance bigger, more complex staffing. The key is to be able to invest strategically on upgrades when needed which where BR fell down a bit. And they’ll be competing with defence, education, local authorities etc, all of which have been hollowed out in recent years. The case for renationalisation is strongest in water because that has never really worked and to invest in the infrastructure and sewerage needed means the margins aren’t there. Hence the Thames Water debacle and also it’s unfair that for example millions visit Devon and Cornwall every summer yet the bill for keeping some of the beaches clean falls on the water ratepayers there via SWW. In rail, it’ll be popular and not as expensive (I don’t agree it will be cost free but it will save the commuter some much needed money). Overall I support it as at least there’s more accountability potentially and like water, it’s not an obvious profit generator like telecommunications where investment, innovation and good margins go in hand in hand.

Maybe not the right place for this but a giant of a politician who worked cross-parties all his career from the 70s at CPAG to Thatcher, Minister under Blair (fell out with Gordon Brown), and finally a Conservative-nominated cross-bench Peer. https://news.sky.com/story/labour-veteran-frank-field-dies-12914087 They don’t make them like that any more

How many goals conceded this season now? Must be 60 or getting on for it. I know we’ve had a Tyro League goalie for much of the season who Rasmus wasted £14m on, but if Maresca, McKenna, Farke, Corberan, or Wagner have the quality at this level of Bednarek, KWP, THB in a back 4, they ain’t conceding 60 odd goals. Thanks S-Clarke - 66 conceded so far. That’s disgusting. What happened to basic organisation?

Whoops - not a good day for Trump and his legal team https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-us-canada-68848464

Hideously expensive too for what, 1% of cases - one figure circulating of £230k per asylum seeker https://www.ft.com/content/3a8e4b8b-1e30-4423-83a0-818f2b7dec05 Some of the figures are eye watering here https://news.sky.com/story/cost-of-stalled-rwanda-asylum-scheme-could-soar-to-500m-watchdog-says-13083968 Four times the cost of accommodation whilst processing appeals. Far better to invest that extra funding to speed cases up and put extra venues on for hearings. As Daniel Finkenstein says in The Times, the main USP of the Tory Party was that although public services wouldn’t be everything you want to be, there would be fiscal caution as a trade off. Now that’s gone out of the window over the last 14 years, the national debt doubled even from the credit crunch highest point under Brown before Ukraine war and even Covid, there’s no point in voting for them. He thinks Truss in particular will be the same millstone the IMF 1976 and Winter of Discontent was for Labour in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. This outrageous waste of taxpayers money for a publicity stunt does nothing to solve what is a very difficult issue. Can you hear the Taxpayers Alliance complaining? Only about aid given to groups appealing against it https://www.taxpayersalliance.com/millions_given_out_to_groups_campaigning_against_rwanda_plan £3m vs £500m. Hmmm, looks like their maths is as wonky as the Tory Party. No wonder the Truss 44 days was such a disaster with Matthew Sinclair their former research director (ha ha) a core part of Truss’s team as economic advisor.

No sign of Priti Patel on that list then… Denials from a few of the names at the time https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5039385/Two-ministers-condemn-dirty-dossier-claims.html but Bob Stewart (now without the whip…) was then cited for using the phrase ‘totty’ to a female reporter the previous year, which hasn’t been used in the workplace since 1990-something. No response there on being allegedly ‘perpetually intoxicated’ either. 2017 wasn’t the best year in the Stewart household https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4257998/Claire-Podbielski-Stewart-banned-drink-driving.html

Ukraine aid bill finally passed, along with a further package for Israel and Taiwan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-68848277 Never thought I’d type the sentence ‘well done Mike Johnson’ but real guts there to get that through, and a heap of skill across the aisles. Greene is a Putin puppet, in his and China’s pocket as much as Trump. Comrade Marj. Vote Trump, get Putin https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/20/republicans-ukraine-aid-package-congress -

Tidy but Warks attack even more toothless and slow than Hants. They’ve got some height but the pitches are too slow early season to come into play or to help the spinners as any turn is easily covered and not much bounce around. 85mph minimum to get anything out of it and neither of the XIs has a bowler of that type without Wheal and Turner. Good first drop partnership. Orr doesn’t look any better technically than Organ so far, both fish outside off but at least Organ had to deal with the Dukes on wet pitches.

I know Adams and Brooks missed chances that would have been sitters in the Tyro League but even so, tactically he is every bit as bad as Nathan Jones, Pellegrino and Branfoot. Cannot cope mid-match with the opposition changing formation and personnel. Obvious Charles needed to solidify midfield today and stop the runners, it was obvious to anyone with any kind of football knowledge or even an alien landing from Mars. If Ankerson wants to keep him as a figurehead for their hipster project, it’s SR’s club not ours, but at least put Calderwood in charge of subs and tactics on match days because Russell Martin hasn’t got a fucking clue organisationally. Feel sorry for the folks who travelled today, mugged off royally by the club’s experimental crap, basic professionalism sees 3 points. Be glad when he and SR are gone.

Wasn’t laughing at your post but was laughing at the SNP and Sturgeon. Whoops. Meanwhile Bannon and Trump’s influence evident on Liz Truss https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68853672

This post needed a soundtrack

Buttertubs Pass became a really supreme drive after the TDF, even Fleet Moss which wasn’t on the route got done too. Not Park Rash though, the double hair pin was as rutted and lethal as always. Good segment here on Times Radio about Truss and what they think will be a continuing campaign of disruption to Sunak in the run-up to and probably during the GE campaign. Hoping James Bagge can give us all a ‘Martin Bell Tatton’ moment on election night.

That’s another damning verdict on player recruitment and the issuing of new contracts. To have three keepers that poor on what is probably a combined £75k per week in the Championship is serial ineptitude especially when the first choice all season has been bottom or near bottom of the league stats in some categories. That’s before we even think about signing a player injured for the best part of a year (Stewart) with his contract running out for £10m.

Great moment in the HoL - the front bench Tory peers trying not to laugh (and failing) https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/lords-erupts-in-laughter-as-member-makes-dig-at-liz-truss-after-un-criticism/ar-BB1lJsD2?ocid=nl_article_link Any opportunity to mock Liz Truss is a good one. Daily Star’s front page is great again today. Why Sunak didn’t expel her after she sat on a platform with Bannon, and Trump, allowing Bannon to eulogise about Tommy Robinson is beyond words, and will cost him and his party dozens of seats. That’s without taking into account the latest MLT-level delusional rantings in her book serialisation. If they’d announced she was joining Reform they’d have sunk them to boot. She really does belong on that platform at Workington on a panel with MLT, Katie Hopkins and the other nutcases.

You’d think so..but Martin is very stubborn. Or brave as he would call it. Chance for Alex to have a solid night and go on to finish his Saints career on a high playing to his strengths of saving and claiming balls which Baz is hopeless at. Worse with his feet but be clear with the back 4 that it needs to go more direct and forward.

Private Eye reported that on Radio Exe the presenter asked a question on a morning quiz segment - ‘If it’s your birthday today, 8 March, your star sign is a fish. Name that sign’ Caller: ‘Tuna’ ITV Tipping Point - Ben Shephard ‘How many sides does an isosceles triangle have?’ Contestant: ‘Five’

What really comes across from all of the sordid correspondence within PO is the second class (no pun intended) attitude towards the sub-postmasters eg ‘subbies with their hand in the till’ compared to long-serving PO employees in Crown Offices, as effectively the former are/were self-employed franchise holders, albeit with a grotesquely one-sided contract which was used as a blunt instrument to say ‘Horizon is perfect, these are your losses and you need to make them good’. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/post-office-horizon-it-scandal-b2527686.html If you are following the enquiry, I recommend Nick Wallis’s book the Great Post Office Scandal - £6.99 on Kindle currently. Nick was one of the first journalists to take the story up. No, I‘m not him! Some of the detail is staggering, and how long this has taken to come to the surface due to the PO’s stalling on evidence requests, blocking and outright lies. By the time Jo Swinson was Minister, the truth was starting to come out with increasing pressure from a cross-party group of MPs including Arbuthnot, Bridgen, Kevan Jones, Mike Wood, Albert Owen and Mike Wood. Her responses were pathetic, she was as useless as she was a Lib Dem leader. This led to the BIS enquiry of 2015 - where the POs lawyers and brown-nosing NFSP (subbies National Federation) tried to claim that a 500 page manual without any in-person or even online training was sufficient to be deemed certified to use Horizon in just one day. Alan Bates and Mark Baker ripped this apart, making clear the PO’s unwillingness to drill down into each and every kind of discrepancy. The Branch Focus manuals which came around branches Bates also exposed as inadequate, and when the PO’s lawyer tried to hit back by saying that losses only seemed to happen in sub-master controlled branches and not Crown Offices (that bias coming out again) Bates came back with a beauty of an internal report showing that Crown Offices lost £2.2m across their counters during 2007/8 at the peak of Horizon issues. The Second Sight review, which was highly critical of Horizon’s reliability and PO leadership and middle management, was being undermined politically. A system which had nearly 20000 fixes to its codes by the way so the system was different each time you used it. How the PO Board went in September 1999 from saying Horizon was miles off being operational to approving it the following month I will never understand but the enquiry must find that out from those still alive. I’m at the point in the book at the BIS hearing where Zahawi is tearing Vennells a new one about the PO stalling on giving Second Signt access to the legal files, which might ring a bell from Mr Bates v the Post Office and her colleagues are tripping themselves up about who had/hadn’t given Second Sight what had been requested and continued denying Parliament details of all of the other wrong prosecutions which had happened.

Getting the thread back on track…NSW Police believe the driver was misogyny but from a very disturbed mind. His family have to some extent backed this up and also confirmed he stopped taking his medication recently which does hint at paranoid schizophrenia https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-68814395 The authorities really do need to move away from the purely care in the community model, and blend that personalised support model for independent living with some monitoring, tracking and enforcement where needed. Not everyone with PS will be diagnosed so not 100% foolproof but a lot more can be done to help PS diagnosed folks, their families and significantly reduce the risks of fatal attacks. The one man of the six killed was a Muslim migrant from Pakistan trying to shield/save women and children from the attacker.

Killers’ family acting with dignity, saying he’s had severe MH issues since age if 17, unreservedly condemning his actions and saying that the female police officer had no alternative but to clean him out. All the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenia. Most people with it can lead a normal life if they take their meds and have a decent support network. A lot of debate in the UK following the Nottingham murder trial recently and other cases where people with it haven’t or haven’t been able to manage their symptoms properly, plus delays in diagnosis and assessment https://news.sky.com/story/jacob-billington-mother-whose-son-was-fatally-stabbed-by-paranoid-schizophrenic-reacts-to-inquest-verdict-13089778 This is controversial, but I’ve always believed in better funding and use of secure units for people with PS who can’t manage a semi-stable lifestyle, with heavily supervised visits to family and trips out if there’s positive progress. There should also be monitoring where stable patients circumstances change. Another example here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/belfast-police-service-of-northern-ireland-more-newry-southern-b2463513.html and here https://www.stewartslaw.com/news/high-court-says-schizophrenic-man-who-killed-three-people-can-bring-damages-claim-against-police-and-nhs/ Up front cost of extra support workers yes, but it would be more than covered by people with PS who can be supported to manage and have networks realising their potential, paying taxes and avoiding expensive police investigations and enquiries costing millions, and most of all reducing the high profile and tragic cases of violence to innocent people.

The IRGC may be over-reaching here, dangerous times. If the IDF can damage them further, it might weaken their role in the Russia-China-North Korea axis and if going further still, weaken the IRGC domestically.

Nothing to do with it, Crouch was cheered after some initial stick, Fuller I’ll possibly give you. Gavin is wholly unsuited to his job and SFC is well beyond his level, as is the Championship let alone the PL. He might make a League One keeper and did show some promise with Pompey but still had a few horrors and they weren’t a patch on the outfit they have now winning that league. Martin ditto, another tactical horror today and he’s never been at Fratton. I don’t know what it is with shoehorning Jack into a DMC role but it must have cost at least 15 points now. Edit - Flynn got both of them out of jail there

The bloke who challenged the attacker with a bollard (see video in this article) deserves a medal the size of a dustbin lid https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/bondi-junction-shooting-stabbings-live-updates-police-operation-in-sydney-s-eastern-suburbs-20240413-p5fjku.html?post=p55uy8&gb=1 This is a horrific, racially-motivated attack with no justification and needs to be reported as such. I suspect Duckie may be on the money around there being a connection to it seemingly being an area with a significant Jewish population. Having said that, he didn’t seem to care who he was stabbing or trying to stab. If he’d had anything about him, he’d have spent his life saving going over there to fight the IDF. Instead his response was to stab bystanders thousands of miles away with nothing to do with the Gaza conflict including a baby. How low can you go? Well done to the copper who wiped him out with a good clean hit.

I saw an interview with Paul Merson in parallel with MLT’s own about why he departed from Sky, and Merson reluctantly admitted that MLT had several warnings about the stuff he was posting on social media and starting to say in public. He seemed genuinely sad about it all as he’s friends with Matt and working with him was a big part of his time there. That’s not to say Sky wouldn’t have made the changes but it gave them a needless open goal. There’s more to it than MLT being a white guy in his 50s with strange views being replaced by ‘wokeness’. Thompson and Nicholas were a bit older, I think MLT would still be on there personally and not scraping the barrel at a festival with that cast of nutters.

Wow, Alan Cook, the PO Director at the time, claims he didn’t know the PO was doing most of its own prosecuting. I mean you wouldn’t expect him to know minutiae of counter processes and ops detail, but top level remit including powers should be an absolute minimum. Crozier up this afternoon. He has so far held a ‘nothing to do with me guv’ stance, being CEO of the Royal Mail umbrella at the time. Wouldn’t expect him to be in the detail but to write off all responsibility? Hmmm. As he’s only got an afternoon grilling and Vennells has 3 days next month (she was in the detail tbf) he’s probably going to get away Scot free (no pun intended). Nothing to do with his ITV role and connections in an election year….

Looks like it although not confirmed anywhere obvious. Vennells is in an increasingly difficult position, only a matter of time before a clear case of perjury arises and certainly fraudulent activity and claims https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68779080 and The arrest needs to happen immediately after she’s given evidence to the enquiry and her movements should be heavily monitored and assets frozen. Two Fujitsu UK employees already under investigation for it and that will be a custodial sentence. Enjoy the porridge Gareth and be careful around the showers https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/01/09/computer-expert-silent-post-office-scandal/