Agreed. As I said, I’m not defending the police.

what the actual fuck were these officers thinking?

This is a fair question, but it does have an answer: people often lie to the police about being injured in order to try and get out of restraints. It was too dark for the police to see the chest wound. Novak had a visible, but not serious, facial wound, though, and the police seem to have assumed this was the injury he was referring to.

Additionally, in this case, the actual perpetrator’s brother was the one who’d called the police. It is very unusual for a murderer or an accomplice to call the police (my understanding is we still don’t actually know why the killer’s brother did this). The police believed they were attending a one-sided assault. When they arrived, two ‘witnesses’, including the person who’d called the police, pointed out Novak as the ‘perpetrator’, corroborating one another’s stories. The police didn’t realise they were lying until too late.

I am not excusing any of the above. The police routinely treat suspects poorly and that’s what happened here. However, they did have good reason to believe Novak had committed a crime, and that belief had nothing to do with anyone’s race.

I hope she smashes them.

Yeah. Unfortunately it is a long time when you’re bleeding to death. It’s possible he’d have died even with immediate first aid because you really don’t have that long once you’re bleeding from a major artery.

I think this shows the police need to change their practice when it comes to how they treat suspects, though, especially those under restraint.

How long did it take them to realise that he was injured?

He was handcuffed for about one minute before the police began CPR, according to the judge.

A long time

From the sentencing remarks as quoted in the FT:

[Novak] was handcuffed for about a minute before his condition further deteriorated and the arresting officer began CPR.

I wouldn’t jump to assume race is the first thing the police go to.

This is correct: it wasn’t the false racist slur that made the police ignore Novak, it was the fact that the murderer had a witness to back up his line that he was attacked.

Unfortunately, people who are handcuffed often fake injury or distress in order to get the police to free them so that they can then either escape or attack somebody. Tragically, the officers here wrongly believed that’s what Novak was doing. He had a visible minor injury and they assumed that’s what he was referring to, and that such a minor injury wasn’t something for them to worry about. Possibly the police should change their procedures in order to properly medically assess detainees who claim to be injured.

Well, I actually agree with you, but actually the first quote was from The Times and the second quote was from Labour MP David Taylor.

I just thought it was fair to extrapolate that the reasons the government banned him were the same as those who publicly called for the ban, not separate reasons that no one who actually supports the decision has cited.

Isn’t it nicer when we all get along?

I actually agree with Novara that Piker shouldn’t be barred from entering the UK but this headline is very misleading.

The UK government has said the ban is because of his use of ‘“antisemitic tropes, such as the claim that Israel controls America” and comments about grooming gangs he made on Piers Morgan’s YouTube show’ and because of his support of a ‘proscribed terror group’ (i.e., Hamas). Nothing to do with his support of Palestine (I don’t think that Hamas represents Palestinians any more than I think that Putin’s party represents Russians).

Sheep rustling is such an old-school crime. It’s like being a train robber or a highwayman.

What if they’re rubbish?

Interesting that The Canary is now publishing this type of nonsense about the Greens. I always suspected they were more committed to ragebait than to any specific politics. This is evidence in favour of that thesis.

if you live somewhere with shit roads you kinda need the suspension travel and clearance

That’s a fine point, but this is /c/London. I’ve been on roads in Brazil where a 4x4 would’ve been great, if not 100% necessary. Not a problem in Tower Hamlets, though!

City Hall Conservatives […] said Vision Zero plan was about the mayor “carrying out [Sadiq Khan’]s anti-car agenda, rather than trying to keep Londoners safe”.

This is so close to being right. It is part of Khan’s anti-car agenda, but his anti-car agenda is the best thing about his time as mayor and key to the reason he’s been elected three times!

The fact is when you look at stats like this:

A spokesperson for the mayor said it was “startling” that SUVs were “77% more likely to kill a child if involved in a collision” [my emphasis]

– it’s obvious that anyone in favour of allowing unrestricted 4x4s in cities is at this point functionally part of a death cult. This is before you get anywhere near the climate change argument. These stupid, pointless cars just kill people.

All together, now:

I guess well done for not doing that?

Agreed, I’ve also seen and heard a lot of this attitude, going back decades now.

In addition, I think that Islamophobia is very widespread in the UK, including among ethnic minority groups. Both white and non-white Islamophobes see anti-immigrant polices as partly or primarily a way to persecute Muslims and prevent more of them coming to the UK.

As I say, the ‘logic’ is roughly what you suggest and if the facts were what you state (and Labour believe), their strategy could make sense. But they’re dead wrong on the facts! The upshot of this is, that their current bad strategy and tactics are not inevitable, which is why there’s still hope for the party.

It feels to me like you’re assuming that there are only two possible strategies (paraphrasing slightly, either ‘be racist’ or ‘rejoin the EU’), but there’s a range of possibilites between those two - as well as the possibility of rejecting that framing altogether. Even in very Brexity areas with Labour MPs, Labour’s voters in those areas were less likely to vote for Brexit than the general population in those areas.

As for what Labour are thinking, I’m afraid they’re just not being that rational about it. They (the leadership and the advisers to whom they choose to listen) have an emotional attachment to a mostly imaginary type of Labour voter and to a mostly imaginary historic Labour party which appealed to that voter.