成人论坛

Hi Newsnight

Huge response to last night traffic lights story, question for you how do you collate the information sent to you in these blogs?

my idea, half joking, stop all road repairs, let nature take the roads back, trees will sprout in time and we can get used to not using them or using ie horse transport,

serious question to Defra, have they taken proactive measures such as opening the sluice gates to lower river levels, or did they do this when they received the long range weather reports?

best wishes
Bob

This terror story sounds interesting- newsnight at its best!

A very convenient story just after the acquittal of Derek Pasquill for breaching the Official Secrets Act who told us that Tony Blair ignored the intelligence services' warnings that invading Iraq would foment terrorist sympathisers.

The "al-Qaeda in Britain" group's aims (if such a group really exists) are for the ending of the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and nothing to do with "our way of life" or "hating our freedom".

She's correct when she identifies British foreign policy as a major source of extremism. The question remains: "will the policy makers listen"?

Dear Newsnight,

When did the royal charter, and all those license payers, give the 成人论坛 permission to act as an activist polemical media-pressure group.

That's about cotton.

Re: the UK branch of Al-quaida, a website, really, just really.!!!

Damian or Day today......

Even the northern rock one I bet will miss some pertinent details.

The only real story seems to be the easter-european doctors, a real story that should enter the mainstream debate, but that's not your first priority in the face os "terrorism!"

Best regards,

Quevoni

You get the impression that the 成人论坛 has an organised bias agenda against GPs. Otherwise how could one watch the program involving the Polish Doctor, agree that a Doctor should not work while tired, but use that as an excuse to demand UK GPs to have 24 hours responsibility for their patients?
If any conclusion could be drawn from the program at all, it is that the push to extend the hours GPs work with patients could be detrimental to patient care. But the 成人论坛 thinks Polish Doctors get tired but not UK Doctors.

The discussion on web sites
were enlightened by Sajjan Gohal
whose Arabic knowledge credentials
and understanding of Arabic expression remain unconvincing and unclear. Thus instead of analyzing contents from a specific site under discussion we get a broad brush overview of what such sites imply.

One way to deal with the issue of the hours worked by the commuting
doctors is through tightening up
the EU European Working Directive
rules as they apply to the NHS in
Britain. Unfortunately, however, it
has been the policy of governments
in Britain to try to dilute these
rules which as I remember have an
opt-out in respect of doctors? It's
not surely beyond the wit of man to
now stipulate that this is tweaked
to take account of double-shifts in
more than one EU member state as well as time taken travelling to
work. The relevant UK Minister at
DWP is Peter Hain MP who claims to
understand this problem intimately
but may be too preoccupied to act?

So 成人论坛 is trying to play its part in bringing down the NHS.
Well the Labour came up with the idea that the nurses can replace doctors and now we have thousands of nurse practitioners all over the country trying to prove that they are worth every penny of the billions of pounds spent on them. Later the health ministry thought that why can't they allow the pharmacist to start seeing patients and here we have pharmacists who are trying to be doctors.
I am quite unsure why the government has still not abolished the medical school system in the UK. In future one should be able to diagnose themselves through the internet and then prescribe for themselves the most appropriate medication hence it will eliminate the issue of litigation etc, and then the trained pharmacist will dispense them the chosen drug and off they go.
Really we must get rid of our GPs by giving them an early retirement. If at any stage we regret and find out that we do need a GP then Poland is not far away anyway.

Hello.

Re: Northern Rock.

What's annoyed me about this story is that no one in
the mainstream media has tried to explain the complexities (or simplicities) to the un-knowing public, and with the help of certain politicians they've lazily tried to characterise it as one of greed, incompetence, malfeasance, etc (and inevitability).

Newsnight has been at it's best when it does the road less travelled; we get a lot more light and
insight.

It's my view, that if even at this late stage, tonight's programme presented the case of either brown (by creating the structure/responsibility division) or mervyn king failing in their duty as lender of last resort (without punitive interest rates), this wouldn't be happening.

Do you remember when Huntington Life Sciences lost access to banking facilities due to the intimidation by animal-rights activists and gutless clearing banks, the BOE did its job then by acting as banker of last resort; just the same as when massive historical levels of
cash was injected post sept' 11th 2001 to maintain liquidity and tell the markets that no matter how 'tight'/panicked they wanted to become, the money was just waiting [ergo no point in panicking].

This is a story of the Bank of England's failure, and not only for the effects of that on Northern Rock, but the whole economy -if the big clearing banks knew that while they gradually cleared up their balance sheets, the BOE would continue to support general lending without punitive interest rates, do you think they'd all have, with almost zero-tolerance, have yanked almost all non-AAA lending.

There's going to be a whole lot of decent potentially great growing businesses up and down this country that are going to fail in this climate, just like Northern Rock is being directed to, due to a lack of capital access.

Simple people talk about debt, 拢60bn, equal to 2x the defence budget, 拢2k each citizen, but that's a mere fraction of the trade done on the LSE on a bad day; not to mention liability versus actually lent.
And originally, Robert peston (+ tabloids) hyped the story based on NR having had the foresight to expect that some of the markets it used would be likely to tighten, and so prudently, pre-emptively asked for permission that IF the capital (capital it uses to lend/to customers, that provide profit) were needed, would it be available.

Northern Rock simply ran into the same problem that the country faced with the oil blockades, but did anyone blame the oil companies, or tesco's, et al at the time, NR simply ran a damn tight ship, highly
efficient.

"Hedge-funds, cold, vultures", in normal circumstances I might agree, but in this case they're the oddest of people, [RAB capital partners and SRM Global] they actually believe an existing business with 拢100bn in assets, 100's of branches, last year a 20%-ish market-share, and employing lots of people, can actually continue as an independent business, if only everyone didn't give up, expect failure and have written nationalisation as unstoppable.
The "sharks" or "vultures" in this case, might actually be branson, olivant, vincent cable and anyone else that rather than see the govt./boe providing cheap short-term lending, would be happy to see such a businesses failure.

I know that If tonights programme spoke with optimism, sentimentality of the jobs, and underlying good business (a victim of current very short-term circumstance) and put the onus on boe/brown, failure (admin./nationalisation) isn't an inevitability.

Before the end of the year, the financial markets will start to see the end of the tunnel, the clouds clearing, results will have been kitchen sinked before the 1st half is out, china, russia and india are going at full-speed.

The "funny" thing is that I'm not a stake-holder in anyway in Northern Rock, I just seem to have a thing for detail and fairness in the face of not hearing them much over the long life of a story!

Best Wishes,

QUEVONI

PS.
It would be good to get a reply to this from Newsnight.

Why can't doctors work a shift system like thousands of other workers? There is no need for them to work more than an 9 hour shift with break times.
Get a 3 shift continental shift system organised.
Or is that beneath their dignity?

I would like to answer STAN who questions why Doctors don't work 9-hour shifts. In fact most Doctors in hospitals do work shifts that is how A&Es are kept open 24/7. If the question was about GPs working 9-hour shifts then there is a problem. First of all most illnessness are not emergencies. There is A&E for true emergencies. GPs' job is mostly to treat illnesses before they become emergencies so this can be done day time.
Secondly, most GPs work in small groups with the average of about 3 Doctors in a group. Just how can we expect them to work 24/7? If you want to see your GP 24/7 I am sorry but it is not possible.
Besides, working 9-hour shifts for a week is more than the hours allowed under the European Working Hours Directive anyway, but a typical GP works for 10.5 hours a day.
I think there are a lot of expectations from Doctors which are not possible to satisfy and I wish the media and 成人论坛 would take a neutral approach rather than blaming GPs for society's woes.

Let me get this straight:

You have an item that is effectively going to get a Polish doctor sacked for working (shock horror!) long hours. Following on from your scandalous campaign last year to get translation services removed from immigrant workers, this seems to be yet another petty 'campaign' by Newsnight against foreign workers.

Secondly, you have a second campaign item, in which Newsnight, it seems, has successfully managed to get two shops - with more to follow - to ban products from Uzbekhistan. Well done. I hope you're proud of yourselves. To translate: in this campaign, you have undoubtedly lost hundreds of families an income. However, I'm sure that you can content yourselves with some tickbox that shows that you have managed to be a really influential on politics. (Unfortunately, it's a completely reactionary influence)

This is NOT your role. Exposing bad pay/ child exploitation is one thing. Campaigning - especially with the express purpose to get people sacked - is reprehensible.

The smugness with which the 成人论坛 and Newsnight in particular is engaged in this citizen-journalism-in-reverse is doubly hard to take. Watching Jeremy Paxman feed lines to his smug interviewee - two joint campaigners congratulating each other on their 'success' - was the final straw.

Bring back the news.

Austin Williams

Ref: 13
Thankyou for the explanation Tom. I understand your reply.
Stan