FlyTheNest

PaulfromYorkshire wrote:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 57234.html

ed-miliband-goes-on-the-offensive-to-win-back-wavering-voters

Lonewolfie wrote:

PaulfromYorkshire wrote:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 57234.html

ed-miliband-goes-on-the-offensive-to-win-back-wavering-voters

Although it's good to see some vaguely positive reporting I find it galling in the extreme that the language is all about 'fightback', 'in a rallying cry to his demoralised party' and 'his Labour critics insist the attempt to oust him was not media-driven' - repeatedly reaffirming throughout the piece all the perceived media-invented anti-Ed bullsh1t.

Mind you - there's nothing to get their teeth into WRT the current Government, as everything in the Rose Garden is just peachy and going absolutley fantastically well.

1.6 Durand plans to educate pupils in years 9 to 11 in new boarding facilities outside South London. It has purchased a site for this, a vacant boarding school, in West Sussex, which it plans to develop and expand. The Department has agreed to provide £17.34 million towards the cost of this redevelopment, subject to the granting of planning permission for the necessary building works and the approval of a final business case. The National Audit Office has received correspondence which outlines
value for money concerns about the boarding school, and the Comptroller and Auditor General has committed to review the business case for the boarding school in due course.

yahyah wrote:Heard an ad for a programme on Radio 4 that said Labour's front bench had been critical of Ed's leadership last week, words implied all of Labour's front bench.

I admit I was a bit distracted last week but don't think that was true ?

PaulfromYorkshire wrote:Not often I quote the Devil, but…

JP Janson De Couet retweeted
alan rusbridger ‏@arusbridger Nov 11
The tale of 1 MP (on £2m of benefits) & the people he's trying to make homeless is going a bit viral http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... ard-benyon" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; …

yahyah wrote:Morning !

Peter Jukes ‏@peterjukes 7h7 hours ago
Fake Sheikh commissioned PI through Ian Edmondson to follow Tom Watson at 2009 party conference

yahyah wrote:Heard an ad for a programme on Radio 4 that said Labour's front bench had been critical of Ed's leadership last week, words implied all of Labour's front bench.

I admit I was a bit distracted last week but don't think that was true ?

But have I got the energy to make another complaint to the BBC for them to ignore ?

refitman wrote:Morning all. Labour lead at 3 points on Yougov:

Latest YouGov / The Sun results 12th November -

Con 32%, (-1)
Lab 35%, (+1)
LD 7%, (no change)
UKIP 15%; (no change)

APP -25 (+1)

giselle97 wrote:

Lonewolfie wrote:

PaulfromYorkshire wrote:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 57234.html

ed-miliband-goes-on-the-offensive-to-win-back-wavering-voters

Although it's good to see some vaguely positive reporting I find it galling in the extreme that the language is all about 'fightback', 'in a rallying cry to his demoralised party' and 'his Labour critics insist the attempt to oust him was not media-driven' - repeatedly reaffirming throughout the piece all the perceived media-invented anti-Ed bullsh1t.

Mind you - there's nothing to get their teeth into WRT the current Government, as everything in the Rose Garden is just peachy and going absolutley fantastically well.

I've been avoiding news so was really cheesed off to accidentally catch BiaseBeeb saying about fight back. Admit I hadn't heard any Ed news for a week - which I was considering as good news. Now, as you say "fight back" is not right. I think another week of quiet after the slammers probably realised they had gone too far and were at risk of making people think/feel sorry about Ed would have been OK, or maybe not!

‘Vested interests’ trying to scupper Miliband to prevent Labour victory
Andy Burnham says recent attacks on Labour leader are an attempt to destabilise the party in runup to the general election
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... l-election

Huw Irranca-Davies ‏@IrrancaDaviesMP 6m6 minutes ago
Top Tory Truss told Brexit Bad for Britain (rural Tories tell gov't to wise-up on EU before they do something stupid)

Diana Johnson retweeted
Richard Corbett ‏@RCorbettMEP 1h1 hour ago Brussels
Packed early morning briefing re #TTIP protection of #NHS, public services, standards, rights, etc. UK minister not convincing.

Stephen. People like you have nearly exterminated the Labour Party in Scotland. I'll listen to you when you learn humility.

societies run in the interests of working people

Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound · 2h 2 hours ago
Finally Sean Duffy admits "it is a possibility" cancer drugs will be cut. NHS England do themselves no favours with this slippery approach

Tim Shipman @ShippersUnbound · 2h 2 hours ago
Will there be cuts to cancer drugs? asks @JustinOnWeb. Sean Duffy offers waffle. We'll take that as a yes then

rebeccariots2 wrote:

‘Vested interests’ trying to scupper Miliband to prevent Labour victory
Andy Burnham says recent attacks on Labour leader are an attempt to destabilise the party in runup to the general election
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... l-election

Just up.

Morning all.

pk1 wrote:In a spat on twitter last night, I came across this journalist & a Scottish Labour MP.

Which journo said to MP:

Stephen. People like you have nearly exterminated the Labour Party in Scotland. I'll listen to you when you learn humility.

How rude, how incredibly patronising !

Ahhh, I hear you say, that's bound to be DFH or some other right-wing sarky journo reporting 'news' to make his daily corn.

Well I can report actual news that it was none other than 'our own' Owen Jones !

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I admit to never being able to quite agree that Owen is the God of the Left. To me he's another journo wrapped a bit t o o tight in the Westminster bubble - a bubble he claims to despise.

Regardless of my own opinion of him, I was momentarily silenced at his response to that MP (whom I have no idea if he does a good job or not).

Owen later went on to declare that what he wanted was

societies run in the interests of working people

- guess that counts people like me out in his society then, regardless of how much I contributed in my working life. I did ask him 'what about the non-working people Owen, what about the people that can't work' but got no reply.

George Eaton @georgeeaton · 11h 11 hours ago
Anyway, back to holiday. But I'd bet on a tax rabbit from Miliband tomorrow.

George Eaton @georgeeaton · 11h 11 hours ago
Miliband attacks those who pay "zero tax". Could he propose UK version of the Buffett Rule (minimum tax rate)?

George Eaton @georgeeaton · 11h 11 hours ago
Based on early extracts, I expect Miliband will have something new to say tomorrow on reducing tax avoidance.

pk1 wrote:In a spat on twitter last night, I came across this journalist & a Scottish Labour MP.

Which journo said to MP:

Stephen. People like you have nearly exterminated the Labour Party in Scotland. I'll listen to you when you learn humility.

How rude, how incredibly patronising !

Ahhh, I hear you say, that's bound to be DFH or some other right-wing sarky journo reporting 'news' to make his daily corn.

Well I can report actual news that it was none other than 'our own' Owen Jones !

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I admit to never being able to quite agree that Owen is the God of the Left. To me he's another journo wrapped a bit t o o tight in the Westminster bubble - a bubble he claims to despise.

Regardless of my own opinion of him, I was momentarily silenced at his response to that MP (whom I have no idea if he does a good job or not).

Owen later went on to declare that what he wanted was

societies run in the interests of working people

- guess that counts people like me out in his society then, regardless of how much I contributed in my working life. I did ask him 'what about the non-working people Owen, what about the people that can't work' but got no reply.

Chris Bryant retweeted
Naushabah Khan ‏@naushabahkhan 3m3 minutes ago
Really disappointed to see Tories attack Strood again- likening it Benefits Street! shows that they just don't have a clue #ImProudOfStrood

StephenDolan wrote:Morning all.

Those OJ tweets are slightly strange. Does he want the Labour Party to change from within or is he leaning towards the Russell Brand 'none of the above, but get organised, energised and active in local issues'?

ephemerid wrote:Fun and games on CIF this morning.

YouGoReborn - Hugo back for gazillionth time.....

I think I'm being stalked on CIF by TwiggyWiggy. This is the 4th day running that he/she/it has either responded to me on various different threads with some nasty personal crap or referred repeatedly to posts I make in reply to others by selectively quoting them. Weird.....

rebeccariots2 wrote:

Chris Bryant retweeted
Naushabah Khan ‏@naushabahkhan 3m3 minutes ago
Really disappointed to see Tories attack Strood again- likening it Benefits Street! shows that they just don't have a clue #ImProudOfStrood

pk1 wrote:

rebeccariots2 wrote:

Chris Bryant retweeted
Naushabah Khan ‏@naushabahkhan 3m3 minutes ago
Really disappointed to see Tories attack Strood again- likening it Benefits Street! shows that they just don't have a clue #ImProudOfStrood

That's in relation to a piece reported somewhere (Graun maybe ?)

Chris Bryant ‏@ChrisBryantMP 3m3 minutes ago
What is it with Tories? They scorned Clacton & not content with leaving Strood off map they now call it "Benefits Street of the south"!

one Tory MP reflected on the rebellion of 2014, which is centred across the River Medway in the more deprived Strood area of the constituency.

The MP said: “Rochester is only one part of the constituency. There is Strood which is the Benefits Street of the south east. They are really angry over there. They are ready to punish us.”
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... sus-tories

RobertSnozers wrote:

letsskiptotheleft wrote:After years of denigrating the Welsh NHS and their cancer drugs policy the Tory led one appears to be going down the same route.

I have no emotion left on this particular issue. The cancer drugs fund was only ever intended to help negate Labour's advantage on the NHS at the last election. It scared Labour into shutting up about the NHS, and its only purpose was short term electoral gain. It was cynical in the extreme, I suspect cooked up because there was a story at the time about a woman whose PCT (mine) had refused her a drug that her clinician wanted her to have. I had my suspicions that it was developed by a SpAd, possibly even Andy Coulson. No proof of that, of course, because it could have been made for the Daily Mail.

The truth behind this story is a sad one. Sometimes there's nothing more a clinician can do for a patient with a terminal illness and for whom all reasonable options have been tried. What sometimes happens is to salve their own conscience, to give the patient and family something to focus on, and (much) more in hope than expectation, the clinician suggests that another treatment might help. (Occasionally the clinician might have a conflict of interest, such as a financial interest in that particular treatment). This might be an experimental treatment, a treatment approved for other conditions but not tested in this particular case etc. The problem in these cases is that there generally isn't any evidence that the treatment will do any good. Often there isn't any evidence that it won't do more harm than good. Evidence for the effectiveness of medical treatments is accumulated in a very structured way. It starts with limited trials looking at individual 'case studies'. If these looks good, more trials are carried out in a more scientific way on more people, right up to the 'gold standard' which is a double-blind randomised control trial - i.e. a fully scientifically selected sample of patients is tested against a 'control' with known parameters, usually the established 'conventional' treatment.

Back to our last-chance saloon cases. Even if there is some evidence that the treatment might help, it's usually low-quality evidence (i.e. not especially reliable by the standards of these things) and often - particularly in the case of this generation of cancer drugs - the cost of the treatment is so stratospherically high you might be talking about an outside chance of giving someone another two weeks of poor quality life for the same money that could otherwise be spent on more reliable treatments giving better outcomes to more people. This is not money the NHS can magic out of nowhere, and you only get to spend it once. Part of the problem is that expectations were raised with a particular generation of cancer drugs that were billed as wonder drugs and ended up never having the kind of effect the early results suggested they might. Cynically, the drug companies had to make their money back on a product that wasn't as good as they thought it would be, so I suspect there was a lot of pressure on clinicians.

...So for those reasons, the cancer drugs fund was already problematic. There should never have been a need for it if individual funding request procedures were working properly, and generally, they were. It was even more problematic when you consider that it was just for cancer. What about other terminal conditions where these decisions were being made? So it was inequitable from the start.

yahyah wrote:Heard an ad for a programme on Radio 4 that said Labour's front bench had been critical of Ed's leadership last week, words implied all of Labour's front bench.

I admit I was a bit distracted last week but don't think that was true ?

But have I got the energy to make another complaint to the BBC for them to ignore ?

yahyah wrote:Heard an ad for a programme on Radio 4 that said Labour's front bench had been critical of Ed's leadership last week, words implied all of Labour's front bench.

I admit I was a bit distracted last week but don't think that was true ?

But have I got the energy to make another complaint to the BBC for them to ignore ?

RogerOThornhill wrote:Morning all.

I have to go to a meeting at school but was just reading the NAO report on related party transactions at Durand Academy and this caught my eye:

1.6 Durand plans to educate pupils in years 9 to 11 in new boarding facilities outside South London. It has purchased a site for this, a vacant boarding school, in West Sussex, which it plans to develop and expand. The Department has agreed to provide £17.34 million towards the cost of this redevelopment, subject to the granting of planning permission for the necessary building works and the approval of a final business case. The National Audit Office has received correspondence which outlines
value for money concerns about the boarding school, and the Comptroller and Auditor General has committed to review the business case for the boarding school in due course.

Excellent. Another one to look forward to - the DT had a puff piece on it the other day which could have been written by the HT and didn't mention the fact that it had been delayed because of VFM concerns.

When Durand Primary School transferred all the land and buildings at its site in
Lambeth to the Durand Education Trust (paragraph 2.2), it was required to seek the
Secretary of State’s approval to the transfer, but failed to do so.4
The Department did
not challenge the transfer on learning of it in 2010 as it considered that the public interest
in the land was fully protected under Schedule 1 of the Academies Act 2010. It still
considers that this is the case in October 2014.
2.5 The assets transferred in 2010 were estimated at the time to have a market
value of £15 million.

RobertSnozers wrote:

letsskiptotheleft wrote:After years of denigrating the Welsh NHS and their cancer drugs policy the Tory led one appears to be going down the same route.

I have no emotion left on this particular issue. The cancer drugs fund was only ever intended to help negate Labour's advantage on the NHS at the last election. It scared Labour into shutting up about the NHS, and its only purpose was short term electoral gain. It was cynical in the extreme, I suspect cooked up because there was a story at the time about a woman whose PCT (mine) had refused her a drug that her clinician wanted her to have. I had my suspicions that it was developed by a SpAd, possibly even Andy Coulson. No proof of that, of course, because it could have been made for the Daily Mail.

The truth behind this story is a sad one. Sometimes there's nothing more a clinician can do for a patient with a terminal illness and for whom all reasonable options have been tried. What sometimes happens is to salve their own conscience, to give the patient and family something to focus on, and (much) more in hope than expectation, the clinician suggests that another treatment might help. (Occasionally the clinician might have a conflict of interest, such as a financial interest in that particular treatment). This might be an experimental treatment, a treatment approved for other conditions but not tested in this particular case etc. The problem in these cases is that there generally isn't any evidence that the treatment will do any good. Often there isn't any evidence that it won't do more harm than good. Evidence for the effectiveness of medical treatments is accumulated in a very structured way. It starts with limited trials looking at individual 'case studies'. If these looks good, more trials are carried out in a more scientific way on more people, right up to the 'gold standard' which is a double-blind randomised control trial - i.e. a fully scientifically selected sample of patients is tested against a 'control' with known parameters, usually the established 'conventional' treatment.

Back to our last-chance saloon cases. Even if there is some evidence that the treatment might help, it's usually low-quality evidence (i.e. not especially reliable by the standards of these things) and often - particularly in the case of this generation of cancer drugs - the cost of the treatment is so stratospherically high you might be talking about an outside chance of giving someone another two weeks of poor quality life for the same money that could otherwise be spent on more reliable treatments giving better outcomes to more people. This is not money the NHS can magic out of nowhere, and you only get to spend it once. Part of the problem is that expectations were raised with a particular generation of cancer drugs that were billed as wonder drugs and ended up never having the kind of effect the early results suggested they might. Cynically, the drug companies had to make their money back on a product that wasn't as good as they thought it would be, so I suspect there was a lot of pressure on clinicians.

...So for those reasons, the cancer drugs fund was already problematic. There should never have been a need for it if individual funding request procedures were working properly, and generally, they were. It was even more problematic when you consider that it was just for cancer. What about other terminal conditions where these decisions were being made? So it was inequitable from the start.

pk1 wrote:In a spat on twitter last night, I came across this journalist & a Scottish Labour MP.

Which journo said to MP:

Stephen. People like you have nearly exterminated the Labour Party in Scotland. I'll listen to you when you learn humility.

How rude, how incredibly patronising !

Ahhh, I hear you say, that's bound to be DFH or some other right-wing sarky journo reporting 'news' to make his daily corn.

Well I can report actual news that it was none other than 'our own' Owen Jones !

" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I admit to never being able to quite agree that Owen is the God of the Left. To me he's another journo wrapped a bit t o o tight in the Westminster bubble - a bubble he claims to despise.

Regardless of my own opinion of him, I was momentarily silenced at his response to that MP (whom I have no idea if he does a good job or not).

Owen later went on to declare that what he wanted was

societies run in the interests of working people

- guess that counts people like me out in his society then, regardless of how much I contributed in my working life. I did ask him 'what about the non-working people Owen, what about the people that can't work' but got no reply.

rebeccariots2 wrote: He's been pretty anti Labour in tone for quite a while. I'm not sure what he suggests people who don't want another vicious right wing government should do at the election ...

rebeccariots2 wrote:

ephemerid wrote:Fun and games on CIF this morning.

YouGoReborn - Hugo back for gazillionth time.....

I think I'm being stalked on CIF by TwiggyWiggy. This is the 4th day running that he/she/it has either responded to me on various different threads with some nasty personal crap or referred repeatedly to posts I make in reply to others by selectively quoting them. Weird.....

That's because you write seriously well informed posts that really cut through the right wing rubbish - and it's threatening to them. You come across as really knowing your stuff. (Same happens with Steb1 on every environmental story they comment on.) So whoever or whatever TwiggyWiggy represents would like you gone - off the boards - would like you so seriously peed off that you don't post.

That's my interpretation anyway.

So I hope you don't quit Ephemerid. But will understand if you feel you have to for your own health and wellbeing.