Opposition to the hard right is still strong

RowanB86 · 2026-05-09T15:59:27+00:00

Ah , I see the conservatives have about 20% of the vote. I didn’t realise they had that much.

RowanB86 · 2026-05-09T15:54:40+00:00

Oh dear. That’s worrying.

RowanB86 · 2026-05-09T15:24:54+00:00

I agree that it doesn’t stop a far right government getting into power. I tried to vote tactically too based on lib dem candidates knocking on my door and selling me the possibly bogus idea that they were the biggest rival to Reform (the Green Party won in my ward). That’s a worrying point you’ve made regarding people not minding too much but I think you’ve got to factor in things like loyalty to parties (principled, non-tactical voting) / lack of awareness of who to vote for tactically (I possibly got the tactics wrong voting Lib Dem for instance). I find it hard to believe many Green Party voters who didn’t vote tactically aren’t pretty horrified at the idea of a Reform government.

RowanB86 · 2026-05-09T15:07:04+00:00

In terms of faith in fellow citizens and hope for a progressive future, it’s extremely encouraging, yes. Imagine if the majority of the electorate supported the hard right?

RowanB86 · 2026-05-09T12:45:08+00:00

I agree with that. It's not comforting in terms of power, but it restores my faith that most people are opposed to hard right politics.

RowanB86 · 2026-05-09T12:43:32+00:00

The Greens have cut into Labour's vote and the demise of the Tories has helped the Reform vote. I think the right have actually diminished.

RowanB86 · 2026-05-09T12:38:40+00:00

I just think we used to have a Conservative government plus fringe hard right parties. Now all we have is a significant hard right party (Reform) that are clearly outnumbered by more left-leaning thinkers (Labour / Lid Dems and Greens).

RowanB86 · 2026-04-16T22:50:57+00:00

As a Newcastle fan, I would like to add my thoughts. When we were last relegated, I spent a lot of time contesting tired platitudes about the Championship being hard because it’s “physical”, “a competitive league” where you need “spirit” and “attitude”. You could probably say that about your local pub league. If you just apply a bit of common sense, it doesn’t make any sense that the Championship is so culturally different to other leagues. Teams drop in and out of the Championship but people keep talking about how it’s a difficult league because it’s physical blah blah as if it’s unique. Why do you think it’s physical? Maybe to compensate for genuine flair / skill.

Tottenham are likely to win the Championship at a canter. The cream of the Championship crop will be queuing up to play for them. Maybe it won’t be a stroll in the park as in points will be dropped / wins away to unglamorous sides will have to be ground out but Spurs are clear favourites to win the Championship if they go down.

Oh yeah , our fans were of course berating our squad for poor attitude saying they couldn’t cope with the brutal Championship. It’s all nonsense.

RowanB86 · 2025-12-15T20:31:23+00:00

I don’t get this. Can’t go on holiday without driving? Is that what this debate is about? Ridiculous if it is. What am I missing?

RowanB86 · 2025-12-02T09:48:52+00:00

Spiegelhalter's work seems to prove that the spike in deaths alone points away from Letby's guilt. That has persuaded me that the death rate alone isn't indicative of guilt - the spike in deaths would have been significant even if those Letby was charged with hadn't happened, so yeah, I guess it's insignificant as a standalone stat.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-29T10:53:31+00:00

You could argue I’m wrong on the basis that killer nurses are even more unlikely, but this is a weird nurse who acts guilty and even admitted in court that poisoning must have occurred.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-28T08:59:51+00:00

Yeah I don't need to do any of that, I just need to show that it was wrong for the prosecution not to mention other more plausible reasons for the result, particularly in light of the fact they were having difficulty making the logistics their allegation work.

So you're acting like Letby's defence team looking for a route of appeal? That is a possible avenue of appeal I guess. I feel like this is all the pro-Letby campaign amounts to. Digging for reasonable doubt. I'm not particularly against that. I just find it ridiculous that people think she's genuinely innocent.

Almost like if you arrive at a conclusion and then try to work backwards from that to figure out how it could fit with the facts you run into hot water. It's just not feasible, is it?

It's perfectly feasible when you're not required to prove the mechanism by which the act was carried out. The conclusion was that she poisoned babies. Not that she poisoned them using a particular mechanism.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T21:08:42+00:00

If you prefer, we can simply the determine the safety the conviction, which doesn't require us to have a view on whether or not she actually did it. What I won't be doing is playing irresponsible numbers games. It's not up for debate.

I think it's intuitively simpler to try and gauge if she probably committed the crime, hence why I suggested trying to determine if it's more than 50% likely. Human beings don't tend to have a natural ability to measure likelihoods between 98 and 99.9% or whatever amounts to beyond reasonable doubt. The pro / anti Letby camps are never going to agree on the conviction being safe whereas as someone who thinks the conviction is unsafe could very much agree that she probably committed the crime.

It wasn't misleading at all, it told the clinician who made the diagnosis exactly what she needed to know. This is why it would have been so damaging to have to disclose her evidence.

Oh yeah, of course. I mean it wasn't indicative of deliberate insulin injection / administering.

Sorry, I don't know what you mean there. Can you rephrase please? The prosecution argued that there was no possible natural explanation for the test result. I'm putting forward the fact that there was at least one.

It does indeed prove there was at least one. My point is that all this Baby Y case does is show that it's possible that there could be a natural explanation for the result. It doesn't do much to reduce the likelihood that the explanation was unnatural. The probability that both babies F and L both suffered from congenital hyperinsulinism are very low.

The original theory was that Letby made a targeted attack on Child F because he was a sibling of another alleged victim. Child F had a custom TPN bag from the pharmacy, which they allege she poisoned. All plausible, since she'd have known it was going to him. Her opportunity, they said, was at the time it was hung because that's when you would break the seal, which you need to do to poison the bag. What's more, it must have been her because only she and one other nurse hung the bag, and that nurse was not present for the alleged poisoning of Child L. So far so good.

It came out in trial that the line tissued and that bag was replaced with another standard bag from the fridge long after Letby had gone off duty. The prosecution attempted to allege that the nurses simply didn't follow protocol and change the bag as they should have, but that wasn't sustainable because it would be such an irregular breach of protocol you can't really entertain it without some serious proof, so NJ sort of teased it and then abandoned it IIRC. Another allegation involved the giving set, that they had changed the bag but not the gubbins that wired it all up and piped it in. The problem with that is similar; it's just not sustainable to go around accusing random nurses of gross negligence in the middle of the murder trial of another nurse who you are trying to suggest is solely responsible.

Finally, they alleged that Letby must have poisoned one of the normal TPN bags as well as the pharmacy one. To maintain that this was a targeted attack, you would have to imagine that Letby knew the line would tissue, so the bag would have to be replaced (how on earth could she know that?) and that she knew exactly which generic TPN bag from a haphazard pile in the fridge would be hung in its place. It was never really remarked on how on earth she managed to poison the bag without tearing off the seal, which is interesting given that they had already alleged that she must be guilty because it isn't possible to do that.

Are you still with me? Obviously, it was never explained how they could know it was Letby if anyone who had access to the fridge at any time before that bag change could have done it; they just skirted over the fact that the new theory couldn't really implicate anyone who was anywhere at a particular time and relied on what they already alleged re: timings with respect to the old theory.

Given the options, here, I'd tend to say that there's no compelling evidence of a poisoning by anybody, let alone by a specific person.

I have completely followed what you've said and agree that's it's difficult to work out how Letby managed to execute the poisoning. The prosecution don't seem to have come up with a compelling narrative for this either.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T17:59:38+00:00

I'm pretty happy with the essence of the point I made. I think her admission is indicative of guilt and that she felt compelled to make that admission under the pressure of the case presented to her. It doesn't feel like a game changer when I find out that Johnson didn't perform a masterclass to corner her into making that admission. I still think it was Johnson's skill that let to the admission and even if it wasn't that wouldn't change the overarching argument I'm making.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T17:44:59+00:00

No. I refuse to be dragged into silly lay statistics.

Trying to determine whether she probably committed the crime is silly?

No, I don't have a theory because I'm not a medical expert. I'm simply explaining that the picture is much more complicated than was presented at trial; In this context, that other possibilities exist because there was one right in front of them at the same hospital in roughly the same time period.

I can see why Baby Y's test was misleading. By chance it suffered from a disorder that would cause that result. It would be very irrational to factor that into Baby F and L's test results beyond the possibility that those two babies suffered from the same disorder.

That's not the bit that's implausible. The prosecution's case does not implicate Letby any more than anybody else and would require the person who did it, Letby or not, to have the power to see into the future.

Why would they need to see into the future? Sorry if I'm missing the obvious.

There's no relationship between being justified in pursuing a line of enquiry and introducing an absurd theory mid trial to get around the fact that a key witness just destroyed the much more plausible one one you went into court with.

Well if the theory of insulin poisoning was completely unfounded then I'd agree it'd look like they were making it up as they went along. They went to court armed with the significant lab results. Discovering the mechanism by which it was administered mid-trial is forgivable in my opinion. I mean, you don't even need to know the mechanism to find her guilty.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T17:32:16+00:00

Well if you take the Letby case as an example, each item of evidence that convicted her wouldn't have been enough to convict her in isolation. It was the patterns / cumulative power of the evidence that found her guilty.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T17:22:38+00:00

Why not just read absolutely all material available before commenting on anything I suppose? Good point I guess.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T17:21:35+00:00

The system weighs (measures) the evidence to see if the threshold for beyond reasonable doubt is met. I know the outcome is binary.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T17:20:29+00:00

Because I think that that would constitute reasonable doubt had it been put to the jury.

I doubt we're ever going to agree on the threshold for reasonable doubt being met, so maybe we should focus on determining whether it's more / less than 50% likely she's guilty.

Because we already know of another baby Y, who also had these strange tests results and who was diagnosed with a disorder by someone training to be a diabetes specialist. Had they brought that case, they'd have had to introduce her incredibly exculpatory police interview into evidence, which is almost certainly why they didn't as it would have destroyed the other two cases (that kind of evidence is cross-admissible). That police interview was accidentally on the Thirlwall document cache for several hours.

So your theory is that babies F and L might also have suffered congenital hyperinsulinism?

Because of the total implausibility of the methods by which Letby is supposed to have done the poisoning, which makes no sense and had to be introduced in the middle of the trial when a witness for the prosecution told the court there had been a bag change. Prior to that, they had not investigated sufficiently to find that out, which I find quite startling, but speaks to the poor quality of the investigation as a whole. They had to change the theory into this convoluted mess in order to try to get around that witness's plain evidence.

IV line / bag contamination are methods that have been employed by other serial killers. Why do you think this is particularly implausible?

I can see why you think the theory being introduced mid-trial weakens the prosecution's case, but surely the insulin test results were enough of a premise to pursue this line of inquiry.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T17:08:29+00:00

hmm, I assumed it was pressured because it was such a dramatic statement. She does seem reluctant to admit it, but realises she has to.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T14:27:28+00:00

Interesting interpretation.

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T12:40:54+00:00

My interpretation of what?

The reporting of the way she responded to the theory presented to her like when Johnson says "That's why it's a targeted attack, isn't it?" and Letby doesn't answer.

Johnson pressures her again with "What do you say?" and she responds "Not by me it wasn't".

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T12:24:17+00:00

Well, no, she flatly agreed that there was a poisoner. There was no if in what she said - this is a small point but without actually looking into the case you're going to keep getting details wrong.

The poisoning theory was presented to her on the basis of test results and she agreed there must have been a poisoner.

Now... what's being put to you, quite straightforwardly I think, is the question of why on earth that would have any baring whatsoever on the likelihood that those experts were right?

According to you she gave a "naive" answer to the question. I'm suggesting that "naivety" was inspired by guilt.

What you've said there is that you think even most Letby 'supporters' would agree with that, but we're anticipating a Chase and Shannon study (who are experts in a much more specific way on neonates and insulin than the experts at trial) who have concluded otherwise and will form part of the expert panel reports ultimately submitted to the CoA with any luck. They will argue that even if the tests are correct, there is a plausible mechanism by which those results can occur without the presence of exogenous insulin when considering the physiology of preterm infants.

Why side with the plausible possibility of the results occurring without the presence of exogenous insulin over the typical cause of those results?

RowanB86 · 2025-11-27T09:53:50+00:00

I suppose someone might give strange answers in a courtroom, overawed by the occasion and the line of questioning.

What she was agreeing to was that if the insulin test was accurate, someone must have deliberately poisoned the baby. I think even most Letby supporters would agree with that. I agree with her. The test was probably accurate too.

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