DaveR

http://www.elc.co.uk/on/demandware.store/Sites-ELCENGB-Site/default/Product-Show?pid=116562&CAWELAID=1638585366

Sunderland 1 v West Brom 1 Everton 2 v Norwich 0 Man Utd 5 v QPR 0 Stoke 1 v Fulham 0 Wigan 1 v Reading 0 Aston Villa 1 v Arsenal 2 Swansea 1 v Liverpool 1 Southampton 2 v Newcastle 1 Chelsea 1 v Man City 1 Tottenham 2 v West Ham 0

"The main problem I have is the denial that reckless cycling is a danger to other road users - not just pedestrians and cyclists, but yes, drivers too." To be clear, it's obvious that individual acts of reckless cycling can endanger pedestrians, other cyclists, and in some extreme cases even drivers. But from what I've seen, it doesn't really figure in the stats i.e. it appears to be rare enough to to be statistically insignificant. Red light jumping is a good example of an issue that often comes up in any discussion, and that, as noted above, pisses people off. However, lots of things piss people off, so it is reasonable to ask why it pisses people off, and why anyone else should care. So why does it piss people off? Because it's against the law? Well so is doing 75mph on the motorway, and we all seem to get on OK with that. Because it's against the law and the law is not enforced? It's not strictly true, and in any event, similarly with 75mph - it's over the limit but you won't get pulled over for it as a matter of police policy. Because it's not safe? Now that's the interesting one. In some circumstances, going through on red may actually be safer - that's why Boris is proposing lights that will allow for an earlier green for cyclists, and also in essence why there are Advance Stop Lines - to give cyclists a head start. In other circumstances it's obviously not unsafe. A pedestrian crossing with no pedestrian in sight - if you go through on red, you're treating it like a zebra crossing, and no-one is suggesting that zebra crossings are inherently unsafe. In fact, the UK is one of the few countries I've driven in where ped crossings with traffic lights operate 24 hours, rather than changing to 'cross if safe' mode at quiet times. However, there are times when it's clearly unsafe, for the cyclist and for others. I have no problem with the idea that any cyclist who goes through a red when there are pedestrians crossing should get a proper fine, that the offence is recorded, and if you do it say three times they take your bike away. Similarly for idiots who go flying through busy junctions, because that creates chaos and uncertainty, and increases the risk for everyone. So I can understand why people get pissed off with cyclists jumping red lights, and in some cases I get pissed off too, and would be very happy if something was done to stop it. But in other cases it is harmless, and maybe should be recognised as such. And, going back to the thing I've said at least ten times now, whatever your view of red light jumping (i) there appears to be little evidence that it is a major risk factor for RTA injuries (ii) it does not provide a legitimate excuse for drivers to get pissed off and then run someone over.

I agree that the Guardian article is about a different issue - put very simply, poor food rather than not enough food. But there is an overlap between the two i.e. in neither case is the key issue short term economic conditions, rather more complex questions about education, aspiration, social mobility etc.

This has come up before on another thread, and this is what I posted there. I think it applies equally here: "This was the response from Martin Narey (head of Barnardos 2005-2011 and ex-chair of the End Child Poverty coalition) to the Save the Children campaign that suggested that poor families routinely cannot afford to buy enough food: "Child poverty in the UK is very real, but it?s not the simple poverty that Save the Children describes. Low income is certainly at the heart of it, but it?s also about poverty of aspiration, education and parenting. But I know why Save the Children is talking about missed meals: it captures public attention. Many times when I ran Barnardo?s ? and during the five years in which child poverty was our No 1 priority ? I declined to sign up to campaigns suggesting that British families do not get enough in benefits to feed or clothe their children. I did so for two reasons: because it?s not true, but also because such campaigns suggest that if we met the very basic requirements of a hot meal and warm clothing, people would think that poverty had been lifted. This isn?t to say that there are not emergencies when families do need urgent help with food or clothing. But they are generally short-term and caused by an administrative glitch, a marital separation, because money has been lost and sometimes, frankly, because it has been squandered on drink or drugs. Such crises are not symptomatic of the welfare state?s failure to provide families with enough money for the basics of life" I can't post a link to the whole article because of the Times subscription stuff." It's important to distinguish between the crises that can affect families from time to time (and where I do support charities that provide help) and any wider generalisations about people in the UK starving.

"He'd then have to fight a pretty aggressive battle to get the correspondent details out of the sites - could take years." Actually, this would probably be quite straightforward in this case, particularly where he is not going after the sites themselves. He'd have to get a court order, but the courts have been handing them out pretty freely in P2P copyright infringement cases. Plus, economies of scale - you only ned one order per site.

It's pretty cheap to send out a whole load of letters before action, and the settlement money from BBC and ITV means he's already ahead on the deal. Plus, if he takes a scorched earth approach, he's bound to sweep up a reasonable number of people who haven't yet been identified, but who he'd be quite happy to have a go at - lefty types crowing over a Tory paedophile story. Plus he is getting lots of encouragement from folks who think this is a good test of the ability of private civil law to control the excesses of social media. If I was at risk I wouldn't feel confident that he is bluffing.

Okay, I'll bite - again. This was my original post on this thread: "I think frustrated rather than deranged, to be fair. Anyone with any interest in the 'cycling debate' (if such a thing exists) has heard this argument go round and round in circles a million times before. The one thing that never changes, and the most important thing, is that in an encounter between a cyclist and a motor vehicle, it is the cyclist who is at risk. If a cyclist does something stupid and puts themselves in danger, that is their individual action and they have to take the consequences. However, it has no relevance at all to debates about tax, insurance and licensing for cyclists (which are all stupid ideas, frankly), nor does it ever excuse a vehicle driver of the responsibility to drive sensibly and have specific regard to the vulnerability of other road users. And the stats clearly show that, if the aim is to stop people getting killed/seriously injured, tackling bad driving should be a higher priority than bad cycling. I agree that it would be better if all cyclists didn't jump red lights or ride at night without lights. But as a car driver neither of these things present any risk of harm to you. Get over it. BTW, overtaking on the inside is fair game, if there is enough space. You need to start actually looking in your nearside mirror - that's what it's there for." Nothing in there about 'us and them', nothing suggesting that cyclists should be able to do whatever they want, are never at fault, etc. My only problem with many of the posts on here is that people are extrapolating from their own experience - "I see lots of cyclists do stupid things" - to a general proposition - "cyclists themselves are wholly or mainly the cause of risks to their own safety" - which the data shows is wrong. IMHO persistently advancing this wrong propostion is likely in itself to aggravate the risks, beacuse it encourages complacency by drivers, and, ironically, the kind of 'us and them' attitude that you have accused me of adopting. I should also comment on this: "There's a curious thing at work here - a cult of invincibility ( I've been told by cyclsists "I don't have to wait" and " it's no skin off your nose if I got through a red light" ).... and a cult of victimhood ( check out mynamehere's dotty ramblings)" Again, whilst it might represent your own experience, as a generalisation of the behaviour of all people who cycle, I think it's almost certainly a load of crap. There is a kernal of truth however. Cyclists (like motorcyclists) behave differently on the roads from cars. Bikes are smaller, lighter, slower, more difficult to see but more manoeuvrable. That means cyclists are both more vulnerable but also able to negotiate city traffic better than cars. I suspect your real complaint is that when you are driving, cyclists sail past you when you're waiting in traffic, but when you want to pass them they expect you to give them a lot of room. In fact you said as much earlier - "wait in line like everyone else!". That's quite a common source of resentment, but - and you know the point I'm going to make - it's not really that relevant to the central issue of safety (and it definitely does not constitute a good reason for losing your rag and running someone over - a more common occurrence than you would think).

It's funny, northondoner, that you quote a post that illustrates exactly what I mean i.e. the attitude of: I don't like the way someone is cycling therefore they 'deserve' to get hurt if they do get hurt it won't be my fault, but theirs the 'problem' of cyclists getting hurt is caused by cyclists therefore drivers should not be expected to take particular care/have respect for cyclists, because it's not their problem This is the attitude that kills people. Whether you are conscious of it or not, it is your attitude. You are contributing, in your own small way to the risk of people being killed. I don't think I can put it any clearer than that. On the other hand, it would be nonsense to suggest that no cyclist is ever at fault, or ever puts anyone else at risk, or ever behaves like a complete idiot, and in fact may be crying out for a slap, and I have never suggested that. But it's a completely separate issue. As I said before, when you get in your car, only one thing matters - are you going to drive safely? If you hit a cyclist, only one of you is going to get hurt. What matters is not what he or she did, but what you did. If you did everything that could reasonably be expected of you to avoid it, your conscience is clear.

Riding at night without lights is just stupid. No excuse.

"It would be odd if The Guardian didn't refer to Austerity Britain in its lead article" That's my point. The data they rely on says that as prices of fruit and veg have gone up, consumption has fallen, and prices of junk have stayed stable and consequently consumption has increased, and that the changing consumption largely mirrors incomes. So far, so obvious. But this para: "Austerity Britain is experiencing a nutritional recession, with rising food prices and shrinking incomes driving up consumption of fatty foods, reducing the amount of fruit and vegetables we buy, and condeming people on the lowest incomes to an increasingly unhealthy diet" is way over the top. What it should say is something like: "the current economic climate appears to be exacerbating an already well established pattern whereby good health, including healthy diet, correlates strongly with income, and many people on the lowest incomes (for any number of reasons) reject a healthy diet in favour of one full of fat and sugar. There is no signficant connection between this phenomenon and austerity/recession and any financial/economic measure is unlikely to provide a long term solution" But that wouldn't be very newsworthy. To my mind, the interesting thing here is that it asks serious questions about how interventionist the State should be. If you wanted to use the economic power of the State to improve public health, how about paying a proportion of all benefits in the form of vouchers than can only be used to buy healthy food? It's logical, but it's far too Big Brother-esque (in the Orwellian sense) for most of us. I doubt that there is anyone in the UK who is compelled by economic circumstances to eat shit food on a long-term basis. There may be gaps in education and information, there may be issues about time and facilities to cook healthy food, but there's also a lot of people making their own choices. Freedom is messy, but preferable to the alternative.

There has always been a correlation between income and health, and part of that is accounted for by diet. The problem with the Guardian article is that it latches on to some unsurprising data (price of fruit rises, comnsumption falls) and talks it up into an 'austerity crisis' story.

This was a case of gross negligence manslaughter, so the seriousness assessment will involve taking account of the nature of the duty of care that was breached, the degree of causation between the breach and the death, and the degree of negligence. In this case, the duty was specific - the guard's job is to ensure passenger safety. The causation was absolute - the negligent act was the complete cause of death (the fact that the victim was drunk explained why she was leaning against the train in the first place, but not why she fell when it moved off). And the degree of negligence was also very serious, given the training and experience of the defendant and the ease with which he could have done the right thing. On that basis, this was a bad case. Add to that no credit for a guilty plea (which is a proper factor to take into account) and the fact that he appears to have been caught out lying by the CCTV (which is not strictly relevant but is likely to have some impact on the mind of the judge) and five years is an understandable sentence.

Northlondoner, you carry on preferring anecdotes to data, and whingeing and moaning about cyclists who have the nerve to pass you. I just hope I'm not around when you're out on the road and the red mist descends.

Edited because I really don't give a stuff

Mate, you know she never fancied you

Arsenal 2 Tottenham 1 Liverpool 2 Wigan 0 Man City 2 Aston Villa 0 Newcastle 1 Swansea 0 QPR 1 Southampton 1 Reading 1 Everton 2 West Brom 1 Chelsea 2 Norwich 1 Man Utd 3 Fulham 3 Sunderland 0 West Ham 2 Stoke 1

I also tire of hearing how this or that minor setback is a "TRAGEDY!"

"I just find is all so depressing. Where will it stop? When NO-ONE but the tiny few can afford to buy? Rents are already heading that way." You can't really use house prices in East Dulwich as a basis to make generalised assertions about the housing situation (whether there may be some truth in them or not). SE22 is an expensive place by SE London standards, because people who have money, or access to credit despite the current state of the mortgage market, are willing to spend it. There are plenty of places within a few miles of SE22 where property costs half as much - literally.

Unfortunately Peter Herbert effectively is the Society of Black Lawyers, or at least he's the Chairman, and I think he was a founder. My purely personal opinion is that he is a very ho-hum lawyer who has made race relations/racial politics his main activity (nothing wrong with that) but is also a rampant self-publicist, and the whole Chelsea/Clattenburg story reeks of the latter.

I'm not sure about the usefulness of that FT link. Firstly, it's from January, and I suspect prices have changed (and in SE22 gone up) since then. Secondly, the average per square foot price may well be accurate as a mathemaical mean, but probably not useful for guide prices. I doubt you will find a 3 bed period terrace (which I would guess is the most popular property type in ED) anywhere in SE22 for the equivalent of ?380 psf.

"I fundamentally disagree with the idea that because cyclists are only putting themselves at risk, they shouldn't be criticised" I don't think that anyone has said that. The truth is that I don't really care what people think about 'cyclists'. I've entered into the debate before, on here and elsewhere, but it's not really helpful. It's just obfuscation, mealy-mouthed dissembling, and outright denial of the most basic fact i.e. if you get in a car and drive on the road, only one thing matters - are you going to drive safely? Use all your mirrors, and your indicators, all the time? Don't pass until it's properly safe, and leave plenty of space? Drive calmly, patiently, and with respect and consideration for everyone else on the road? Most importantly, don't drive as if there is some kind of valid debate out there about what is safe and what it not. Don't look at that cyclist passing you on the inside and think 'if I go past him a bit too close for comfort, it's not my fault - he shouldn't have been there'. I should add that all of this applies equally to me, because (like the vast majority of people who cycle) I also regularly drive. I can't claim to be a perfect driver, but I do my best to drive safely, and that's all I'm asking of anyone else. But when I point this out, and someone says this: "Ah, but what about cyclists.....insurance...knocked my mate's wing mirror off....went through a red light etc. etc." I can't avoid thinking that they are just a little bit more likely to go out and drive like an idiot. Edited to add: thanks for the tip, silverfox. Must be just my slow reactions, or maybe that advice was intended for occasions when you have a little more time to think.

So, exactly as predicted, the "debate" continues to go round in circles. The most revealing comment from northlondoner, ever true to type: 'why don't you wait in line?' Meanwhile, yet again I had an unwelcome encounter with the tarmac on my way home tonight, when a guy runs out into the street in front of me. I hit the brakes, he's fine, I'm over the bars and hoping there's not a car too close behind me. So forgive me for not being that interested in nice interpretations of the highway code.

"Friend, you're sounding a little deranged. Most folk don't hate cyclists. They just want a lot of them to act more responsibly. You know, stop the red light busting , trying to overtake on the inside, riding at night without lights etc. Jeez" I think frustrated rather than deranged, to be fair. Anyone with any interest in the 'cycling debate' (if such a thing exists) has heard this argument go round and round in circles a million times before. The one thing that never changes, and the most important thing, is that in an encounter between a cyclist and a motor vehicle, it is the cyclist who is at risk. If a cyclist does something stupid and puts themselves in danger, that is their individual action and they have to take the consequences. However, it has no relevance at all to debates about tax, insurance and licensing for cyclists (which are all stupid ideas, frankly), nor does it ever excuse a vehicle driver of the responsibility to drive sensibly and have specific regard to the vulnerability of other road users. And the stats clearly show that, if the aim is to stop people getting killed/seriously injured, tackling bad driving should be a higher priority than bad cycling. I agree that it would be better if all cyclists didn't jump red lights or ride at night without lights. But as a car driver neither of these things present any risk of harm to you. Get over it. BTW, overtaking on the inside is fair game, if there is enough space. You need to start actually looking in your nearside mirror - that's what it's there for.

"I think the enormous emphasis on breast is best unintentionally causes a huge burden of guilt for those mums who really want to do the best for their babies but breastfeeding doesn't work out" As always I have to caveat my comments by saying it's easy for me to say, as someone who didn't actually experience pregnancy and childbirth first hand, but I think the problem is not with emphasising the potential benefits of breastfeeding, but the wider issue of expectations placed on mums (particularly urban middle-class mums) by themselves, their peer groups and by the authors of about a million 'how to be a perfect mum' books. This goes much wider than breastfeeding and is something I was acutely aware of when I was an expectant Dad. I can't suggest an easy answer, except that people need to be sensitive to it. If it's not your job to help women with their choices about childbirth and childcare, it's probably a good idea to keep quiet unless someone asks for your opinion. If it is your job, you need to go about it in a supportive way. In that context, although everyone is free to debate the research on the benefits or otherwise of breastfeeding, I'm not sure how valuable that is in practice. The risk is that opinion gets polarised and/or people get into a state of denial. Paraphrasing what I said before, if there really is a 'breastapo' this is fundamentally an issue of good manners, rather than science.