Wednesday 10th April 2024

[refitman]

Morning all.

[frog222]

Post Office has run out of road thanks to an honest, stubborn man
Zoe Williams
Even the judge at the Horizon inquiry seemed impressed as the Alan Bates entered the room to recount his experience with the Post Office

" Nonetheless, Bates blames the civil servants more than the ministers. Ultimately, the Post Office went rogue. “They were definitely trying to outspend us,” he told the inquiry. “They had a bottomless pocket, as such, being a government organisation. Anything they could do to spin it out, they did. Anything to cost us money and try to get us to stop the case.” "

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... ubborn-man

The MoD took fifty years to compensate the family of the RAF airman killed with sarin at Porton Down, and the NHS and other orgs are equally good at persecuting whistleblowers .

[frog222]

I don't know very much about him but at least he can communicate with humans, like another human, unlike Robotic Rachel .

Notes from the campaign trail: listening, trust, and honesty
"Britain should be run in the interests of the people who do the work. "

What struck me is that everything they wanted was reasonable. They didn’t want a premier league football club or an international airport. They just wanted secure jobs that paid a decent wage, and the means to get them. That’s the core of my political philosophy – Britain should be run in the interests of the people who do the work.

Someone approached me afterwards. “I found that quite moving,” he said. “No one comes to places like this and listens. You didn’t just listen, you gave them answers in detail. You didn’t patronise them, either. You trusted them to understand what you were saying. And you were honest about what you could and couldn’t do.”

Part of the reason the people don’t trust political parties is because political parties don’t trust the people. We get spoon fed sounds bites and platitudes.

Part of the lack of trust is weasel words. “I will look to…” is a classic. “I would like it if…”. Or the go to, “I will launch a consultation on fixing this very serious problem.” The mayoral election is less than a month away. If you haven’t got a plan, or can’t show where the money is coming from, you’re not ready to take office. We can’t have a mayor who spends their first year running consultations.

https://northeastbylines.co.uk/notes-fr ... d-honesty/

[frog222]

28 years an MP, and YES he claimed £££ 000'sf or cleaning his swimming pool and painting his summer house, BUT a very clear witness on the right side of History !
I watched half an hour of it , good honest stuff . A number of nuggets --

Liveblog 25m ago 11.55 CEST

At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry, Lord Arbuthnot has said that everybody seemed to rally around the word “robust”, and he was constantly told that the Horizon system was “robust”.

He told the inquiry “There were lots of people who were told to use this word, which implies a sort of series of group-thinking seminars, which led to the use of language.”

Another nice nugget from Tom Peck , on Alan Bates at yesterday's hearing --

The Post Office is indeed a private company, but it doesn’t seem entirely ridiculous to think that, had the man with ministerial oversight of it been a touch more interested in a miscarriage of justice on this kind of jawdropping scale, the right of that wrong might not have taken a further decade and a half. If he’d taken seriously what Bates had written to him years ago, that the Post Office were “thugs in suits” — a view that has now been entirely vindicated — it is possible that Davey could have been one of this sad story’s few heroes, rather than another of its seemingly endless villains.

The two men did meet in the end. We would also be shown Davey’s briefing notes from civil servants, which clearly state they have agreed to the meeting mainly for “presentational reasons”.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Was quite looking forward to PMQs today (well, a bit) but apparently MPs are still on recess! Nice work if you can get it.....

[refitman]

Well, the Cass review is officially out (on trans care in England). Not sure I'm fully confident in the findings

[frog222]

I haven't watched PMQ's for quite some time, relying on Mr Sparrow et al, but I do miss THE Report !

We'll be back on 18th April with a studio audience from Buxton

[AnatolyKasparov]

Quite impressed that Sparrow is still going strong tbh, he must actually enjoy his job at the Graun!

[refitman]

So, why would anyone LGBTQ or an ally vote Labour?

[refitman]

So, why would anyone LGBTQ or an ally vote Labour?

[frog222]

[refitman]

Absolutely insane that anyone is taking this report seriously

[frog222]

Biden risking doing something humane, election year ?

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/ ... ge-charges

[frog222]

"Rats ate my dam" cont