quote:

Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour Party leader delivered disappointing news for proponents of drug law reform this weekend. When asked his thoughts on decriminalising cannabis possession in a television interview, Starmer said “I’ve never subscribed to that view […] it causes huge issues to vulnerable people across the country”.

In the interview with Sophy Ridge for Sky News on Sunday 21st February, Sir Keir Starmer went on to say, “When I was director of public prosecutions, I prosecuted many, many cases involving drugs and drug gangs and the criminality that sits behind, and it causes huge issues to vulnerable people across the country.”

The leader went on to suggest that the country’s existing drug laws are “roughly right” however he noted that “there’s always room for a grown-up debate about how we deal with these cases”.

Jose posted:

https://twitter.com/BenTaylorson/status/1364560883012276226

gonadic io posted:

https://twitter.com/filsdelenin/status/1462847038517878786

CoolCab posted:

ahahahahaha i just found something amazing. you probably work at a place with a "absence management" policy, and many many of you will have been impacted by it. if you have ever hit a sickness "staging trigger", you have experienced it, the whole NHS runs some variant on it. this is all derived from something called The Bradford Factor, and it has many many euphemisms. the simplest way to describe it is like this:

(Number of occasions of absence in previous year) ^2 x (Total days absent in the previous year) = Bradford score/attendance score

if you look in your current sickness absence policy you will almost certainly find some variation on this with obfuscated language or slight variation. The Bradford Factor is broadly used as an attendance management tool in the UK in the public and private sectors. the cabinet office gushed about it in a report on public sector absence management in 2004, describing it as a sophisticated scientific formula to fairly deal with sickness absence. after all it's a Factor, it's got math in it and as such it is a near univerally applied metric.

there are two major problems here. first, look at that equation again, and in fact lets simplify it to (x^2)(y)=z. see the problem? here, let an economist tell it:



but that must be a misunderstanding, right? we'll just go check the literature, find the article the The Bradford Factor is based on - oh, there isn't one? or a book, or an article or a seminar or a video or, let alone anything peer reviewed literally anything that describes the theoretical underpinning of this equation...

because there is no Bradford.

there are a handful of folksy origin stories like it came out of a school named Bradford but they're all completely unverifiable. there is no theory written by a Bradford, no human resources consultant or writer named Bradford, and the school named Bradford it allegedly comes from has repeatedly said it has nothing to do with them. he's made up.

so if you've ever had a manager tell you "i'm sorry but you've hit your trigger, we'll need to have a staging meeting" know that what's actually happening is a totally made up unscientific nonsense has been applied so punishing you isn't your managers fault somehow and the constant fear you might have of hitting a higher trigger is the entire function of the policy.

(source: Treble, J. and Barmby, T. (2011) Policy implications for firms. Worker Absenteeism and Sick Pay, pp. 175-190.)

see kids, a business management degree helps you learn all kinds of fun poo poo lmao

dispatch_async posted:

https://twitter.com/shirleymush/status/1551594724967997441

Jose posted:

lol after all the shrieking of stalinism by rumours of MP deselections under corbyn they're going straight ahead trying to get rid of any left wing MP now

https://twitter.com/JamesEFoster/status/1552291813582569473?s=20&t=N8ddRf2bAlcUqyzTNkynoA

gonadic io posted:

https://twitter.com/RMTunion/status/1610225584054960129

Falcorum posted:

the brown cliffs of dover

happyhippy posted:

England and Wales are the ONLY two countries in the world who have fully privatized their water and sewerage.
NI and Scotland get to control their own.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/30/more-than-70-per-cent-english-water-industry-foreign-ownership

70% of English water owned by foreign investment funds too.

dispatch_async posted: