And don't forget, there was nothing at all to say we had to have the burgundy ones anyway. It was our national choice to keep things easy and use the standard template.
I think the passport printed in France is wrong but Jesus that Daily Mail front page.
Does anybody actually know anybody who reads it and if so do they go around permanently angry or offended?
My parents love it. The old man sits in front of Sky News...pausing only to tune in to Farage if he's on... reading his Mail, getting himself in to a right state about migrants*, the unemployed, communists, do gooders, political correctness, homosexuals*, the state of the roads, the state of the army, the state of the NHS, the state of West Ham, the state of the state, etc. etc. etc. It's flipping depressing trying to have any sort of serious discussion with him so I've long since given up.
He'll be reading that hateful, ridiculous opinion piece in there today nodding at every word, then trot off to his bowls club to sit around with a bunch of other Mail readers agreeing what a terrible thing it is that our political elites haven't allowed our country to be dicked over for an unnecessary £120m just to provide a warm glow to a few Leavers and a positive headline in their newspaper.
I've offered to buy them a subscription to the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, Readers Wives, anything....to break the daily cycle of their confirmation bias being reinforced but they love it because it feeds back and legitimises their opinions to them.
*this may not be what he always refers to them as.
Thank goodness my parents are dyed in the wool Sooshulists (for @PragueAddick ).
And don't forget, there was nothing at all to say we had to have the burgundy ones anyway. It was our national choice to keep things easy and use the standard template.
I think the passport printed in France is wrong but Jesus that Daily Mail front page.
Does anybody actually know anybody who reads it and if so do they go around permanently angry or offended?
My parents love it. The old man sits in front of Sky News...pausing only to tune in to Farage if he's on... reading his Mail, getting himself in to a right state about migrants*, the unemployed, communists, do gooders, political correctness, homosexuals*, the state of the roads, the state of the army, the state of the NHS, the state of West Ham, the state of the state, etc. etc. etc. It's flipping depressing trying to have any sort of serious discussion with him so I've long since given up.
He'll be reading that hateful, ridiculous opinion piece in there today nodding at every word, then trot off to his bowls club to sit around with a bunch of other Mail readers agreeing what a terrible thing it is that our political elites haven't allowed our country to be dicked over for an unnecessary £120m just to provide a warm glow to a few Leavers and a positive headline in their newspaper.
I've offered to buy them a subscription to the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, Readers Wives, anything....to break the daily cycle of their confirmation bias being reinforced but they love it because it feeds back and legitimises their opinions to them.
*this may not be what he always refers to them as.
Thank goodness my parents are dyed in the wool Sooshulists (for @PragueAddick ).
He's far from a bad man my dad but bejeezuz his political views are out on towards the far right. He of course believes that he's in the centre ground and anyone that doesn't see things the same way or throws annoying things like facts that don't support his view is a raving lefty.
I think the passport printed in France is wrong but Jesus that Daily Mail front page.
Does anybody actually know anybody who reads it and if so do they go around permanently angry or offended?
My parents love it. The old man sits in front of Sky News...pausing only to tune in to Farage if he's on... reading his Mail, getting himself in to a right state about migrants*, the unemployed, communists, do gooders, political correctness, homosexuals*, the state of the roads, the state of the army, the state of the NHS, the state of West Ham, the state of the state, etc. etc. etc. It's flipping depressing trying to have any sort of serious discussion with him so I've long since given up.
He'll be reading that hateful, ridiculous opinion piece in there today nodding at every word, then trot off to his bowls club to sit around with a bunch of other Mail readers agreeing what a terrible thing it is that our political elites haven't allowed our country to be dicked over for an unnecessary £120m just to provide a warm glow to a few Leavers and a positive headline in their newspaper.
I've offered to buy them a subscription to the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, Readers Wives, anything....to break the daily cycle of their confirmation bias being reinforced but they love it because it feeds back and legitimises their opinions to them.
*this may not be what he always refers to them as.
Thank goodness my parents are dyed in the wool Sooshulists (for @PragueAddick ).
He's far from a bad man my dad but bejeezuz his political views are out on towards the far right. He of course believes that he's in the centre ground and anyone that doesn't see things the same way or throws annoying things like facts that don't support his view is a raving lefty.
Well he is wrong as I am the centre ground ask @A-R-T-H-U-R .
It would be quite fun to use FOI to get some more detail on this passport procurement bid. I've got to go on the website for a new Olympic Stadium FOI, so I might give it a go. They won't give me the bids on the grounds of commercial confidentiality, I am sure, but even the tender document might be interesting to see (it ought to be publicly available anyway, come to think of it)
Can someone remind me which Govt. ministry is responsible? Home Office?
Doubt it’s available. Wouldn’t commercial sensitivity prevent an FOI request ?
Well it is all too commonly used as grounds for refusal. I do though have a bit of experience in contesting such a refusal :-)
The tender document (inviting bids) cannot possibly be excluded on those grounds. How then could it be a "free and fair competition"? The beauty of the wonderful privatised world of Britain is that it allows anyone to give it a go. That was the argument defending the OS deal to the European Commission. "Anyone could bid - Chelsea could have bid" (the LLDC lawyer really wrote that). "But they didn't, therefore West Ham's bid was the market price".
This is what happens when you create false markets run by lawyers, public sector officials, and administrators who can suddenly call themselves CEOs
I've offered to buy them a subscription to the Telegraph, the Times, the Independent, Readers Wives, anything....to break the daily cycle of their confirmation bias being reinforced but they love it because it feeds back and legitimises their opinions to them.
*this may not be what he always refers to them as.
I'm not sure the Telegraph would be that much of an improvement - OK it doesn't have Richard Littlejohn or Sarah Vine, and the crossword's better, but it's been veering towards the batshit itself in recent years.
The FT on the passports, well worth reading if you can get behind the paywall, the BTL comments are well worth reading, as they often are in the FT, lots of well-informed people there.
e.g:
The real issues are :-
Why 11.5 years contract term - recipe for climbing the golden rope on change actions.
Why is the winning bid £120M cheaper than the others - suggests buying the job which has only one outcome - risk, corner-cutting and performance failure once the economics of the contract start to bite.
Smells, as ever, of inexperienced/complacent/incompetent procurement officials.
but my favourite:
Indeed! Ministers should travel in Morgans not Tata-owned Jaguars.
David Davis putting his Irish border eggs in the technology basket. Get ready for the human race to be microchipped to suit brexiters. If not that, then what?
Been reading this this morning and Number 10 getting involved in outing a man of Pakistani origin as gay before he'd told his family and friends is an "interesting" development. Suspect more clumsy than malicious but could have been handled better.
Sublime to the ridiculous in terms of journalist ability on Andrew Marr paper review today. Carole Cadwalladr to Isabel Oakeshott.
I am going to complain to the BBC about that.
Last week, in the paper review, they showed Carole C's scoop last in the review, presenting it as some rather complicated techie story, which was duly sniffed at by Jane Moore (of the Sun) and less excusably by that twat Owen Jones who works for the same newspaper.
All through the week the BBC has been shown up by Channel 4 on this story. Facebook's value drop £60bn because of it. So we get to Sunday and you hope for contrition from Marr. Well, they actually invite Carole C on to do the paper review. Ostensibly. Because the only other guest is Isabel Oakeshott, who is not just an extree right wing Brexit commentator, but actually worked for Leave EU. Marr allows Oakeshott to keep saying to CC "where's the evidence" but without giving CC the space to actually answer. And it is supposed to be a feckin paper review, FFS.
Marr knows all about Oakeshott, as he has invited her on several times before, whereas I have never before seen CC on TV. If he wanted to really ask CC about where the evidence leads, why didn't he ask her in as a guest in a one on one interview? Well? Why didn't he? That was an attempted hatchet job, absolutely disgraceful. The most charitable explanation is journalistic jealousy.
I don't suggest the entire BBC is infested with pro Brexit producers, but there clearly are some in important influencing roles (notably also on R4 Today radio); and the idea that the BBC can be said to be pro-Remain is utterly laughable and that sordid little episode is an example of why it is laughable.
Owen Jones and Isabel Oakshott are cut from the same cloth as so called mouths for hire and are the equivalent of Shay Given or Danny Mills in punditry, that is to say useless and stealing a living as predictable political box tickers at each extreme. The proper journalist who broke a proper story was disrespected with faint praise by the desperately jealous vacuum of a journalist called Isabel Oakshott. They would be better off having my neighbours cat on Marr than Jones of Oakshott
Sublime to the ridiculous in terms of journalist ability on Andrew Marr paper review today. Carole Cadwalladr to Isabel Oakeshott.
I am going to complain to the BBC about that.
Last week, in the paper review, they showed Carole C's scoop last in the review, presenting it as some rather complicated techie story, which was duly sniffed at by Jane Moore (of the Sun) and less excusably by that twat Owen Jones who works for the same newspaper.
All through the week the BBC has been shown up by Channel 4 on this story. Facebook's value drop £60bn because of it. So we get to Sunday and you hope for contrition from Marr. Well, they actually invite Carole C on to do the paper review. Ostensibly. Because the only other guest is Isabel Oakeshott, who is not just an extree right wing Brexit commentator, but actually worked for Leave EU. Marr allows Oakeshott to keep saying to CC "where's the evidence" but without giving CC the space to actually answer. And it is supposed to be a feckin paper review, FFS.
Marr knows all about Oakeshott, as he has invited her on several times before, whereas I have never before seen CC on TV. If he wanted to really ask CC about where the evidence leads, why didn't he ask her in as a guest in a one on one interview? Well? Why didn't he? That was an attempted hatchet job, absolutely disgraceful. The most charitable explanation is journalistic jealousy.
I don't suggest the entire BBC is infested with pro Brexit producers, but there clearly are some in important influencing roles (notably also on R4 Today radio); and the idea that the BBC can be said to be pro-Remain is utterly laughable and that sordid little episode is an example of why it is laughable.
Couldn't agree more. Very disappointed the way that all turned out. Mind you it is difficult to shut Oakeshott up without being rude.
Sublime to the ridiculous in terms of journalist ability on Andrew Marr paper review today. Carole Cadwalladr to Isabel Oakeshott.
I am going to complain to the BBC about that.
Last week, in the paper review, they showed Carole C's scoop last in the review, presenting it as some rather complicated techie story, which was duly sniffed at by Jane Moore (of the Sun) and less excusably by that twat Owen Jones who works for the same newspaper.
All through the week the BBC has been shown up by Channel 4 on this story. Facebook's value drop £60bn because of it. So we get to Sunday and you hope for contrition from Marr. Well, they actually invite Carole C on to do the paper review. Ostensibly. Because the only other guest is Isabel Oakeshott, who is not just an extree right wing Brexit commentator, but actually worked for Leave EU. Marr allows Oakeshott to keep saying to CC "where's the evidence" but without giving CC the space to actually answer. And it is supposed to be a feckin paper review, FFS.
Marr knows all about Oakeshott, as he has invited her on several times before, whereas I have never before seen CC on TV. If he wanted to really ask CC about where the evidence leads, why didn't he ask her in as a guest in a one on one interview? Well? Why didn't he? That was an attempted hatchet job, absolutely disgraceful. The most charitable explanation is journalistic jealousy.
I don't suggest the entire BBC is infested with pro Brexit producers, but there clearly are some in important influencing roles (notably also on R4 Today radio); and the idea that the BBC can be said to be pro-Remain is utterly laughable and that sordid little episode is an example of why it is laughable.
Couldn't agree more. Very disappointed the way that all turned out. Mind you it is difficult to shut Oakeshott up without being rude.
Newspaper reviews: invariably shit. Horrible cheap-format television requiring little thought or planning (at least as we see them today), and providing an additional platform for the over opinionated gobshites who appear again, and again, and again and who already have more than enough opportunity to publicise their particular brand of thinking.
In the past we had the magnificent What The Papers Say. It was clever, it was witty and it made you think. Whether it was fronted by someone from the left, the right or the centre, there was always something to learn. The reason it worked was because they worked very hard at making it work. It was properly scripted, it was properly captioned and they had professional actors to read the quotes. There was always a structure that worked towards delivering a clever punchline, in much the same way as a carefully crafted stand-up routine delivering a pay-off relating back to gags and observations made much earlier in the set. Whist each individual programme invariably took the views of the week's presenting journalist, over a period of time there would be editorial balance because of the rotation of presenters.
Today we get none of that. We get the same hacks and opinion formers with a stack of papers in front of them and the sense that they've done no more preparation that a quick scan through the headlines in the back of their cab to the tv studios. There's very little control and whoever shouts the loudest gets the most airtime. Appalling tv.
Sublime to the ridiculous in terms of journalist ability on Andrew Marr paper review today. Carole Cadwalladr to Isabel Oakeshott.
I am going to complain to the BBC about that.
Last week, in the paper review, they showed Carole C's scoop last in the review, presenting it as some rather complicated techie story, which was duly sniffed at by Jane Moore (of the Sun) and less excusably by that twat Owen Jones who works for the same newspaper.
All through the week the BBC has been shown up by Channel 4 on this story. Facebook's value drop £60bn because of it. So we get to Sunday and you hope for contrition from Marr. Well, they actually invite Carole C on to do the paper review. Ostensibly. Because the only other guest is Isabel Oakeshott, who is not just an extree right wing Brexit commentator, but actually worked for Leave EU. Marr allows Oakeshott to keep saying to CC "where's the evidence" but without giving CC the space to actually answer. And it is supposed to be a feckin paper review, FFS.
Marr knows all about Oakeshott, as he has invited her on several times before, whereas I have never before seen CC on TV. If he wanted to really ask CC about where the evidence leads, why didn't he ask her in as a guest in a one on one interview? Well? Why didn't he? That was an attempted hatchet job, absolutely disgraceful. The most charitable explanation is journalistic jealousy.
I don't suggest the entire BBC is infested with pro Brexit producers, but there clearly are some in important influencing roles (notably also on R4 Today radio); and the idea that the BBC can be said to be pro-Remain is utterly laughable and that sordid little episode is an example of why it is laughable.
Couldn't agree more. Very disappointed the way that all turned out. Mind you it is difficult to shut Oakeshott up without being rude.
She is lovely though.
She certainly seems to think so. Not got much else going for her I suppose.
Wasn't Robert Peston running a post -Brexit documentary on ITV last night? I thought he trailed it, but then forgot to check on it. Judging by his book, I would expect it to be worth a watch.
Because everybody knows the Remain campaign was massively more resourced than the Leave campaign, however dodgy their dealings may have been, so on balance nobody much cares except die hard Remainers.
Or to put it another way..The Government, The Treasury, the CBI, the EU, President Obama, the IMF, sections of the media, The Labour Party, The Liberal party, the SNP and old Uncle Tom Cobley were campaigning for Remain but the Leave campaign overspent by 600k and that is what swung it. Really? I was just getting used to the idea that Leave won because I was hypnotised by Facebook , now it is the 600,000 divided by 17.4 million, hold on that is 3p overspending on each voter. You are right, it was the 3p what won it.
Because everybody knows the Remain campaign was massively more resourced than the Leave campaign, however dodgy their dealings may have been, so on balance nobody much cares except die hard Remainers.
Have you priced up the value of all those front pages in the Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Express, etc. now then? What about the endless opinion pieces by the likes of Littlejohn spouting nonsense about the EU for decades, how much was that promotion of Leave worth?
Or to put it another way..The Government, The Treasury, the CBI, the EU, President Obama, the IMF, sections of the media, The Labour Party, The Liberal party, the SNP and old Uncle Tom Cobley were campaigning for Remain but the Leave campaign overspent by 600k and that is what swung it. Really? I was just getting used to the idea that Leave won because I was hypnotised by Facebook , now it is the 600,000 divided by 17.4 million, hold on that is 3p overspending on each voter. You are right, it was the 3p what won it.
Come on Prague, you can do better than that.
Actually wasn't the difference about 1.3m in the vote? So to turn half of that lot around it works out about a quid a pop or so doesn't it. If enough bullshit is targeted at the right voters you could do a lot with that...which is exactly what this story is all about of course.
Because everybody knows the Remain campaign was massively more resourced than the Leave campaign, however dodgy their dealings may have been, so on balance nobody much cares except die hard Remainers.
Have you priced up the value of all those front pages in the Mail, the Sun, the Telegraph, the Express, etc. now then? What about the endless opinion pieces by the likes of Littlejohn spouting nonsense about the EU for decades, how much was that promotion of Leave worth?
His answer will be Soros or some such in continued desperation to portray the leave campaign as some sort of plucky upstart campaign that gathered pace despite innumerable obstacles.
Which we all know is false.
Well i suppose we can add Vlad to the leave campaign so that jacks up the total wealth considerably...
Or to put it another way..The Government, The Treasury, the CBI, the EU, President Obama, the IMF, sections of the media, The Labour Party, The Liberal party, the SNP and old Uncle Tom Cobley were campaigning for Remain but the Leave campaign overspent by 600k and that is what swung it. Really? I was just getting used to the idea that Leave won because I was hypnotised by Facebook , now it is the 600,000 divided by 17.4 million, hold on that is 3p overspending on each voter. You are right, it was the 3p what won it.
Come on Prague, you can do better than that.
I will do my best to spell it out for you. Carole's scoop is not about Brexit. Do you really think Facebook has lost $100bn off its share price because of poxy Brexit ? (well you probably do , but US fund managers don't). However it is impossible to deal with the story without touching on Brexit because the illegal theft and abuse of personal data was used in the Brexit cause in this case. (There are numerous other cases around the world slowly revealing themselves).
The question then is why have the BBC not allowed Panorama to run the stories? I suggest that whatever the reason, it gives the lie to the idea that the BBC is pro-Remain, because if it were, it would be all over it. On the contrary as we saw on the Marr Show on Sunday, they are seeking, pitifully, to rubbish the story. And again, the global markets decided it wasn't rubbish at all.
Or to put it another way..The Government, The Treasury, the CBI, the EU, President Obama, the IMF, sections of the media, The Labour Party, The Liberal party, the SNP and old Uncle Tom Cobley were campaigning for Remain but the Leave campaign overspent by 600k and that is what swung it. Really? I was just getting used to the idea that Leave won because I was hypnotised by Facebook , now it is the 600,000 divided by 17.4 million, hold on that is 3p overspending on each voter. You are right, it was the 3p what won it.
Come on Prague, you can do better than that.
I will do my best to spell it out for you. Carole's scoop is not about Brexit. Do you really think Facebook has lost $100bn off its share price because of poxy Brexit ? (well you probably do , but US fund managers don't). However it is impossible to deal with the story without touching on Brexit because the illegal theft and abuse of personal data was used in the Brexit cause in this case. (There are numerous other cases around the world slowly revealing themselves).
The question then is why have the BBC not allowed Panorama to run the stories? I suggest that whatever the reason, it gives the lie to the idea that the BBC is pro-Remain, because if it were, it would be all over it. On the contrary as we saw on the Marr Show on Sunday, they are seeking, pitifully, to rubbish the story. And again, the global markets decided it wasn't rubbish at all.
Comments
The tender document (inviting bids) cannot possibly be excluded on those grounds. How then could it be a "free and fair competition"? The beauty of the wonderful privatised world of Britain is that it allows anyone to give it a go. That was the argument defending the OS deal to the European Commission. "Anyone could bid - Chelsea could have bid" (the LLDC lawyer really wrote that). "But they didn't, therefore West Ham's bid was the market price".
This is what happens when you create false markets run by lawyers, public sector officials, and administrators who can suddenly call themselves CEOs
e.g:
The real issues are :-
Why 11.5 years contract term - recipe for climbing the golden rope on change actions.
Why is the winning bid £120M cheaper than the others - suggests buying the job which has only one outcome - risk, corner-cutting and performance failure once the economics of the contract start to bite.
Smells, as ever, of inexperienced/complacent/incompetent procurement officials.
but my favourite:
Indeed! Ministers should travel in Morgans not Tata-owned Jaguars.
Get ready for the human race to be microchipped to suit brexiters.
If not that, then what?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b09wfrk0/the-funeral-murders?suggid=b09wfrk0
Whatever happens to the border, it mustn't result in going back to those days.
Last week, in the paper review, they showed Carole C's scoop last in the review, presenting it as some rather complicated techie story, which was duly sniffed at by Jane Moore (of the Sun) and less excusably by that twat Owen Jones who works for the same newspaper.
All through the week the BBC has been shown up by Channel 4 on this story. Facebook's value drop £60bn because of it. So we get to Sunday and you hope for contrition from Marr. Well, they actually invite Carole C on to do the paper review. Ostensibly. Because the only other guest is Isabel Oakeshott, who is not just an extree right wing Brexit commentator, but actually worked for Leave EU. Marr allows Oakeshott to keep saying to CC "where's the evidence" but without giving CC the space to actually answer. And it is supposed to be a feckin paper review, FFS.
Marr knows all about Oakeshott, as he has invited her on several times before, whereas I have never before seen CC on TV. If he wanted to really ask CC about where the evidence leads, why didn't he ask her in as a guest in a one on one interview? Well? Why didn't he? That was an attempted hatchet job, absolutely disgraceful. The most charitable explanation is journalistic jealousy.
I don't suggest the entire BBC is infested with pro Brexit producers, but there clearly are some in important influencing roles (notably also on R4 Today radio); and the idea that the BBC can be said to be pro-Remain is utterly laughable and that sordid little episode is an example of why it is laughable.
The proper journalist who broke a proper story was disrespected with faint praise by the desperately jealous vacuum of a journalist called Isabel Oakshott.
They would be better off having my neighbours cat on Marr than Jones of Oakshott
In the past we had the magnificent What The Papers Say. It was clever, it was witty and it made you think. Whether it was fronted by someone from the left, the right or the centre, there was always something to learn. The reason it worked was because they worked very hard at making it work. It was properly scripted, it was properly captioned and they had professional actors to read the quotes. There was always a structure that worked towards delivering a clever punchline, in much the same way as a carefully crafted stand-up routine delivering a pay-off relating back to gags and observations made much earlier in the set. Whist each individual programme invariably took the views of the week's presenting journalist, over a period of time there would be editorial balance because of the rotation of presenters.
Today we get none of that. We get the same hacks and opinion formers with a stack of papers in front of them and the sense that they've done no more preparation that a quick scan through the headlines in the back of their cab to the tv studios. There's very little control and whoever shouts the loudest gets the most airtime. Appalling tv.
I was just getting used to the idea that Leave won because I was hypnotised by Facebook , now it is the 600,000 divided by 17.4 million, hold on that is 3p overspending on each voter. You are right, it was the 3p what won it.
Come on Prague, you can do better than that.
Which we all know is false.
Well i suppose we can add Vlad to the leave campaign so that jacks up the total wealth considerably...
The question then is why have the BBC not allowed Panorama to run the stories? I suggest that whatever the reason, it gives the lie to the idea that the BBC is pro-Remain, because if it were, it would be all over it. On the contrary as we saw on the Marr Show on Sunday, they are seeking, pitifully, to rubbish the story. And again, the global markets decided it wasn't rubbish at all.
Got it now?