The Budget Day Glass Box.
The Glass Box is where the PM team meets in at 18.00 every weeknight to discuss the content of the programme.
We try to be honest with each other, but not hurtful, as we talk about what worked and what didn't...what met our expectations and what fell short.
This virtual glass box is where you're encouraged to take part in the same spirit. PM's editor Rupert Allman will read your comments and may well add his own.
Listen to PM
© MMIX~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~51~RS~)
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Up goes a pint of beer, again. How much do MPs pay in the HOP for pint?
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DMcN (1): It doesn't matter, since they'll claim the cost on expenses :)
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mittfh 2, And at pub prices.
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Very little, David - and didn't I hear recently that their catering is also heavily subsidised? Talk about Life of Reilly!
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Are those "Scottish Bank" notes?
Can't be. Who'd accept them?
Mind you, who'd accept notes from ANY Bank today..?!
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BS 4, Somebody told me two pounds, but I can't see them paying that much.
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Charlie 5, The last Scottish note I had was for ten shillings.
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We've never had it so good!
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Doh!
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I am not the greatest fan of the leader of the opposition but his reply was really very good indeed.
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I'd love to be in the top rate of tax band bracket.
However, until then I'm content with being subsidised by them.
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fJd 10, Yes, I'd pay a bit extra if I was getting 150,000 pounds a year. Even the extra 5p on a pint of beer. I might even buy a round!
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D-M 7
Worth a "King's Ransom" today.
If only we had a King...
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Eddie
"Bull S-it baffles brains" Really..?
Anyway, not this PM.
Yvette Cooper struggled and floundered.
As well she might. One (she) can't defend the indefensible...
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Question: given how empty the Commons chamber always appears to be on the rare occasions when I'm sufficiently bored to tune into BBC Parliament, will the proposed new attendance allowance (not to be confused with the benefit of the same name!) help improve participation - if the government can persuade the Tories and Lib Dems that it's "A Good Idea (TM)"?
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...We have to act on the intelligence available...
Isn't that why we (UK plc) went to war over Iraq..?
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Eddie, the pattern seems to be;
It dosen't seem to matter whether or not the evidence is flawed as long as it is acted upon as if it is not flawed. The interest of your interviewee stoped at that point.
Therefore, you can not have a semsible rational disscussion about the issues.
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No Charlie - we went to war on evidence that wasn't actually available ...
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Charlie 12, If only I hadn't spent it.
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sid 17
Ah, I see...(?)
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Who is this Vincent Uggleby guy?
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Felt a bit sorry for the Chief Constable - the police are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Imagine the furore if they hadn't done anything, there had been an "incident" and it was discovered that they had intelligence indicating something might? Better to be safe than sorry?
(15) Charlie: I'm fairly sure they cooked that up and their intelligence showed no risk of WMD whatsoever.
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Sid (17)
So am I right, your saying....Absence of proof...isn't proof of absence?
Or it just didn't matter in this case?
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L_S 21, I haven't been keeping track because of the BORING ! budget, but have the police beat the doodah out of any Tamil protesters yet?
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D-M 18
King David eh..?
Ooops sorry, I should perhaps have said
Edward VII...
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LS (21)
I understand what you are saying. However, what I understood from the tone of the police man was that the he believed the people arrested were complicit in some wrong doing. However, the burden of proof was too is too high for the evidence they have?
The released suspects have been recommended for deportation by the home office too. This doesn't sound like precaution due to suspicion, this sounds like overwhelming guilt to me.
Why can't we know the evidence?
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Mr. Darling said: ".... from 2010 as the economy starts to recover."
Herein lies the problem. Nobody on the planet knows when Britain's economy is going to recover and Vince Cable gave the truthful answer.
Are we supposed to believe that the vacancy in Downing Street for a SPAD was filled by Mystic Meg? The politicians (Cable excepting) just can't tell the truth. Mr. Brown blames the horrid foreigners but Britain and America created this mess and things are becoming worse by the moment.
No mention of when quantitative diseasing is going to begin.
The Iranians are producing centrifuges faster than this government is printing wonga and when that problem has to be faced, Britain's economy is going to continue to struggle, if it survives at all.
We are being misled.
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Okay, who else suspected the 'terrorist bomb plot' spectacularly 'uncovered' over Easter in what - if it was for anything else - bore a startling similarity to a coordinated PR exercise would come to nothing, but crucially didn't want to say so? I bet loads of journalists did.
Even now I hesitate to ask in the face of the apparent overwhelming 'threat' and what we have now been trained to accept as the "imminent attack": What terrorist threat? Where? Who?
Isn't it time serious questions were asked by people who actually have some hope of getting an answer about who or what might be benefiting from this dangerous abuse?
It seems all the police have to do to shut everyone up again is talk vaguely about "very serious threats" and "ongoing investigations". I think journalists on behalf of the country really need to start considering where this could all end up.
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I've found two blue rubber bands round a bunch of spring onions I bought from the coop.
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Joseph Walker @ 27, it's one of the 'you can't win' things.
If nothing happens, that just proves they are effectively preventing it, not that nothing was going to happen anyway.
The same is true about torturing people for months and months, as the US has now admitted they did: Cheney claims that by doing so, they got vital information that prevented "terrorist attacks", but the details are "too sensitive" to be released. If they exist, they can't be revealed, and if they don't exist, they can't be revealed.
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From memory the Chief Constable repeatedly said the suspects had been released because they appeared not to be guilty (I'm paraphrasing here) but the implication in his voice was the police knew they were up to something.
Interesting they've been deported. If they were completely innocent would they have been entitled to remain?
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Lady Sue - they are, I believe, planning to appeal against deportation.
Also - the CC said they were being released because they couldn't be bailed (on terrorist charges - makes sense) and they couldn't find enough evidence to charge them. (I think.)
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fjd @ 22
What I'm saying is: there was some evidence of something. This was dressed up to look like evidence of something else. We went to war because of what it looked like, rather than what it was. Does that make sense?
I notice there are still people around who repeat The Sun's line on those who marched against the war - if 1 million march against the war and 58 million don't ... well, the war wins, obviously!
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LS (30)
"From memory the chief constable repeatedly said the suspects had been released because they appeared not to be guilty"
Don't you think that if they appeared to be 'not guilty' ,( a legal term reserved for a court room) do you not think there is the real possibility that they are actually 'not guilty'?
Apart from the In's and outs of the situation you have to admit, there does seem to be a pattern in this type of activity by the police.
I also refere you to CG's Number (27).
By the way a review by Lord Carlisle is to be undertaken in this case due to the repeated pattern.
They haven't been deported...it has to go through the courts first.
I don't think the government have to have any real reason to try to deport any foreign national as long as they say its on security grounds or in the public interest?
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Sid (32)
Yes, it makes sense. Looks like the 58 million who didn't march, did so out of misinformation then? This could get complicated me thinks?
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Sid and fJd: I take your respective points.
Perhaps they are all totally innocent but from the way the Chief Constable was responding to Eddie's questions, it seems he doesn't think so.
Glad the programme tonight was not all about the budget.
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Lady Sue and others, I agree that the police are in a no-win here - either they act and get it wrong or they don't and people get hurt.
However there seem to be two serious issues arising. First the grand fuss made of the news by various politicians who appeared to be in serious danger of pre-judging the evidence, and secondly that we cannot convict people because a Chief Constable "doesn't think" the suspects are innocent. He may, and surely does, know a lot more about it than any of us, but they seem to have ended up in a situation where they had not enough evidence even to bring the case to court. We cannot judge the evidence or lack of it - but in the event we have to treat the men as innocent until proven guilty i.e. at present, innocent.
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Anne, absolutely. I agree with you entirely.
The flip side is, it must be terribly frustrating when a policeman/detective knows someone is guilty but can't prosecute as there is a lack of evidence hard enough to get a conviction. (O.J. Simpson first time round springs to mind but I know it is another country and a bad example).
However, the British legal system is based on presuming innocence until proven otherwise and I can't argue with that.
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Certainly and always, innocent until proven guilty.
A tiny hitch where modern terrorists are concerned is that the ultimate undeniable proof of guilt may be provided by the culprit blowing up to smithereens both himself and a few dozen innocent bystanders.
Plays merry hell with the benefit of the doubt, too...
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Just seen that PM promo on BBC1 again. When was the last time Eddie Mair and Chris Moyles were seen together in public?
Hold on lads, I've got a great idea...
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Where is it on the money box? Some Hanseatic place? Holland? (Last there, 1959!) Just about, Boston or Kings Lynn? Virtual?
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What I cannot work out is this.. Under anti-terrorism laws, they can hold them for up to 28 days without charge...correct?. So if they suspected them of being involved with a serious crime, you would have thought they would have kept them as long as possible to exhaust every avenue of investigation, and then charged them. BUT!.. They let them go after only, I think, fourteen days.
There can be only one explaination. That they realised they had cocked up, and there was, and never likely to be, any serious evidence against them.
So why are they now trying to get them deported? Sounds like a face saving exercise to me.
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nextoanidiot #41: As I understand it, to hold someone past the 14 day point, they need to have the detention of a suspect reviewed by a judge sitting in camera every 7 days, up to the limit of 28 days. So, the judge, CPS, or the police had decided that there was insufficient evidence to detain the suspects at that time.
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JM-42 Thank you for that.
So that sort of ties in with what i said then. Does anyone know which of the three it was?
And if they hav'nt got enough evidence to convince a judge that they should be kept for another week, what evidence will they use to convince a judge that they should be deported. ...Bizzarre!
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TRW- 40.
Looks like the red light area in Rotterdam to me. That's Pink Lil's on the corner.
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nextoanidiot #44: I'll take your word for that!
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Come on Jim, that's you coming out of the door!
WR.
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41, 42. 43
And the judge, in camera, is empowered to hear all evidence, no matter its secrecy level.
So the whole shebang wasn't worth a light - pure theatre.
Pure, deliberate theatre.
What is Quick's resignation package?
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nextoanidiot @ 41
about the arrested "terrorists", you wrote:
"There can be only one explaination. That they realised they had cocked up, and there was, and never likely to be, any serious evidence against them.
"So why are they now trying to get them deported? Sounds like a face saving exercise to me. "
You would probably be interested by an article in the New York Review of Books this month in which Mark Danner discusses the Red Cross report on torture. In it, the conclusion drawn seems to be that a very high proportion of the prisoners (I'm not going to call them "detainees": "abducted civilians" seems closer to the mark) held by the USA for so long as "terrorists" or "enemy combatants" were arrested in the first place to make up quotas, and/or simply by accident. The reason they were not released when it was discovered that they were not and never had been guilty of anything in particular apart from breathing in the wrong place at the wrong moment seems to have been that to release them would have been to admit to error.
At least this time it was only i4 days, not 14 months or years or (well, if the previous mob had had their way) decades of somebody's life spent "disappeared". That's 14 days too long, even so.
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At least they weren't Brazilian electricians with expired visas trying to catch a train. If that were the case they'd have been shot out of hand for being suspected terrorists.
Think I'm being too harsh? Check out the front cover of the current edition of Private Eye.
WR.
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Idiot's neighbour,
Indeed, and just possibly a wee bit racist?Complain about this comment
I think the reason that they feel that the Immigration Review panel has different levels of "proof" when it comes to evidence.
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Well, Ive just read all you comments through twice, at first i thought you were all having a dig. But now im beginning to think that you agree with me. is that right?
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nextoanidiot #52: Are you asking me? To be honest, I don't know enough to make a call on that. I'd say that until the immigration review takes place, we can't tell how much information there is about the men involved. What it does highlight is for the need for intercept evidence to be admisibkle in court. I was listening to the Today programme on the way into work, and I was amazed to hear that we are the only country with a judicial-based system of law that doesn't allow for intercept evidence to be admissible in court....
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JM 53. Thats a good point. Could explain a lot.
Need to know a bit more about who can, and when, hear intercept evidence.
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nextoanidiot, I was following up the notion that some at least of the incarcerated may be the victims of face-saving on the part of those who incarcerated them rather than being guilty of any particular offence against any law.
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WR @ 49, it's a fake photograph. The person depicted is wearing a name-badge.
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