Yeah this is my worry, or at least my principle as someone who thinks we should still be able to elect prisoners as MPs if we want to. But equally there is a bit of injustice that *so many* people get vetted now who didn't 20-30 years ago.

Genuine question: is that not a bad idea? Like now I think about it I had to go through more vetting to work at a train station than I did to work for an MP.

I've been learning Russian for a while because I am apparently a masochist and really, lads, if you are going to have a language where case is very important to meaning you should also have the decency to not blend every word into the next according to what pleases your tongue

This is why people on the left who claim to care about the global south should regulate their enthusiasm for universal household bailouts in rich countries.

It irritates me immensely when after a pavement with flagstones or cobbles is dug up for works they don't replace them but just fill it with asphalt.

This, along with the remittances from Palestinians working in the Gulf/West were understood to be very important to the Israeli economy at the time but were also resented and perceived as a sort of... Decadent Zionism.

Only a historical point, but Israel's move away from domestic production of military equipment has also been tied to the changes in how the occupation has been conducted. Palestinian labour in the civilian economy freed up Jewish labour for defence industries, for example.

Feel like it should be bigger news that the Home Secretary is very publicly losing the plot

This is entirely true, btw, and even the algorithm reflects it. My Instagram often leans to right-wing bullshit even though I have no time for it but the still-married-dad stuff? That's often pretty liberal! Especially the British-still-married-dad stuff.

And of course the real story for the press in every country other than this one is "British trans doctor forced to flee country", but no, for our own extremist press it's "let's continue to harass them in their new country and try to get them sacked there too"

Tweet by Martina Navratilova. "Predator. That is how he should register. A sexual predator…" quote-tweeting a tweet by "Biology Rules OK" about Dr. Beth Upton, a trans woman

This tweet is highly defamatory and Martina Navratilova should be fired from BBC Sport for it.

It demonstrates an horrendous level of hatred for a trans woman (who was cleared of all wrongdoing in a recent tribunal) because she is a trans woman.

(Might also result in one of my pet ideas: pay people who are out of work to move to the south east or London if they are keen to)

We've put an awful lot of effort into cutting back the ease and generosity of the dole, but the core problem remains, so it would probably be a very good idea to let local areas to do at least some tailoring to local needs and opportunities!

I often wonder how many of problems are a result of the fact no one wants to admit that a central pillar of Thatcher's Britain was a pretty accessible and robust if not generous welfare state for people of working age.

And that happened five different times

Anyway to be entirely personal about it I will just say that having lived about a decade each as an adult in London and NYC I have been a victim of crime only once in NYC and lost count in London (twice in the past year!) but only in NYC was someone murdered near my house.

The composition has changed - less assault, more theft - but overall your chances of being a victim of crime in the UK aren't much better

I hate to defend them but a specifically UK problem is that overall crime rates have nearly returned to the levels they were at for our own peak c. 2003.

They spent decades believing in markets, and for decades markets also delivered the outcomes they thought were just and moral in focusing on them and punishing people with 'deviant' lifestyles. When the market stopped doing that they became unmoored and basically went insane.

To agree with you I also think that overall the UK did do a decent job and I do appreciate the government's response more now than I did at the time.

My son is younger than your child and weirdly 80% of the time I think back on those times I wonder how we would have coped now with, like, playgrounds being shut and stuff like that.

In Barnes I have received four Lib Dem leaflets, one Green leaflet, and no Tory leaflets though interestingly they have taken over one of the local Facebook groups which is all this sort of crap now

In the same manifesto, Palantir's owners argued that we need a national military draft, that soft power is over, and that we were too hard on Germany and Japan after World War II. I don't think that company should be allowed to exist anymore.

I was walking down the street earlier with a nice little coffee and I heard my first chirping stolen lime bike of the season and it genuinely made me excited for summer :)

As far as I can tell he got it because he wanted it.

Like as you may grasp from this article, and as I really cannot emphasise enough, so much of this crime is really dumb and would be very easy to stop if you just gave three police officers of no special intelligence or experience two weeks where they weren't run ragged

If there is a single BTP officer at my station and a woman accuses a now departed boyfriend of smacking her on the platform, or there is a known phone thief who just ran off with a phone to a known location, which incident do you think they will deal with? And which can they close?

This is exactly how they do not act and as someone who has worked closely with the police for 15 years I don't really know how to convey to you the simple fact that they care more about the priorities that are passed onto them as *orders* than they do about statistics they barely see

The problem - if it is a problem - is that they're obligated now to deal with all violent-ish crime properly and can't sack it off as they may have 20 years ago, AND numbers have fallen, AND the support staff who used to pick up a lot of slack don't exist

This isn't how the police operate though, if anything from their POV an arrest'n'charge + no court date is win-win as they get good numbers *and* don't have to lose their guys to court days.