Careful; that graph is of absolute numbers, but the number of seats up for election varies. If you win +200 seats and only 300 were up for election, clearly that's a strong result, not a weak one. That's why I normalised my graph a few pages back to percentages of overall seats.

That feels like data that means something, now.

That feels like data that means something, now.

I believe this is what they call an iron fist in a velvet glove.

an iron fist in a velvet glove.

Aw, I really wasn't trying to be mean I'm sorry, I just think that Cavey's efforts would perhaps be recognised more if he posted something different, because all his posts get musged into one long rant when I try to read them, because if the repetition.

I try not to be mean to people when I post (apart from to Myp, partly because it's Myo, and partly because I luffs him so have to hold him to a higher level of expectation than most (I mean, he always fails my expectation, but he's getting better) and he gave me away at my wedding and so is essentially my dad.

I'm with Cavey on Nigeria.

Some parts of it are nice, others less so, and despite the prospering economy, there's a lot of corruption.

Not that there's no corruption over here; just nobody seems to care when it is done by our MPs. Weird.

I ducked out of being political in this thread a fair while back now, because nothing much good seems to come of it, and no one's mind seems to get changed one iota about anything,

Welcome to the internet. You must be new here...

The Perry Beeches trust’s financial difficulties, including debts estimated by one member of staff as reaching £1.8m and rising by tens of thousands of pounds each month, have deterred potential sponsors, meaning that the trust will probably be divided up and individual schools taken over by different sponsors.

...

[CEO/executive headteacher] Nolan resigned as the trust’s chief executive at Easter after a damning report on financial mismanagement by auditors from the Education Funding Agency (EFA), the DfE’s accounting watchdog, was published in March.

Following publication of the first report, EFA investigators have returned to the schools for a second inquiry. The investigators are said to be looking into the school’s hiring practices as well as issues over admissions and exclusions, and allegations of inappropriate use of funds including political donations.

Jon Hunt, a Liberal Democrat on Birmingham city council, said he had made a formal complaint to the Electoral Commission over the school’s involvement in sponsoring Labour party events.

One event was a fundraising dinner in 2014 for Gisela Stuart, the MP for Edgbaston, with Perry Beeches academy listed as a supporter on the invitations.

The EFA’s first report found that Nolan was paid an additional salary via a company named Nexus, which then made payments to another company, Liam Nolan Ltd, run by Nolan, in contravention of academies’ financial rules and Treasury guidelines.

Nolan’s company received £160,000 between 2013 and 2015 for Nolan’s services as Perry Beeches’s chief executive, the EFA reported. The payments were in addition to his salary as executive head.

The EFA investigation of Perry Beeches uncovered irregularities including nearly £1.3m in payments without contracts to Nexus as a third-party supplier. “No evidence of a formal procurement exercise, including quotations and tendering, was available for expenditure with Nexus,” the EFA report said.

A separate report by the EFA also found that more than £2.5m in free school meal (FSM) funding could not be confirmed because records had been erased. “The trust has breached the academies financial handbook by failing to retain any form of FSM eligibility evidence for a period of six years,” the EFA concluded.

(In terms of my original post about Labour, I was more thinking of Livingstone's implosion - he is a major policy-making figure with gravitas, not x% or whatever - and Corbyn's very slow response to correct IMO)

Definitely an interesting read.

I think it is stretching a point to one of ridiculousness. When I'm swinging over a pit with a whip then double jumping to grab the amulet of whatnot, in a game, I'm doing it for fun, not thinuking about the cultural resonance if such acts. It's highly unlikely that a game in which a young woman fights dinosaurs with 2 repeating pistols or zooms around Venice (in a highly disappointing follow up) in a motor launch, there's a higher purposeful narrative of "put it back where it belongs". The grauniad here is trying to hang an argument on a very thin nail. In CoD MW2 when I am mowing down the Chinese soldiers, it isn't out of racism, or shooting the passenger line in an airport terminal, it isn't out of annoyance that I am asked if I pack my own bag. It's a game. If you want to push it and call it art; then it is that and the Chinese had to die as did the airport people because it devices and motivations.

There's a huge over-think going on but one that is only one dimensional.

Umm, all right then.

but written by a 16 year old who probably dots their i's with hearts.

It's OK. Not really directed at you,

And replace him with someone who doesn't want to see the human race wiped out by a meteor too. That'd be nice.

He wants to see us wiped out by a meteor...?

He wants to see us wiped out by a meteor...?

Slightly?

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Patient care could start to suffer after hospitals and other NHS trusts in England overspent by a record £2.45bn last year, experts are warning. The unprecedented deficit for 2015-16 - triple what was recorded the year before - is largely a result of hospitals busting their budgets. They will now need to use extra money they are being given this year to bail themselves out.

Might just be coincidence, but the Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt was appointed as Health Secretary in September 2012.

I think most people are probably agreed that we would have been better off with Ron Jeremy than the Rt Hon Jeremy.