Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[HVC]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C_HronLgvrd/?igsh=NTZ0MmdhYTJkdDJt

[Tamas]

The Lucy Letby saga annoys me greatly. I bet if the accompanying photo was of an ethnic minority lady nobody would bat an eyelid but because it's a deer-in-headlights looking blonde girl people just can't accept she is a monster.

[Josquius]

The Lucy Letby saga annoys me greatly. I bet if the accompanying photo was of an ethnic minority lady nobody would bat an eyelid but because it's a deer-in-headlights looking blonde girl people just can't accept she is a monster.

Also disgusting is the current Chris kaba shit.
The scum are absolutely masturbating themselves into oblivion screaming about how he was a killer and the cop did absolutely nothing wrong and should actually be shooting more people. That those who called for justice to be served are forever proven invalid by... Justice being served and a not guilty verdict reached

[Sheilbh]

The Lucy Letby saga annoys me greatly. I bet if the accompanying photo was of an ethnic minority lady nobody would bat an eyelid but because it's a deer-in-headlights looking blonde girl people just can't accept she is a monster.

Also the New Yorker long read about it and the reporting restrictions limiting access to it in the U.K. at the time I think slightly mischaracterised the legal position.

Particularly around reporting restrictions - and I think Kaba is a good example of the value of reporting restrictions - all the stuff coming out now wasn't put in front of the jury because the judge decided it wasn't relevant, but also couldn't be reported while there was a live trial in front of a jury.

On Letby I do get the concern around the expert evidence and I think there is an interesting legal problem there which I'll try to dig out an article on.

(And of course in thinking about as a white woman v a minority - the questioning has come from the New Yorker, Private Eye and the Guardian. The tabloids and right wing press seem pretty satisfied with the verdict and just think she's a monster.)

[garbon]

So Labour has now flipped on the outdoor smoking ban. Now in the course of the day walked back comments on whether to discuss UK role in slave trade and reparations at Commonwealth summit.

[Sheilbh]

So Labour has now flipped on the outdoor smoking ban. Now in the course of the day walked back comments on whether to discuss UK role in slave trade and reparations at Commonwealth summit.

I don't necessarily mind on either not doing the outdoor smoking ban, or going from no talk about reparations to open to non-monetary forms of reparations. Also, to be blunt, if you're not planning to talk about enslavement or reparations at the Commonwealth - you can't have your Foreign Secretary going around making numerous speeches, such as at the UN, talking about how he is descended from enslaved people.

But, it's still not great. It just all feels very disjointed and unfocused - I still think that on basically every issue they haven't really thought what they're for. They don't have an analysis or an argument. It's like they thought that all the problems were basically because the Tories were bad people and simply by not being Tories and being good people things would be fine

I think you sort of see it in Starmer's big conference speech criticism of the Tories being populist, which is divisive and bad. Not about how they were wrong. Or in stopping some arms sales to Israel or even the Chagos islands where they basically said we legally have to do this because of the ICC, rather than making an argument for why it's right. Or even in the whole freebies scandal where the defence kept on being that the rules were followed and, say, Starmer had declare £100,000+ gifts so there's no issue.

There's no animating purpose. It feels like the worst case scenario of electing an institutionalist lawyer - there doesn't really need to be a plan, as long as the right process is followed.

It may turn around with the budget and so on but. But at this stage, it feels that despite 14 years out of office to work out what they want to do - there's no there there...

I am worried (and I think Badenoch is a bigger threat than Jenrick)

[garbon]

Yea, your 2nd paragraph is how I feel about it.

[crazy canuck]

Yeah, a good process only sets the foundation for good decision making.  You still need good decision making.

[Sheilbh]

And to be absolutely clear I am very much unsure that the British state currently has a good process

[Tamas]

Badenoch isn't getting elected by the membership. Last time they had a choice of skin colours they went with the obviously not right in the head white lady over the Hindu dude.

[Gups]

Badenoch isn't getting elected by the membership. Last time they had a choice of skin colours they went with the obviously not right in the head white lady over the Hindu dude.

They went for the right wing nutter over the less right wing non-nutter. Badenoch is the massive favourite  (the betting odds are 80% v 20%) to win.

[Tamas]

Badenoch isn't getting elected by the membership. Last time they had a choice of skin colours they went with the obviously not right in the head white lady over the Hindu dude.

They went for the right wing nutter over the less right wing non-nutter. Badenoch is the massive favourite  (the betting odds are 80% v 20%) to win.

Fair enough.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah the Conservative Home poll (which is made up of a panel of 3,000 verified party members - or 3% of the electorate ) has her with a pretty strong lead so I'd be surprised if Jenrick won:


Having said that I think their poll significantly over-estimated Truss v Sunak and also (but less) Johnson over Hunt. So it's not surprising but I think their sample leans to the right of the Tory party and the more moderate candidate actually does better.

I'm not sure that's a particularly relevant distinction in this case

And yeah I think race probably was a factor - but ultimately they went for the candidate running to the right and promising loads of tax cuts etc v the candidate who said we couldn't afford that. And, with one exception, since the Tory party members got a vote in the leadership they have always gone for the most right wing option - again I'm not sure it's a meaningful distinction here given Badenoch and Jenrick's positions.

[Sheilbh]

Thought this was interesting on why London's phone signal is so bad (I have had to be nodded in to the cinema because I couldn't download my ticket) - and it is things like this where the same issues just keep recurring, that makes me think a lot of the issues here are fundamentally pretty fixable if anyone has the will to do it.

London is miles behind basically all the other cities I've been to in the UK on this and lots of European cities too -Poland especially has great internet - and in terms of Britain's dreadful productivity I can't help but feel there's space for gains by having things like working phone networks in our biggest city

I also feel like the politicians and local people looking at a coverage map and seeing 100% coverage but not thinking about capacity is the story of a lot of our infrastructure issues - like HS2 which is really important because the West Coast Mainline is more or less at capacity. There's no space on the existing infrastructure or timetables:

Why is the phone signal so bad in London?
   

Phone masts on top of a residential housing block in Lower Clapton.

I was trying to interview telecoms analyst Matthew Howett about the problems with London's phone coverage but there was a problem: The call kept failing due to poor signal.

Howett runs his business from an office close to Liverpool Street station, while I was speaking from my desk in south London, directly opposite a phone mast on top of the building across the street. But maintaining a stable connection between the two of us in a supposedly global city was impossible.

"The networks want to fix it," said Howett. "Because you're not going to give them money for something that doesn't work. But they are not being helped to get the stuff done that they need to do. It's become a government problem."

The main issue, he said, are the challenges that networks face when it comes installing the telephone masts that enable you to send a WhatsApp, check your email, and refresh TikTok while on the go. It's a combination of planning policy failure, opposition from local residents, and lack of backing from central government. And it's going to take years to put right.

Ask Londoners where in the capital the phone signal is particularly bad and you'll get a wide spread of answers: Covent Garden. Hampstead. Stratford. In the modernist concrete bunkers that make up the arts venues on the South Bank, and in the Barbican, people have been unable to download the e-tickets they need to access events. Railway lines out of Waterloo through south west London seem to come with extended periods of data blackouts. And you may find yourself hovering in the far corner of your local shop trying to download a QR code to collect a parcel, while the queue grows behind you.

To understand what's going on, you first have to understand how a mobile phone network operates. In its simplest form it is like a super-powerful outdoor wi-fi network: your phone connects to a mast, which might be a modest lamppost-style pole on a street corner, or a big chunky metal lattice structure standing some distance away on top of a hill or a block of flats. Your phone then sends and requests data from the mast, which in turn deals with the request by communicating with a central network, usually using an underground fibre optic cable similar to your home broadband connection.
   
   
A modern mobile phone mast in south London, showing the cabinets needed to power the device and transfer data to the main network.

In common with all major cities, London is already at a disadvantage because it is full of tightly-packed streets with tall concrete and plate glass buildings, which block signals. According to Howett, a drive to fight climate change and increase energy efficiency means new windows often contain a lot of metallic products, creating a Faraday cage which block electromagnetic signals. Unless a developer chooses to spend extra money voluntarily putting a mobile phone signal repeater inside the building then people will find their signal is impacted.

One of the biggest areas of confusion for Londoners, according to Howett, is the difference between your phone being able to connect to a mast and it having the ability to actually download data at a reasonable speed. This might mean that your phone is showing a strong signal but you have absolutely no ability to use data services to receive WhatsApps or reply to that Instagram DM.

"The bars are just referencing the strength of the signal that you've got to the site," he said. "But the site and its connection to the internet are reliant on how many people are connected to that site. It's like a cake: You've got to split it a lot of ways. You might have five bars because you're connected to the site but if there's no capacity then you're not going to have a good experience."

When 4G was first switched on very few phones had the ability to access it, so there was lots of cake to go around. As a result the data download speed for many Londoners really was higher a decade ago compared to what they might experience today. Now, with the installation of 5G networks and proliferation of phones using it, more and more devices are trying to latch on to a small number of masts – meaning the cake is divided so much that it becomes a useless pile of crumbs.

Astonishingly, tests carried out by London Centric found that in several high-profile areas of the capital the best place to find a fast 5G mobile data connection is now hundreds of feet under the capital in deep tube tunnels. This is thanks to new equipment – known as "leaky feeders" – installed in recent years under a contract with Transport for London.

In a damning indictment of the capital's outdoor mobile infrastructure, if you want to tether your laptop to your phone and work remotely you might be better off tapping into the tube network and doing your work while riding around at 40km/hr underneath London. (Much of this article was written on the tube in this manner.)

On a packed rush hour Jubilee line train to Canary Wharf on Thursday morning it was possible to download data over EE's network at 217mbps (megabytes per second), as fast as many home broadband connections. But the moment you go above ground and are surrounded by the financial district's skyscrapers the data download speed falls by more than three quarters to 49mbps.

Get back on the Jubilee line heading east from Canary Wharf and, thanks to the train emptying out, it was possible to hit a super-fast 371mbps on 5G in a tunnel deep under the Thames, enough to download an entire film in little over a minute. But on arrival at Stratford station there was no data connection on many platforms.
   
Jump on the Elizabeth Line to central London and the in-tunnel data speed returns to 203mbps – but outside Tottenham Court Road station, where you might be trying to meet a friend, it immediately falls to a barely-usable 2mbps. Even wandering around the corner to the middle of an empty Soho Square, free from obstructions, did little to improve download speeds.

The solution to all of this is to install more masts with greater capacity. Gareth Edwards works for lobby group Mobile UK, which represents the interests of mobile phone network providers. He said the biggest issue the operators face in London is the planning system, with local councillors across the capital politically incentivised to object to new masts at all costs – either on aesthetic grounds, or over dubiously-sourced fears about the supposed health impacts.

He said an ongoing issue is that councillors and local residents check coverage maps, see the capital is effectively 100% covered for signal, and conclude there is no need for more masts: "While the general perception is that a dropped call or slow connection is a coverage issue, it is more likely to be a capacity one."

At the same time, Edwards said the networks he represents also receive complaints from the same local politicians about the lack of data capacity in their area, without making the connection between the two issues. In some areas council leaders delight in boasting about how many masts they have blocked on behalf of local residents.

You don't have to go far to find recent examples of London's opposition to masts. In Haringey the council apologised after allowing a mast to be built near a cricket club, saying it was a "regrettable error". In Mitcham local residents have been fighting a mast that will "cast a shadow" over a village green. In Romford residents called the installation of a mast on their block of flats a "public health failure".

The end result is that in London it is uniquely hard to get permission for new equipment. According to Mobile UK's internal data in Greater Manchester, Leeds, and Edinburgh more than 80% of requests for new masts are approved at the planning stage. In Greater London this approval rate plummets to less than 40%, one of the worst in the country.
   

Planning approval rates for mobile phone mast applications in major UK cities, according to phone network lobby group Mobile UK.

The places most in need of extra capacity, such as Soho or the West End, are also among the areas with the highest levels of architectural protection for their old buildings. Large swathes of the capital are conservation areas that have much stricter planning rules on how equipment must look. Although a modern 5G mast might be relatively slim, it still requires a series of chunky power supplies and networking equipment to be located in cabinets at street level. In some local authorities wealthy residents running letter-writing campaigns will do everything they can to block new masts.

Howett said some London councils are notoriously difficult to deal with: "Kensington and Chelsea famously hate street cabinets which you need to go with the mast."

Ultimately, Edwards said, there has to be an acceptance among the public that bringing a reliable 5G signal to people means placing masts in locations "dependent on radio physics", rather than somewhere considered more aesthetically pleasing by councillors.

The rapid redevelopment of London also means many older buildings with functioning masts are being ripped down – leaving the mobile networks scrabbling to find suitable nearby sites for replacements. Equally, a new tower block might be erected which blocks a signal relied on by local residents.

And as anyone who has attended an event at EE-sponsored Wembley Stadium or the O2 Arena knows, these venues can quickly become overwhelmed by too many people trying to connect at the same time. This could be easily solved by the installation of "neutral hosts" providing signal to all networks – but that's not in the interests of mobile phone network sponsors. They want people to know that you have to switch contracts if you want a reliable signal at those venues.

There is one other uniquely British issue that has impacted the mobile network in London: Huawei. The Chinese tech company was a relative minnow in the global technology world until BT made it a supplier of choice in the 2000s. This support from British customers built it into a global giant but was also its undoing, amid concerns from US President Donald Trump and Boris Johnson's former chief of staff Dom Cummings that its role in the UK's 5G network could provide a backdoor for Chinese spies.

In 2020 the order went out from central government that all Huawei kit had to be removed. Billions of pounds had to be spent by the networks ripping out functioning 5G equipment, sourcing replacement kit from other suppliers such as Nokia and Ericsson, and installing it. The process set back the rollout of 5G capacity by years, according to Howett, who retains doubts about the decision: "There's never been evidence of espionage by China in the network. The national cyber security centre took apart every piece of equipment deployed in the UK and British engineers never found a problem. The only problem they found was some sloppy code from Chinese developers."

He said London has to decide between having a city where people can get data on the move, or one which is aesthetically clean and free of masts: "You walk down the streets in Asia and there are wires hanging from building to building, because people expect connectivity. Within 10 minutes of moving house you expect new full-fibre broadband and there's shame on the operator if they haven't installed it by then. People move in, they want the internet, and they don't care if there is a cable dangling. We care a little bit more about what people see at street level."

But the ultimate question remains: Which mobile service provider should Londoners choose for the best signal? Howett has an extreme solution that means he's almost always connected: "I've got a SIM card from every network."

And a really interesting map of the problem in one area - Westminster Council has kitted out bin lorries with phones to collect data on data. And by evening it's nearly unusable in big chunks of central/west end London:

[Sheilbh]

Also totally separate (and I suspect a u-turn is coming on this because even supporters are raising concerns), the legalisation of assisted dying will be through a private member's bill.

That's the traditional way free vote/moral issue bills are passed (like decriminalisation of homosexuality, abolition of the death penalty, divorce liberalisation etc) - but they're normally done by the government providing time to the bill.

In this case they're currently not providing government time to look at and debate the proposal properly. So it will proceed as a normal private member's bill. That means it won't go to committee, the text of the bill doesn't need to published until quite late in the process and there'll only be a five hour debate which seems pretty inadequate - especially given everyone says they agree it's really important to get the safeguards right.