My understanding is that Joanna Cherry’s KC is an ‘earned’ one, while Suella Braverman’s is essentially a courtesy for being appointed Attorney General. I think @the_borderer was referring to the former.
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I made the same error as @Dire, then realised and deleted my screed pointing out Bravermann’s dubious accomplishments as a lawyer.
I will still quibble with the argument that being a KC means you lie well in court.
Barristers who make KC on merit don’t tend to lie in court: a) it’s unethical and b) if you’re any good you don’t need to.
Your clients may be lying through their teeth but as long as they’re not stupid enough to force you to acknowledge that (points at e.g. Trump and Musk), that’s their problem.
Also even “earned” KCs don’t necessarily tell you anything about the quality of the barrister.
I mean most KCs will be “good” barristers but that can mean various things for different barristers, fields of law and from client to client.
Also lots of very good barristers don’t seek to become KC. It’s a very double-edged sword in many ways.
On the one hand you can charge much more. On the other hand, you are also expected to charge much more and to leave the routine bread and butter work to more “junior” barristers.
So you have to weigh up whether the benefit in prestige and higher charge-out rates is worth the potentially significantly reduced opportunities.
And since most barristers live pretty hand to mouth existences (admittedly very nice middle income hand to mouth existences), it can be a big mistake for many.
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A vanity project that is going nowhere fast.
If the delay is Manchester–Crewe and Birmingham–Crewe, doesn’t that mean Birmingham–Manchester?
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Yep. Just yesterday Sunak referred to Starmer (a human rights lawyer by trade) as “another lefty lawyer standing in the way” on immigration.
They’re manufacturing consent for scrapping the HRA, which encodes the ECHR into British law, and replacing it with the British Bill of Rights.
At best the new bill is going to get as close as possible to withdrawing from the ECHR without actually doing it. They’ll likely drag the whole issue into an endless mire, where one side argues that it’s not compatible with the ECHR and the other side argues that it is, until the public and the media get bored of having polarised, non-factual opinions about it and move on.
At worst they’re going to withdraw from the ECHR entirely, and I think they will if they can. I suspect the section 35 order against Scotland’s Gender Recognition Act is testing the waters for the full frontal assault on devolution that withdrawing from the ECHR would require. Joanna Cherry has, of course, been a useful idiot in that regard.
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And they’ve pissed off the Civil Service, especially the union for senior CS, where the party sent an email signed by Braverman blaming Labour, lefty lawyers and the CS.
Their defence so far is that she didn’t see it, which is no excuse - someone should be sacked if they’re signing a minister’s name to things they’ve not seen.
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HS2 isn’t a vanity project, but it is badly managed.
The UK badly needs high-speed rail, and really should have started building out a real network at least 30 years ago. There’s currently a real bottleneck of capacity on the WCML, and if we’re going to expand rail freight (which we absolutely must for environmental reasons) then we need the expansion of passenger capacity that High Speed rail will bring.
Cutting back and delaying AS2 is a huge false economy, because its value is in serving more destinations and stretching the project out will ultimately cost more, and delay the benefits being realised.
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Nearly Marcus Rashford levels of owning the Conservatives.
Shame on them.
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… and of course the media coverage is all about the Tory pearl-clutching and we have to spend twenty minutes on Google to find out what he actually said 
oh dear what about his career
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So of course, Gary Lineker said nothing of the sort. He said that the language currently being used about refugees was reminiscent of 1930s Germany. That’s a far more nuanced statement than implied by the coverage. He’s saying that we’re in danger of creating a similar environment of dehumanisation to that of 1930s Germany.
What’s truly scary, and very much worthy of comparison to fascism, is taking the lie, that he’s compared the tories to the nazis, and repeating that lie over and over again until it becomes the truth in the public mind. What was it Goebbels said about lies and repetition?
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Mordaunt’s excruciating analogy from yesterday was an excellent example of a defender shinning a clearance putting the striker on goal.
Ms Mordaunt accused the party of “borrowing from the Gary Lineker playbook” in its criticism of the plans, claiming Labour are the “party of goal hangers” who are “poised to seize any opportunities and to take an easy shot”.
She said the country needs “centre forwards” who “put in the hard work”.
Responding to the comments, the Match Of The Day presenter said: "Thank you for mentioning me in your clumsy analogy.
“I’m just happy to have been better in the six-yard box than you are at the dispatch box. Best wishes.”
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I see in the quote further up the page here, he does actually directly compare the policy to 1930s Germany, but I think the original thing he said that kicked it all off was about language being comparable.
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heaven forbid the left should ever focus on winning
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it’s just that one tweet, that’s all he said
This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s
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Typical conservative attitude - pointing out something bad is so much worse than perpetrating it.
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You’re quite correct, it’s the same quote “in language that is not dissimilar…”
Replying before coffee, that’s what happened.
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He might be wrong about the decade
“Just send all those people to Poland” was the ’40s
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The Nuremberg Laws etc., etc. and the encouraged /s emigrations were 30s language in Germany.
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