Creative Midfielder
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Posts posted by Creative Midfielder
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6 minutes ago, Naturalcynic said:There were also several Labour MPs in that job up until 2010.
Yes, there were and they all fall into the large group of people who have questions to answer. which also includes some very senior civil servants.
But their questions will be around whether they asked enough questions themselves or were gullible in believing the lies they were told, and even if it is established that they discharged their ministerial responsibilities poorly I guess that amount to sins of omission and certainly makes them far less culpable than the Tory ministers/PMs who had knowledge of the injustices being done and helped cover them up instead of taking action to stop them - those are sins of commission.
So I’m afraid it still seems like a deflection from the real culprits.
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1 minute ago, Naturalcynic said:I don’t disagree with what you say. I just feel that there’s too much pretence from some quarters that Davey is squeaky-clean in all this.
Well if there is ever a full and proper investigation of this whole sorry saga and Davy is proved culpable in some way and punished appropriately then that is fine by me.
But I can't help feeling the whole discussion around him is because as the only non-Tory (ex-)minister with even a tenuous connection to this mess he is, as @Well b back has pointed out, a very convenient distraction from a whole string of Tory ministers (and possibly/probably PMs) who we now know definitely are culpable.
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31 minutes ago, Naturalcynic said:Because of his subsequent involvement with Herbert Smith Freehills.
And you think that trumps the Tory ministers who had knowledge of the PO cover up, which Davy didn't, and who had ministerial responsibility for the Post Office (which Davy hadn't had since 2012) - that makes no sense to me.
As I said the first time around, I agree there are plenty of politicians and civil servants who have a variety of questions to answer but in terms of who has the most, or perhaps the hardest, questions to answer it is clearly the series of Tory ministers who knew the Post Office had mounted an comprehensive cover up and yet took no action - worse than that they became part of the cover up themselves at a time when the postmaster's campaign, backbench MPs and Select Committees were all trying unsuccessfully to get at the truth.
One of those MPs was of course a senior Tory, back in the days when decent Tories weren't quite as rare as hen's teeth and he appears to take exactly the same view as to where responsiblity lies:
Lord Arbuthnot, a former MP and vocal critic of the handling of victims in this scandal told the BBC that the government has to take responsibility "for everything that went wrong" in relation to the sub-postmasters.
He said, "It's a distinctly corrupt murky story that goes right the way into government and it's deeply worrying."
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1 minute ago, Naturalcynic said:You seem very defensive of Davey for some strange reason.
I didn't intend to be - he isn't someone I have a very high regard for, although ironically he was a far more capable energy minster than anyone we've had since but that apart.........
I was only intending to question, probably at too great a length, why you thought he had 'more to answer than most' when in practice he has a lot less to answer than all his Tory successors.
I couldn't be bothered to look up just how many ministers that amounts to but based on the almost continous Governmental musical chairs that have been going on for years now I imagine that its quite a few, although we can perhaps excuse whoever notionally held the post for a few days whilst Liz Truss was PM.
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17 minutes ago, Naturalcynic said:Ministers from Labour, LibDem and Conservative parties all have questions to answer, although Davey perhaps has more to answer than most, not least because after his tenure as Minister with responsibility for postal affairs, he acted between 2015 and 2021 as an advisor for Herbert Smith Freehills, the law firm that advised the Post Office in the 2019 court case and acted for it in compensation claims and disclosures to the public enquiry.
Nice try but unfortunately for you the revelation that the Government became aware of what was going on relates to 2014 onwards by which time Ed Davey had been Energy Minister for 2 years (in what to all intents and purposes was a Tory government anyway).
In addition Davey has already been questioned publically about his tenure as Minister responsible for the PO (which ended in 2012) and has insisted that he did ask questions of the PO himself at the time and was lied to - that may have seemed like a cop out at the time he was asked but it now seems not just plausible but certainly true as we now that there was organised cover up in which the PO lied to everyone including the courts, MPs and initially the Government.
Why would Davy have more questions to answer than his multiple Tory successors in that post who were in charge as the truth about the misdeeds of the Post Office started to emerge, not just through the campaign but via the High Court cases and yet they still did nothing?
But whilst it's true to say that lots of people, and not just ministers, have questions to answer - some senior civil servants must already be looking for new jobs.
But it is only a series of Tory ministers who will have to answer the question 'Why did you not take any action when you were informed that the Post Office had mounted an organised cover up?' which is a question they are going to find pretty difficult to answer in the current climate.
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4 minutes ago, TheGunnShow said:Germany. I nearly went there after the Brexit result (the only thing that stopped me were the tax rules on the self-employed - VAT is charged at a far lower turnover relative to the UK), and since meeting Miss TGS in Germany in 2022 and we're pretty much a year into a LDR now, it makes perfect sense to go there rather than suggest that she comes over here.
Especially as she's just picked up an excellent job in her field (she's a radiologist), and I'm always good in translation provided the Internet's quick. Got another visa appointment a week on Monday, just need to get the insurance and the flights sorted soon and printed out, and that should be everything down for the application.
Just got to dial back my output in that first year to stay below their VAT threshold, but it'll be plain sailing after that. And there's the bonus that I'll earn far more in rent from my place in the UK than I'd be paying over there, and that it wouldn't be subject to income tax in either country as it's not earned in Germany, and below the threshold in the UK.No doubt about it, hope it all goes well for you.
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43 minutes ago, Well b back said:After all that is coming out this morning about the government helping to cover it up, no wonder they didn’t do their normal trick of throwing mud at SKS for being DOPP.
Wow - I hadn't seen that when I posted that it just keeps getting worse.............turns out it had already got a lot worse and not just for the Post Office - hopefully this is the final nail in the coffin for the Tory Party.
Think you are right about Starmer - thought it was a bit odd that although the Tories did have a quick go at their usual dirty tricks early on, they very quickly went quiet again and now we know why.
Really looking forward to listening to their explanations/justifications of this one - reckon they can look forward to the mother of all kickings from most of the press and media, although I dare say that GB News idiots will still be trying to pin it on Ed Davey 😂
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Just now, Well b back said:They are also being investigated for tax avoidance, both as a company and individuals as they wrote potential compensation claims off against tax.
Really!!
It just keeps getting worse and worse, doesn't it?
Someone told me this morning that the PO also made sub-postmasters make good losses incurred in armed robberies at Post Offices!!
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2 hours ago, horsefly said:They are indeed actively investigating for very serious crimes (perjury etc). Whether that will turn out to be a cover up or genuine remains to be seen.
Would be interesting to know what crimes they consider have potentially been committed - perjury does seem a very obvious one but I would have thought that fraud, theft and especially misconduct in a public office are all definite possibilities.
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9 minutes ago, A Load of Squit said:More, these are so apt. 'Marzipan dildo' is brilliant.
Very apt, can't see anything to apologise for there.
Going off at a bit of a tangent, surely it must now be time for Angela Rayner to retract her apology (which she should never have been bullied into making) over her Tory scum remarks, given that there is now ample evidence in the public domain that shows that her remarks were entirely factual.
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19 hours ago, littleyellowbirdie said:Well there's a surprise (didn't bother to read the rest of it tbh).
😂 Oh really........and yet you did bother to reply.
You really are a rather strange and perverse individual but if that is what floats your boat.......😂
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On 20/01/2024 at 12:18, littleyellowbirdie said:It's so odd that there's only random campaigny tweets about an isolated supermarket in Grantham on this apparently massive problem rather than actual news coverage. Last stories I can see searching online on this topic is Feb 2023.
Media conspiracy maybe?
I don't think its odd at all, partly because it isn't a (now) generally the massive problem that it was originally post-Brexit (unless you live in Grantham apparantly 😀) but the main reason we no longer hear news coverage of it is that it has become so commonplace that it isn't newsworthy any more and indeed we have pretty much become 'used' to it as the new normal.
For the avoidance of doubt I'm not suggesting the picture above represent the new normal but I can pretty much guarantee that every time I head to my local supermarket(s) there will be at least a couple of items that won't be available, not anything exotic just basic grocery items that pre-Brexit would have always been available week-in, week-out. What the items are varies over time and is sometimes surprising - one of my particular bete noires, which is a very frequent offender is strong flour for breadmaking. Aldi haven't had any for months and if I get desperate and start trying other supermarkets then eventually I'll find some but often there a just a few battered packets of wholemeal and no white, or vice versa.
But enough of my problems!
The point is there are clearly still many problems in many supply chains in the UK and several years on they show no sign of getting sorted out, so it seems unlikely that they are going to. In fact when the new regulations finally get implemented on imports into the UK there is every chance that things will get even worse.
But its just not newsworthy any more and I guess most people are resigned to the fact that it just another facet of the sh*tshow that is Brexit and we've got to live with it for the forseeable, and until such time as we start to unwind Brexit or at least the shocking Johnson deal part of Brexit.
Anyway, probably a good job there's not too much on the shelves, since years of Tory austerity followed by Truss crashing what remained of our eceonomy means that most people can't afford to buy much stuff anyway......😀
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12 hours ago, Fen Canary said:We’ll wait and see, you’re much more optimistic than me about this green revolution leading to well paid jobs, especially for those who will lose theirs as a result.
Fair enough but I would point out that my optimism is based on the experience of being of part of a start-up renewables company started in 2008 with half a dozen employees and by late 2011 was employing just shy of 3,000 - shame that Cameron's 'greenest ever government' then almost completely killed off the UK renewables industry (about the only sector of the economy that was showing any growth at all at the time) and drove most renewables businesses into liquidation resulting in 40,000 - 50,000 job losses.
From what I can see the biggest beneficiary will be China. We’ll decimate our oil and gas industries and China will manufacture all the renewables, all while building coal fired power plants themselves.
Well they are also installing massive amounts of wind and solar which last year far outweighed the new coal fired plants which are being seriously scaled back, not least because the renewables are much cheaper. But you are right they will be the biggest beneficiary because they had the foresight and long term strategy to position themselves to become the dominant supplier of not just renewables but the other important technologies of the future such as energy storage and EVs, and they have succeeded whilst many western countries and especially the US & UK have tried to keep the old and increasingly expensive carbon technologies and are now hopelessly adrift in the renewable technologies. Obviously the US is now spending a huge amount in an attempt to catch up but I suspect they will have very limited success (and of course will give up completely again if Trump wins).
Germany has already severely damaged its manufacturing base because of its lack of cheap energy due to its green policies and I can see Britain doing the same. I’ve no problem transitioning to greener technology as it becomes available, but we shouldn’t be hurting the living standards of people to do so.
The damage to the German manufacturing base has nothing to do with it transitioning to greener policies (which started long before the UK and the German economy continued to boom) and everything to do with the fact that despite their green policies they still had a huge dependence of cheap Russian gas which came to an abrupt halt with the invasion of Ukraine.
As far as the UK is concerned it is precisely because we haven't transitioned sufficiently to renewables that our standard of living is being hit - solar and wind are both substantially cheaper sources of energy than gas or oil and yet this government continues to block their growth whilst giving huge tax breaks to multinationals to drill for more gas and oil - absolute economic madness and something that is costing every household in the country hundreds of pounds of extra cost in their energy bills.
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18 hours ago, Fen Canary said:Where are all these well paid jobs from a green revolution we were promised would arrive? Instead we’re seeing workers thrown on the scrap heap, driving around our cities becoming ruinously expensive and the nations key industries such as steel making and energy production/extraction being left in foreign hands.
They will arrive when the green revolution gets underway - as far as the UK is concerned we are still waiting for that and we are waiting as a direct result of Tory Government policy which has stalled major green projects whilst continuing to blow huge amounts of taxpayer cash in massive tax breaks to oil and gas producers.
This is not just crazy from a climate perspective, it is crazy economics and very damaging to the future prosperity of this country.
So as to when the green revolution gets going in the UK, I suppose we have to hope that Labour after the next election will make some progress but realistically, whilst they can't fail to be an improvement on the idiot Sunak and his useless predecessors, given the very deep hole the Tories have dug for our economy and the fact that we are already lagging so far behind all our major competitors in green technology and its deployment, it is going to be very difficult for them to make a major impact whilst simultaneously trying to fix virtually all our public services which have either been striped to the bone or actually broken by the Tories.
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22 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:Twitter is a weird thing, it sometimes makes us go to accounts that we know we'll disagree with and which will irritate us. No one would go into a library and take out a book they know they will find offensive or tiresome but there is something about 120 character tweets that not only draws us in but also encourages us to amplify them.
I'm increasingly thinking that twitter is evil. It is never the voices in the middle or the conciliatory accounts that get the clicks only the nutters on the edges in equal measure.
Seems to me that the message might even be irrelevant in a lot of tweets, we just like to metaphorically shout out of the window. It doesn't matter what we shout we just want someone, anyone, to turn around and look at us.
The real buh was right. Its a poisoned ecosystem and the world is better off without it. I'll write a letter of complaint- just after I see what Nigel Farage and Joleon Maughan have posted today
As someone who has never used Twitter, and doesn't intend to ever, my experience of it is by definition second-hand but of course you get those second-hand glimpses of it all the time.
IMO, right from the start it had a rather unhealthy side to it and that has steadily increased over the years - then the Musk takeover elevated it to a whole new level where a description of it as evil is probably justified. Obviously that's not true of all the content but I would suggest that it unarguably causes a great deal more harm than good.
It has baffled me for years why our utterly useless government (I suppose that may be a clue 😀 ) has failed to introduce legislation that hold Twitter, and the other tech platforms, to the same standards as our printed, broadcast, other electronic publishers are all held and made accountable for the content that they publish instead of allowing these tech platforms to hide behind the absolutely nonsensical line that they are not the publishers of what their platforms pump out.
Unless and until that happens then things will continue to get worse because bizzarrely the one and only check on these social media platforms seems to be the worry of scaring off advertisers who don't want their adverts appearing alongside vile content and in reality even the advertisers are part of an ecosystem which is essentially a race to the bottom.
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On 15/01/2024 at 11:28, dylanisabaddog said:Here is what David Frost wrote in The Sunday Telegraph. Obviously he's ignored the problems that he caused but even so, I can't help thinking they're going to need a bit more than Shakespeare.
Astonishing, takes being 'out of touch' to a whole new level 😂😂
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14 hours ago, Rock The Boat said:Reform party will get more votes than the Greens
Maybe, but the Green party will win more seats than the Reform party, as will the Lib Dems, SNP, Plaid and possibly even Alba.
That's FPTP for you.
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11 hours ago, Fen Canary said:Your description makes the free movement laws sound like a constant supply of transient cheap labour….which is exactly what the bulk of those who voted to leave wanted to stop happening. Why would employers increase pay and working conditions when you can simply import the workers you need from poorer countries?
Nothing to do with free movement as you can quite easily see by looking at the immigration figures of recent years - we are still importing workers from poorer countries - much poorer countries on the other side of the world and in far greater numbers than when we had free movement.
If that is what you Brexitty idiots voted for then it has massively backfired on you.
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11 hours ago, Nuff Said said:Is the failure we’re seeing in our country caused by a lack of confidence though, or is it because the right wing philosophy of a low tax, low level of public service government just doesn’t work, at least to the level the British public desire?
I'm assuming that you meant to say competence rather than confidence, if so then I think the answer is both.
Clearly this country would be in a much better state if we had had competent governance instead of being run by the corrupt and incompetent shower that have actually been there for the last 13 years.
But even so, I can't think of a low tax, minimal public service western economy that would deliver what the majority of the British people expect, and given that the Tories have actually managed to deliver a high tax, very low level of public services whilst promising the opposite I don't think that right wing philosophy is going to fly again here for a very long time, if ever.
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10 minutes ago, Barbe bleu said:The way I see it being a competent manager and a strong leader are subtly different things. Sometimes you need the one quality to come to the fore sometimes you need the other.
Of course they are different things but by no means mutually exclusive, and the point you keep missing, or perhaps I should say more accurately avoiding is that is competence is in itself important, at all levels actually.
Personally I find the prospect of Starmer as PM pretty uninspiring but as I think as @king canary was suggesting earlier he still represents a massive improvement over the shower of sh!t we've endured for the last 13 years and unless something totally unexpected happens then that is all that will count come the next GE |and probably the one after that as well!).
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1 hour ago, Barbe bleu said:I'm edging towards this for the next election, a period of relative silence would be welcome.
Not sure I'd want all our future prime ministers to be bland though. There must be sense of purpose about the agenda they set and they must lead the nation in achieving those aims, and its difficult to lead in today's society if you are practically invisible.
Let the civil servants be blandly competent, elected politicians need something different, or what's the point of them?
I think you're getting far too hung up on the 'blandly' component of the phrase 'blandly competent prime minister ' and ignoring the infinitely more important component 'competent'.
We have now endured 13 years of government without a competent Prime Minister and the damage to the country that has resulted is very clearly all around us - I would have thought that the point of having a competent PM, irrespective of the degree of his blandness or otherwise, would be blindingly obvious.
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4 hours ago, king canary said:I think he's largely done a solid job of keeping the far left at arms length, hence them constantly frothing at the mouth about him on twitter.
I do find him a bit too cautious at the moment- he seems too afraid of giving the Tories/Mail/Sun any attack material that it means he comes across as too wishy washy at times. Saying that I think if/when he wins power that will change somewhat and I think a bit more confidence and personality may come out.
I am glad though that we as a country seem to have recognised our mistakes that putting people who are deemed 'interesting' in charge of our major political parties probably isn't the best strategy, rather than going the US route of further demagoguery. I'm all for our Prime Ministers being as blandly competent as possible.
Absolutely, a competent PM would be a very good start but I'm still naive enough to expect that we should be able to expect a full Cabinet of competent ministers, which actually we look as though we moght get if Labour win the next GE.
Obviously we won't know for sure until they are actually in post but at the moment the shadow Cabinet looks to be a massive upgrade over the current bunch of dimwits and chancers occupying ministerial posts - the most intellectually challenged Cabinet we've ever had IMO.
No, sorry - the second most intellectually challenged Cabinet we've ever had, it's so easy to forget that Liz Truss had a Cabinet!
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40 minutes ago, dylanisabaddog said:The key difference between this and other fraud cases is that the Post Office has the power to police the system and prosecute without reference to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). If the Police and CPS had been involved it is highly unlikely that any more than the first few cases would have got to court. The group run by Alan Bates and a former MP (James Arbuthnot) is quite rightly trying to get those rights removed.
Arbuthnot is an Eton educated Lord who was formerly a Tory MP. Everything I hate in life but he is actually a highly intelligent and decent man and has worked long and hard for those affected. I like him even more because bizarrely his middle name is Norwich!
I see that from today's news the situation is even worse than I suggested yesterday, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/07/post-office-suspected-of-more-wrongful-prosecutions-of-operators-over-horizon
It seems that the Post Office did run quite a large pilot scheme at the start of the national rollout and they did find software problems but instead of investigating and fixing the software issues.................they prosecuted the sub-postmasters!!!!
Totally unbelieveable, utterly disgusting and surely must be criminal, and therefore I imagine involving far more PO employees than just the top management being involved in criminal acts.
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On 05/01/2024 at 16:07, Herman said:Fair points CM.👍
Another question is why the PO went down this terrible route to protect a company that sold them a real shoddy product. It doesn't make any sense to me. They could have sorted this right at the start.
Absolutely, they could and should have done precisely that and that is of course highlights another huge flaw in both Fujitsu's and the PO's handing of this disgraceful shambles - any remotely competent software developer knows that a system of this size and complexity needs really comprehensive testing before going anywhere near the customer - that clearly didn't happen.
Even when Fujitsu were happy it was ready then the PO should have conducted their own tests of the system to satisfy themselves it was working correctly - that clearly wasn't done.
Finally when the PO was also satsfied with the system it should have been rolled out to a relatively small number of carefully controlled and studied 'pilots' to ensure that the system performed correctly in the real world - that clearly didn't happen.
Seems to me, that given all of that, plus the complete denial that problems existed even whilst having the logs of their help line containing millions of calls telling them otherwise, that Fujistsu and the Post Office are both guilty of a gigantic fraud.
In many ways this is pretty typical of the way that most large Government IT projects have gone over the last 20 years, which has been one of hugely over-priced systems failing to deliver the required and working system on-time and on-budget and in some cases not at all.
The key difference with the Post Office is that in most cases these IT shambles become visible to the public fairly quickly but here PO somehow managed to keep their's under wraps for years which I think, as a Governemnt owned/public service), raises some very uncomfortable questions about how that was possible both for the government and also our supposed top notch legal system which convicted hundreds of people of financial crimes on zero or very flimsy evidence which wasn't tested in any way by the courts.
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New Tory Leader
in Non-Football
Posted
Even for the idiot Sunak that seems particularly crass and very foolish - I'm beginning to think he may be almost as stupid as Truss, so we'll just have to hope that his complete lack of authority over his own party will prevent him from pulling any disastrously similar stunts to her.