One of the most enjoyable aspects of investigations is listening to miscreants’ excuses for their bad behaviour. The same ones came up regularly, so much so that interviews would have been much quicker if we’d had a poster on the wall of the excuses so they could just have pointed and said: “6” with a bit of “9”. The two most common, usually presented with the passive-aggressive mulishness of schoolboys, were: “Where does it say I can’t do that?” and “Show…
An extreme utilitarianism stalks the land My daughter has started learning about philosophy. She is particularly enamoured with a thought experiment known as The Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem invites us to either let things be with dire consequences or take action by pulling a lever and producing less dire consequences. Most people see this as a no-brainer: take action, pull the lever. This choice supposedly outs most people as utilitarians; the right thing to do is to maximise utility,…
The best place for late night political convesation Clearly the fight against the coronavirus continues to dominate and looks set to do so for weeks if not months. There are so many factors and the increasing death toll in the UK with the knowledge that it will go much higher must be seriously worrying for ministers. What are your thoughts? Even if you have never posted on PB before you will be most welcome. Have a good night. Mike Smithson
This had been widely predicted and, indeed, follows the pattern or some other countries but even so the scale of what is happening comes as something of a shock. The forecasts earlier in the week of the eventual UK death total being 20k don’t now look exaggerated. One thing is for sure the more old people are losing their lives the more people are taking note of the government warnings. Quite where this will end is hard to say but…
Ever since that first YouGov labour leadership poll come out at the start of the year there has never been any real question that the next LAB leader would be the former DPP, Sir Keir Starmer. His margin in that first poll came as quite a shock it will be recalled, because the assumption was that at the candidate favoured by the current leadership, Rebecca long Bailey, would secure the backing of the same groups in the party that were…
For the best in late night political conversation For many years a regular feature on PB was nighthawks – an overnight open thread. For some reason we stopped doing it and I am bringing it back following calls by a couple of longstanding PBers. The nighthawks “logo”, inspired by the original Edward Hooper painting, was designed by Marf. For me there are two big unknowns – how long this is going to last and how the world will have changed…
There haven’t been many opinion polls of late but this afternoon we’ve got the detail of the latest Deltapoll which includes its regular well/badly leader ratings. The detail is shown in the panel above together with what those sampled did at GE2019 and the referendum. For me the most interesting numbers are the views of Johnson particularly the sub-set of LAB voters just three and a bit months ago. Generally there is a very clear party split in views of…
At 15/1 she’s worth a punt One of the features of the coronavirus crisis is that we are hearing a lot more from some American state governors. We’ve already seen the developments relating to Andrew Cuomo of New York and another one whose role in the crisis is getting a fair degree of national coverage is Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. You can tell she’s being effective because her approach is causing a lot of irritation from President who who refers…