... The complete disregard for how an institution's actions & inactions impact on those at the bottom of the 'pyramid' & the subsequent attempt to evade responsibility for the harm caused when publicised.
(you'll have other you'd like to add to the list, I'm sure)
A damning picture of misused power & disregard for others.
It increasingly clear, as the media furore around Iain Duncan Smith's proposed law on cyclists causing injury & death grows, that this has been intended a s divide & roll measure in favour of car drivers.
Its clear from the data that both pedestrians & cyclists are more at denser from cars than from each other on the roads.... so Smith's attempt to shift the narrative to see pedestrians fume about cyclists, looks like a political help to dangerous drivers, not endangered pedestrians!
@ChrisMayLA6 I'd favour a law or set of laws placing a duty of care on users of dangerous machinery in public spaces. Something that would establish an automatic and onerous burden on anyone involved in an accident, regardless of actual or perceived fault, who chooses to endanger others by operating heavy machinery in public. A hierarchy of risk, if you like, with the heaviest burdens on operators of the most dangerous machinery (trucks, cars, buses) down to the least (bikes, scooters, etc.).
George Monbiot on the role of profit in (children's) social care:
'two Northamptonshire councils revealed they are paying an average of £281,000 a year for each residential placement, or £5,400 a week. A direct comparison cannot be made, because many children in care have complex needs, but just by way of reference Eton’s eye-watering fees are £46,000 a year'!
So, much of tax payers money is supporting investors not those needing care!
@ChrisMayLA6 I have a friend that works in a school for kids with needs that can’t be met by mainstream schooling, and each child that lives outside the town where the school is situated gets a budget for taxi transport of £40k annually. That’s significantly more than the annual income of a lot of their families, and it makes me wonder if a). That’s really the most cost-effective way to get them to school, and b). If that money couldn’t be better spent improving their home life, which is obviously and evidentially the root cause of many of their problems.
I sometimes thought my father thought he could't die while he still had books on his pending pile (a stab at immortality I seem to be replicating)... so, it was strangely touching to see Tom Gauld has had similar thoughts.
Each of Emma Newman's Planetfall quartet explores a different aspect of the same overarching story of religious driven intergalactic migration. In Atlas Alone (2019), the fourth story centres on an elite gamer & their attempt to uncover & then take revenge for a crime against humanity. To say much more would ruin the plot for you, but as with the others, this is great, fascinating sci-fi, which has a great payoff at the end.
What thing is being denounced? Specifically, and exactly, what is being denounced?
Are you conflating the Bible with Christianity? The twain shall never meet.
More than half of the Bible was written and in circulation 900-1500 years before the existence of Christianity.
If you read the Bible without Christian blinders on, it is plain that the Bible condemns Christianity and all other religions as idolatry. Rather the Bible authors call men to worship God in spirit and truth without regard to a priesthood or place.
This dramatization shows a recorded event from the Bible demonstrating what Jesus taught about the end of religion:
The model of 'flexible' labour markets with few(er) protections for workers & curtailed unions was (mainstream economists predicted) going to delver innovation, spur entrepreneurship & lead to better-paid jobs... but we actually have got from it is an economy patterned by low-wage labour, inequality, falling real wages & labour exploitation (via precarious working).
As Larry Elliot suggests, its time to follow unions urging to try a different way!
Why it’s almost like mainstream free market champions are the most ardent anti-capitalists, because everything they touch destroys markets, property, competition, choice, and agency. I mean who really needs competitors competing in a market place when they can tell how competition works, as perfectly clairvoyant rational utility maximizing scholars. They can pick the winners.
Having learnt nothing from the previous disasters around PFI projects in the health service, OFWAT is pushing the model for getting investment in water infrastructure restarted....
So, the model to shift us from being exploited by renter firms who have taken our money & used it pay dividends rather than maintain the system, is to replicate that model in special purpose vehicles, running infrastructure projects on contract...
It will not go well, as history has already shown!
Britain's record on homelessness is world beating, just not in a good way.
We've the highest recorded levels of homelessness in the developed world; while other counties have seen (albeit slow) declines in homelessness, since 2010 the UK's rate has been accelerating away.
The housing crisis has many dimensions, but here there's a direct correlation between the arrival of the current Tory govt. & massive increases!
The party of landlords is working for them & doing nothing for us!
The world is undergoing a major health pivot as the majority of premature deaths swing from being caused by disease to being the result of 'metabolism-related risk factors' (high blood sugar & fat levels) which cause illnesses like heart disease, diabetes & cancer.
As health systems are already dealing with the results of ageing populations, this re-emphasises the urgent need for investment in public health & preventative policies.
#health
data: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation/FT
Not only are the DWP causing pain & crisis in the lives of unpaid carers, three years ago they were told the approach they had adopted was doing this....
So even if it had been accidental (I 'm not sure it was) in 2020, for the last three years they have known the distress & problems their actions were causing but carried on blithely.
We should be cherishing & rewarding carers at home, not penalising them for minor infractions of unjust rules!
interestingly, Alan Beattie (FT) points out, the headline subsidies quoted as flowing to fossil fuel firms around the world include both explicit & implicit subsidies (calculated by the IMF & World Bank).
I'm not saying all is therefore fine, but the implicit subsidies include future taxes not levied... as well as other regulatory issues (rather than cold hard cash payments).
This makes the figures look less 'fact' & more political rhetorical which is worth knowing!
Despite Trudi Warner's case for contempt of court (for holding a placard reminding a jury of its ability to acquit on moral grounds in a climate protest case) being thrown out by the UK High Court because it was 'fanciful', the Tory Solicitor General Robert Courts has decided to appeal the decision.
And so its starts (continues).... after the hints that the BoE might ease interest rates over the summer, Megan Greene (a member of the MPC that sets rates) is telling anyone who listens that:
'In considering for how long we must retain our restrictive stance before policy should be eased, I think the burden of proof therefore needs to lie in inflation persistence continuing to wane'.
As predicted the evidential hurdle is rising to keep workers under pressure a bit longer!
Are we taking ourselves into further decline? Is John Bryson right & 'British political discourse is broken, rather than Britain itself'?
This is an interesting issue, nt least for how the idea of 'broken Britain' lay behind the 'logic' of austerity (and therefore much of the social damage wrought over the last decade).
The difficulty is we (the British) also are highly suspicious of anyone 'talking up' the country... a political dilemma for our times?