Blah Blah

I think the reality now is that this virus is going to spread globally. How much it can be contained from its worst impacts is the big unknown. Some people also carry the virus and pass it on but never show any symptoms. Hard to safeguard against that.

Even if a mental health issue is identified at school, it would still be referred to an outside agency for treatment.

I think you are not understanding the service these types of centers offer. The people staffing will be qualified health and youth service professionals. You can't treat all young people as though they are likely to misbehave in some way.

You live in a dense urban area John. There is always going to be antisocial behaviour around bars and pubs. Those bars and pubs have been there for a long time. Not saying you should have to put up with it, but expecting peace and quiet around that kind of sector is just not realistic. And having already insulted young people with low level mental health problems, you now conflate them with 'gangs'? Really?

And who is leaving the main doors to your flats open? Sounds as though you have more of an issue with other residents than anything going on outside. And the presumption that any young person going to the center would just walk into your building is quite frankly offensive. Anyone up to no good can already do that if the door is left open.

So it is not a young offenders center that is being opened there, but a center to help young people with mental health services. The two are entirely different things. The latter absolutely should be welcomed.

JohnL, Rye Lane IS a retail area. The clue is in that it is full of shops, bars and other retail space. Yes the premises in question might be at the bottom end of that space, but nonetheless, it is still part of Rye Lane. And FYI Rye Lane has been a retail area for at least 100 years. You might also be surprised to find that plenty of vulnerable people already do live around you. You even back onto a council estate (shock horror) where some teenage offenders actually live. No surprise either that you complain about a snooker hall/ club that has also been there for a longer time than you. And you might also be surprised to find that most shop chains have security doormen. You really must get out more.

It is more likely to be a service center for low level offenders to support them into a more constructive direction. Rye Lane is a retail area and these low level offenders probably already go there, for shopping if nothing else. So let me be the one to go there. Stop being a NIMBY Lcoe2. Think this through in a sensible way. Edited to add, nothing on either the planning OR licensing registers. Given the existing licenses are for retail space, there is nothing as yet that indicates any change of use.

Good to see differences of opinion being debated civilly no matter what kind of english expresses them :D

There is a shortage of mental health wards and bed with beds in the private sector being used at greater expense to the NHS. The whole system of mental health provision needs an overhaul, and not just in terms of treatment, but also in terms of prevention. A lot more could be done to reduce stress for example, which is why Southwark's policy around giving free fitness center access to those with health conditions (including mental health) on GP referral is a good investment. But for treatment to be effective, it has to be long term and at the moment, everything is rationed in a way that it can be argued is ineffective. When it comes to this man, there is an issue around at which point is an underlying condition treatable in the community, and at what point does a condition become a threat to other people or the patient themself? This is often a hard one to call. Antisocial behaviour that is verbal, isn't restricted to those with mental health conditions after all. Assaulting someone by throwing coffee in their face won't always lead to a custodial sentence either. What we do not know is what care and/ or treatment plan this man is currently under (he is almost certainly likely to be already known to local mental health teams), nor what view is taken of the alleged physical assaults (the hot coffee and pushing). It sounds to me as though some day to day supervision is needed to assess his general behaviour.

This is precisely why I think it will be rethought Keano, as the obvious problems emerge in practise. Priti has a track record of poor understanding of most of the things she expresses views on, so I take her comments with a pinch of salt. She also has poor judgement and it is only a matter of time before she messes up, as she did when she unofficially met Isreali officials.

Just back on the unemployed taking up those low skilled jobs that immigrants will no longer fill. Priti seems to forget that those in receipt of UC (and not sick or disabled) are already required to apply for those jobs if they live near to them. But where are the hoards of unemployed living around farms to go and pick lettuces for min wage? The full employment claim is also a red herring as a person only has to be doing one hour of work a week to be classed as employed by government figures. Zero hours contracts and a million plus full time workers in need of top up benefits to meet basic living costs is the real story behind those figures. The figure for long term unemployed has consistently sat at around 240k ish. Using the term 'economically inactive' may indeed signal a move to force those beyond the category of 'able bodied' unemployed into jobs, although quite how they intend to manage this is going to be another matter. Employers don't want unsuitable people foisted onto them either.

The Greeks want their Marbles back as part of any deal apparently. Quite fitting as we seem to have lost ours ;)

And many more elderly/ or mobility challenged people do not have the means to own a car. Free parking is not a right. I totally understand there are issues around genuinely disabled people failing to get BB's, and that seems to be the real issue here. I think more people would have sympathy with something being done to address that, than keeping parking free for everyone.

Councils are strapped for cash after years of central funding cuts. Adult social care is a more pressing issue than parking in parks surrounded by free on street parking and good transport links. It is a question of priorities and has nothing to do with pitching communities against each other ffs.

She clearly was very distressed and vulnerable. Every suicide is a tragedy and the immediate question is always one of whether anything could have been done to help her. Her friends and family especially will wrestle with that for a long time. I suspect that she had been battling with depression for some time, and that the decision to pursue with the assault charge was the final tipping point. It will be a complex mix of things that took her to this very tragic place though. Very sad. She had everything to live for in reality.

Most parks don't have car parking within them. It is not the council's fault if the government have made PIP and disability assessments harder to pass. The fact still remains that BB holders can park for free. I don't think charging everyone else is unreasonable, and no, I don't say that because I hate cars either.

Having a car is a luxury. It is not a divine right to park it anywhere you choose. Genuinely disabled people will have blue badges and be exempt. Given the cost of insurance, MOT, petrol and all the other associated costs of owning a car, parking charges are par for the course.

Geez, Savid Javid resigns after being told he had to get rid of all of his advisors if he wanted to keep his job!

Is Boris planning to stuff his cabinet with those that would support a no deal scenario if it comes to that?

The AG has gone too. It is who those sacked are replaced with that will signal the direction. A new cabinet full of yes people would be my guess.

War may have been the perfect scenario for a pandemic to spread in the past because it was the one time in which there was mass migration of people. That is not the case to day where millions of people travel across continents every day. We also have other things in play now, like better understanding of pandemic spread, better medical technology to fight infection and better protocols for contagion. Ebola is a case in point. Very deadly and quickly spread but defeated in the end by education, process and medical knowledge. More than that, we now have an army of experts constantly scanning the globe for the first signs of any new virus. None of this existed when Spanish Flu took hold.

The real issue with any new virus is mutation. What previous pandemics have taught us is that it is often not the first wave that does the worst damage, but the second wave after the virus learns how to do what it lives to do, better.

The cost of treating obesity related medical conditions far outweighs any concerns we should have for the food industry. In an ideal world, education would be enough to make us all eat responsibly. But we have a food industry that stuffs our supermarkets and high streets with processed food that leaves us hungry (helping us to overeat) and turns us all into sugar and processed fat addicts. And that is before we get onto the methods used to provide cheap meat. It completely baffles me, that when we know so much about nutrition and the body, that we continue to do nothing about so much bad food.

Plus we already do trade with the whole world. So this is not about freedom to trade, but how the terms of trade are arrived at - i.e. who owns the trade agreement. We currently enjoy the benefits of a huge trade deficit (for them) with the US. That will be the first thing to be cancelled out by the US in any trade negotiations. For me, the issue is how to get some leave voters to stop trotting out the same factually incorrect statements parrot fashion, fed to them by the likes of Mogg and Farage. The 'we can now trade with the whole world' being a case in point, when we already do that.