This seems insane to me. I see foxes at least every month.

I literally just had a pair yelling their terrifying night music outside my window.

They’re common as fucking pigeons in towns and cities.

Yeah…it’s autumn.

Presumably this isn’t your first autumn.

There are lots of spiders because it’s spider season. There are always loads of spiders in September and October.

And you’re noticing all the foxes because this is their mating season, and they make a horrendous amount of noise when they’re mating.

You’ll be panicking about all the leaves on the trees dying and falling off, next.

Do the fish need to be in North Tyneside in order to be sexually attractive, or will any fish from the Tyne & Wear area do?

Makes sense from an internal party management point of view. Rayner remains a popular figure with the membership and the left of the party. Starmer might have known that he was going to end up needing to sack her, but it’s useful for him (not always the most popular figure with that crowd) to show some support for her and avoid sticking the knife in. Ultimately the independent ethics report was going to come back with what it came back with, and Starmer and Rayner would both agree that she couldn’t remain in role at that point- but at least it doesn’t look like Starmer was itching for an excuse.

From the voting public’s point of view, I’m not sure it makes much difference in this case. Starmer said he’d wait for the full facts, and then sacked her when he had the full facts. Anyone upset with him for not going a couple of days earlier would probably have been upset with him whatever he did anyway.

“This has nothing at all to do with racism, it’s just pride in our football team. But apropos of nothing, how about all those illegal immigrants?!”

It’s also against the law to mess with road markings. Road markings need to look like they’re supposed to look; how they look conveys their meaning. You can’t just let anybody with a tin of Dulux and a Very Important Cause go around making up their own road markings.

Highways authorities are required by law to remove vandalism like this, and the groups responsible will inevitably use this as an excuse to cry about being censored.

She’s talking about Tomiwa Owolade’s words on racism in Britain.

She gives three, and only three, examples of racism to illustrate her point:

In pre-civil rights America, Irish people, Jewish people and Travellers were not required to sit at the back of the bus. In apartheid South Africa, these groups were allowed to vote. And at the height of slavery, there were no white-seeming people manacled on the slave ships.

Pre-civil rights America, the American slave trade, and Apartheid South Africa are all explicitly not about racism in Britain.

Tomiwa Owolade’s points may have been more focused (and more valid), but her own commentary takes it in a wildly unhelpful direction. And it’s her commentary that’s being criticised, not Owolade’s.

That’s public transport for you. You pay for one ticket, you get one seat; you don’t get a whole row to yourself just because you don’t like other people.

Pay for first class if you want more space and a seat on your own.

Yep. It’s to distinguish it from other forms of homelessness, such as “sofa surfing” (where someone moves from one friend or family member to another for short periods without having a fixed address of their own), people temporarily living in homeless shelters/boarding houses, people living in places which aren’t really accommodation (such as their place of work), and “statutory homelessness” (a broader legal definition which includes a few things which might not seem like homelessness, such as people who are at serious risk of violence in their homes).

I must have missed the golden age. Taco Bell opened in my town in 2021, and I’ve only eaten in there a couple of times because it’s dire. Small, scraggly little wraps with barely any filling (and the filling they do have is bland and crap; they don’t seem to sell a single spicy item on the menu).

We’re not exactly overwhelmed with Mexican restaurants, but even if I wanted a taco I still wouldn’t bother.

So, is the general thinking that the courts got it wrong?

No, there is no “general thinking” here. It’s a very complicated case and there’s a lot of detail, and it’s a shame that some people seem to be leaping on it as some salacious conspiracy theory.

The panel of doctors didn’t “conclude that she’s not at fault”. They reviewed each individual incident, and determined that they didn’t think there was sufficient evidence in each case that the baby died/was injured in the way that the prosecution alleges. If you take their evidence at face value, you could conclude that there isn’t enough evidence to convict.

However the courts have generally been not enormously interested in that line of reasoning because it doesn’t address all the other evidence against her, including a witness statement from a colleague who says they literally caught her in the act on one occasion, or the fact that she had a 40% incident rate for a type of fatal error (breathing tubes becoming dislodged) which generally only happens on less than 1% of shifts (i.e. it only ever seemed to happen when she was there).

So yeah, people need to chill and let the justice system grind this process out. Maybe her conviction will be overturned, maybe it won’t. Not only is there no point in second guessing that, but when we’re dealing with the depths of conflicting evidence and medical testimony even a nul conviction doesn’t necessarily tell you much about whether she actually did it or not.