Lib Dem councillor ‘took part in pro-Palestine protest at police station'
'Councillor Latif is pleased with the outcome of his case and is grateful to his legal team for their assistance and will now continue to serve his constituents in his capacity as councillor.'
After the sentence, a Cardiff Council spokesman said: 'A conditional discharge by a magistrates' court does not preclude a Councillor from acting in the office of member of a Local Authority in Wales.
'In due course, it will be a matter for the Public Services Ombudsman for Wales to consider whether the actions of the councillor will meet the threshold of an investigation of a potential breach of Cardiff Council's Members' Code of Conduct.'
The Welsh Liberal Democrats said they will now review the incident that took place in June 2024 through their internal processes.
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The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘It wasn't an error': Ofqual boss defends regulator after withdrawn data row
England's chief regulator of exams has put up a staunch defence of Ofqual after it was forced to withdraw a decade of statistics detailing the number of students granted extra time and other assistance for A-levels and GCSEs. In his first interview with a national media organisation since his permanent appointment as head of Ofqual, and just weeks after the data was dramatically pulled, Sir Ian Bauckham said there had been no error in the figures, blaming instead the way they had been interpreted. He also denied that the data 'misunderstanding', which comes five years after Ofqual's disastrous attempt during Covid to award GCSE and A-level grades by algorithm, had further undermined confidence in the organisation, saying: 'We've got a qualification system in this country to be proud of.' In an interview with the Guardian, the chief regulator also addressed the debate surrounding the government's curriculum and assessment review, warning against any wholesale move from exams to coursework because of concerns about students' growing use of AI. He also urged caution over the introduction of digital exams, saying that any assessment innovation must be secure and deliverable, and should not disadvantage poorer students who may not have had the same access to digital devices and software as their wealthier peers. Ofqual, which was set up in 2010 to regulate qualifications in England, shocked the education sector when it announced on 17 July that it was withdrawing official statistics for special access arrangements for exams going back to 2014, because they 'significantly overstated' the number of students. Access arrangements are adjustments to exams for students with special needs, disabilities or injuries, with 25% extra time being the most common. In 2012-13, 107,000 students in England were granted extra time, but in 2024 Ofqual said it was nearly 420,000 students, an increase of nearly 300%. The data appeared to show that 30% of students had been granted 25% extra time last year, with particularly high rates in private schools where nearly 42% of students received adjustments. Ofqual now thinks the actual rate is far lower. Bauckham said the confusion had arisen because, rather than showing access arrangements solely for students entered for GCSEs and A-levels in one particular year, the data includes a much broader list of access arrangements. Each access arrangement lasts two years. There can be duplicate applications for the same student, and the list may include pupils with special arrangements in place who did not sit exams that year at all. 'It wasn't an error, because the published data only ever claimed to be the long list of approved access arrangements,' Bauckham said. 'It never claimed to be that data mapped against actual exam entries, but it was interpreted as that. 'I've been clear that moving forward … we need to publish actual granted access arrangements that relate to actual entries in the year in question.' He said the final figure is likely to be much more in line with the proportion of pupils in England with special education needs and disabilities (Send), which according to the most recent official statistics stands at 19.5%, including those with education, health and care plans 'Just because this figure is significantly lower, doesn't mean that there may not have been a rising trend,' Bauckham added. 'I would be very surprised indeed if the final data, when we're able to pinpoint it, doesn't indicate a rising trend. So I don't think it takes away the problem, but it alters the scale of what we're thinking about.' On what appeared to be a growing gap between the use of access arrangements between private and state schools, he said: 'Of course in independent schools there is a slightly higher proportion of Send than there is in state-funded schools. 'I don't think it's unreasonable to hypothesise that there will still be a difference between state-funded schools and independent schools, not least because of that higher Send figure, but I'm absolutely clear that we must have data that informs the public debate on this issue.' Bauckham, who after a year as interim chief regulator was permanently appointed in February, said Ofqual had moved on a long way from the chaos of Covid when exams were cancelled and grades calculated using an algorithm had to be scrapped. 'Five years later, we've moved back to examinations which are widely trusted as the fairest way to accredit and assess what students know, understand and can do,' he added. On the government's curriculum and assessment review, due to report later this year, the Ofqual chief acknowledged concerns about the volume of exams pupils currently face, but he warned against reducing assessment to a single paper per subject. Students 'really value the opportunity to have at least two bites at the cherry, by which I mean two opportunities in two separate exam papers in the same subject',' he said. He is in favour of AI being used to support teaching and students' learning. 'But I would be very concerned about moving wholesale to a system where exams were replaced by extended writing coursework, because that would, in current circumstances, be open to malpractice.' 'I'm not worried about the future of qualifications,' Bauckham said. 'I think qualifications are going to be needed more than ever in the future, but I think in education, we've got to be clear that students still need rigorous intellectual training. They still need mastery of key knowledge. 'We still need to set our sights high for them and we mustn't succumb to the confused thinking that says, because AI will enable future workplaces, we don't need students to know, understand and be able to do skills and demonstrate knowledge at a high level, because I think the opposite is true.'
Sky News
an hour ago
- Sky News
Inside Jeremy Corbyn's new party and the battle for leadership
Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn may be the figureheads of a new left-wing party, but already there is a battle over leadership. The confusion behind the initial launch speaks to a wider debate happening behind closed doors as to who should steer the party - now and in the future. Already, in the true spirit of Mr Corbyn's politics, there is talk of an open leadership contest and grassroots participation. Some supporters of the new party - which is being temporarily called "Your Party" while a formal name is decided by members - believe that allowing a leadership contest to take place honours Mr Corbyn's commitment to open democracy. 5:51 They point out that under Mr Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party, members famously backed plans to make it easier for local constituency parties to deselect sitting MPs - a concept he strongly believed in. His allies now say the former Labour leader, who is 76, is open to there being a leadership contest for the new party, possibly at its inaugural conference in the autumn, where names lesser known than himself can throw their hat into the ring. "Jeremy would rather die than not have an open leadership contest," one source familiar with the internal politics told Sky News. However, there have been suggestions that Ms Sultana appears to be less keen on the idea of a leadership contest, and that she is more committed to the co-leadership model than her political partner. Those who have been opposed to the co-leadership model believe it could give Ms Sultana an unfair advantage and exclude other potential candidates from standing in the future. 2:18 One source told Sky News they believed Mr Corbyn should lead the party for two years, to get it established, before others are allowed to stand as leader. They said Ms Sultana, who became an independent MP after she was suspended from Labour for opposing the two-child benefit cap, was "highly ambitious but completely untested as leader" and "had a lot of growing into the role to do". "It's not about her - it's about taking a democratic approach, which is what we're supposed to be doing," they said. "There are so many people who have done amazing things locally and they need to have a chance to emerge as leaders. "We are not only fishing from a pool of two people. "It needs to be an open contest. Nobody needs to be crowned." 1:22 While Mr Corbyn and Ms Sultana undoubtedly have the biggest profiles out of would-be leaders, advocates for a grassroots approach to the leadership point to the success some independent candidates have enjoyed at a local level - for example, 24-year-old British Palestinian Leah Mohammed, who came within 528 votes of unseating Health Secretary Wes Streeting in Ilford North. Fiona Lali of the Revolutionary Communist Party, who stood in last year's general election for the Stratford and Bow constituency, has also been mentioned in some circles as someone with potential leadership credentials. However, sources close to Mr Corbyn and Ms Sultana downplayed suggestions of any divide over the leadership model, pointing out that their joint statement acknowledged that members would "decide the party's direction" at the inaugural conference in the autumn, including the model of leadership and the policies that are needed to transform society. A spokesperson for Mr Corbyn told Sky News: "Jeremy will be working with Zarah, his independent colleagues, and people from trade unions and social movements up and down the country to make an autumn conference a reality. "This will be the moment where people come together to launch a new democratic party that belongs to the members."
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Precrime profiling is no longer a fantasy
This week the UK government introduced an 'artificial intelligence violence predictor' into the prison system, a tool to analyse factors such as criminal record, age and behaviour, to calculate which inmates are most likely to resort to violence so officers can intervene before they do. With attacks on prison officers increasing, AI profiling of inmates is the latest example of so-called precrime technology, based on the dubious theory that science can foresee individual criminal behaviour and prevent it by disrupting, punishing or restricting potential law-breakers. The idea was popularised in the 1956 Philip K Dick novel The Minority Report, adapted by Steven Spielberg into a 2002 movie starring Tom Cruise, in which teams of psychic 'precogs' exercise foreknowledge of criminal activity, including premeditated murder, to identify and eliminate persons who will commit crimes in the future. • Prisons get 'Minority Report' AI profiling to avert violence In the film, set in 2054, the chief of the Precrime agency explains the advantages of pre-emptive justice: 'In our society we have no major crimes … but we do have a detention camp full of would-be criminals.' Thirty years ahead of schedule, instead of clairvoyance as a crime prevention tool, we have AI. The theory of precrime dates to the early 19th century and the Italian eugenicist Cesare Lombroso, who is purported to have invented the term 'criminology'. Lombroso believed that criminals were born lawless, inheriting atavistically villainous characteristics and physiognomies. Criminal anthropometry, the precise measurement of faces and bodies, he argued, could be used to identify crooks and stop them from committing crimes. This 'positivist' school of criminology claimed to recognise criminals not only by biological characteristics but also through psychological and sociological forms of behaviour. 'Born criminals', nature's psychopaths and dangerous habitual offenders, could thus be eliminated using capital punishment, indefinite confinement or castration. The sinister notion that a system might detect the mere intention to offend is echoed in the 'thought crime' of George Orwell's 1984. Richard Nixon's psychiatrist, Arnold Hutschnecker, advised the president to run mass tests for 'pre-delinquency' and confine those juveniles to 'camps'. A refugee from Nazi Germany, Hutschnecker insisted these would not be concentration camps but holiday camps in a 'pastoral setting'. In the 1970s, the University of California, Los Angeles attempted to set up a Centre for the Long-Term Study of Life-Threatening Behaviour, using scientific data to predict 'dangerousness'. It planned to 'compile stocks of behavioural data to understand crimes that had not yet occurred but were 'in formation'.' The project foundered when it was suggested the centre intended to use 'psychosurgery' to modify behaviour. • Conned by the Tinder Swindler: how his victims took revenge But precrime is not some sci-fi fantasy or a wacko theory from the fringes of eugenics; it is already here. 'Predictive policing' — using data to forecast future criminal activity — is expanding rapidly. The UK Ministry of Justice is said to be developing a 'homicide prediction project' using police and government data to profile individuals with the aim of forecasting who is more likely to commit a murder. The project, revealed in April by the investigative group Statewatch, will 'review offender characteristics that increase the risk' and 'explore alternative and innovative data science techniques to risk assessment of homicide'. In the US, the software system Compas (Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions) is used by police and judges to forecast the risk of recidivism among more than one million offenders. The software predicts the likelihood that a convicted criminal will reoffend within two years based on data that include 137 of each individual's distinguishing features as well as criminal or court records. This is where actuarial science (mathematical and statistical methods used to assess risk in insurance, pensions and medicine) meets crimefighting and sentencing guidelines: a technological tool to predict the risk of reoffending by rating factors such as type of crime, age, educational background and ethnicity of the offender. In Chicago, an algorithm has been created to predict potential involvement with violent crime to draw up a strategic subject list — or 'heat list' — of those the algorithm calculates to be the city's most dangerous inhabitants. Precrime is most obvious and advanced in the context of counterterrorism to identify threatening individuals, groups or areas, but inevitably invites conflict between the ideal of impartial criminal justice and the needs of national security. In the traditional justice and criminal system, the law attempts to capture and punish those responsible after crimes have been committed. AI could invert that equation by meting out punishment or imposing surveillance where no crime has been committed — yet. As the chief of the Precrime agency in Minority Report observes: 'We're taking in individuals who have broken no law.' Critics fear that precrime techniques could remove the presumption of innocence, the cornerstone of the justice system, and increase guilt by association since an individual's known contacts would influence any risk assessment. It also threatens to dehumanise individuals by reducing people to the sum of their accumulated data. Latter-day predictive policing already deploys data analysis and algorithms to identify higher risks of criminality, triggering increased police presence in certain areas and communities. Critics argue that this leads to increased racial profiling, with certain populations disproportionately flagged as high risk. If the data pool being 'learnt' by AI is already racially biased, then its predictions will be similarly skewed. Until the digital age, crimefighting was based on solving crimes or catching criminals in the act. In the age of AI, the sleuth will rely on machine learning to uncover clues to crimes that have yet to be perpetrated. 'It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data,' said Sherlock Holmes. In the brave new world of precrime, the data will take over from the detectives.
