Best Of

Yes. Because Badenoch nor her most likely replacements have the foggiest idea how to resolve it. Being Diet Reform was never going to work but they're kind of stuck there with diminishing returns unless somehow they can install Cleverly as leader, recalibrate and start making different arguments to the country.

I was told about a couple of fascinating snippets about a focus group conducted earlier on this month.

1) The focus group summed Kemi Badenoch as saying 'Reform are right so vote for us'

and

2) Boris Johnson and the Tories are blamed by those who voted for Brexit for promising to reduced immigration then overseeing record breaking immigration. It has permanently lost for the Tories around 40% of voters who voted Tory for the first time in 2017/19.

The Conservatives should have made an effort to explain who the immigrants were.

Hong Kongers with money, Ukrainian refugees, exorbitant fee paying students, health and care workers could all have been defended.

Instead they babbled on endlessly about asylum seekers and then failed to do anything about them.

It wouldn't surprise me if most people think that most immigrants came via rubber dinghy.

Badenoch should gamble.

Anyone in her party who tweets or speaks on camera saying Trump is the new messiah and England should worship him and Musk she should sack immediately. Braverman out etc

Paint Reform as Trump Party (English branch). Make Farage own Trump.

If/when Trump chaos 2.0 wrecks world economy and american civil peace and order she will reap the rewards.

As I say, it's a gamble. But she is running out of options.

That's not a gamble, it's a left wing person's political wet dream. No remotely impartial or informed strategist would suggest something so stupid.

No it is not.

As far as I can see, her approach so far is that Tories need to go back and rediscover their eternal core values. Then the fruits of policy can flow abundantly.

She says time and time again that they have lost their way.

Trump 2.0 is not conservative. It is not Tory. It is not a party of law and order, constitutional monarchy, sensible finance, understated patriotism, love of family (even the errant ones), the small platoons, volunteering, decent people living ethical lives in small communities within traditional and religious values and so on.

Trump is a wrecking ball. He believes in nothing and has no idea what the words 'conserve', 'my place in the cosmos' and 'tradition' mean. He has no faith. He reveres nothing. He hates people who give their time and don't ask for a $ in return.

Trump would think the Home Guard were a bunch of old, sad losers wasting their lives.

A proper Tory would celebrate everything they stand for.

Ishmael, Tim, and Martin Coxall are three we’re well-rid of.

The last two were before my time.

Tim was the reason I didn't use my real name on here when I joined. But whilst he could be abrasive, he also had some good insights and, at times, was hilarious. I'd like to see him back, but can understand why others feel differently.

When I asked how to get mental health help for a friend who we were concerned about, he proved very helpful.

I can't remember Martin Coxall at all.

Tim was occasionally funny but posted too much dross in between. When the Vanilla numbering system was introduced he hit 15k in the first year. That's over 40 a day. Not at all healthy. But some of his lost causes (school buses, British Winter Time) were at least arguable. He felt he'd been doxxed by SeanT who in turn believed he had merely repeated information posted by Plato who in turn averred that Tim's identity and even his home address had been exposed on another forum. Welcome to the internet.

Some posters are much more relaxed than others about concealing their biosphere identity. Charles was innocently open about his, and he provided a unique insight into the exotic worlds of banking, big pharma and patrician Toryism. Ishmael drove him away by implying they had mutual acquaintances with whom he would share Charles' comments from here. That was inexcusable.

I still miss Charles. He was one of the more erudite posters.

On Covid, there were two broad strategies on could follow that worked:

(1) Absolutely massive and total lockdowns designed to get rid of every last case, so that every last case is eliminated, and life could continue as normal. This is what the Antipodeans did. (The goal here is R=0, so we can reopen.)

(2) Relatively modest restrictions, that prevented high risk activities and kept R at a significantly lower level than would otherwise have been the case. (The goal here is keeping R at or around 1, so that the virus doesn't run out of control.) This probably included: masks on public transport, encouraging working from home, and temporary closure of concert venues, nightclubs and other places where people are going to be crammed in a poorly ventilated indoor space.

What was an absolutely stupid policy was having enormous restrictions that probably only had a modest impact on R, and which didn't wipe the disease out.

After 1st (March-April 2020) lockdown it was pretty clear that the transmission problem was mostly relating to crowded indoor venues. For most of the country the restrictions were fairly minor, and probably ineffective until the winter lockdown of Dec 2020.

The really stupid thing was to allow schools back for a single day in Jan 2021. The death rate peaked at the end of Jan 21 at around 4000 per day. It was totally grim to be helping on ICU then, with 3 times the number of patients to regular capacity, with no one over 60. Over 60% the hospital beds in Leicester occupied with covid patients. Oxygen capacity was significantly stretched. I never want to work in such a situation again.

This was concurrent with the vaccine rollout so there was real light at the end of the tunnel. The restrictions probably lasted too long, and should never have been applied to outdoor socially distanced activities, particularly after the over sixties

I would rather eat my elevenses out of the urinal at that fucking Wuhan market than read one more shittious post about whether covid came from a lab or not.

I think it's possible to believe it's really important to know where covid came from and to be immensely bored by relentless discussion of it.

The idea this subject is discussed “relentlessly” is completely fictitious

The fact is the overwhelming evidence now points to lab leak and quite a few people on here do not like that, and want the whole debate to go away, as it makes them uncomfortable

We literally discuss the Post Office scandal more often than this. Indeed we discuss it ad nauseam, if you aak me, but I’m not a whiner and people on here are free to debate whatever they like

Covid is arguably the biggest event in all of our lives, if anything we ignore it too much - but I get why, it’s a hideous memory for 80% of people. Including me. But sometimes it must be addressed

A regular reminder that "Fact" and Leon are rarely acquainted.

Millions of people such as myself weren't remotely under any threat, but had our human rights distinctly curtailed..that was the real outrage..🤔🤨 Not the froth about it's "origins".

Why weren't you 'remotely under threat' ?

And surely, even if you believe you were immune, you had relatives and friends who were not superhuman?

92.3% of COVID-19 deaths were in people aged 60 and over; over half (58.3%) were aged 80 and over. Likewise, mortality rates were highest among those aged 80 and over and lowest in children and young people under 20.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-reported-sars-cov-2-deaths-in-england/covid-19-confirmed-deaths-in-england-to-31-december-2022-report

ONS, mid-2021 estimates: over 60s were 24.6% of the population, over 8-s were 5% of the population)

The thing about statistics is that they are mostly gained after the event. Back in early 2020, we had f-all idea of how Covid was spreading, and there were plenty of fit and healthy young people who were affected, as stories from Italy and China seemed to indicate. Yes, it seemed it *mostly* affected the elderly worse, but we unsure by how much.

My personal view is that the first lockdown was wise and necessary. The second, perhaps. As time went on, and we gained more knowledge and more jabs in arms, the less restrictions were needed. But that first lockdown was utterly unavoidable without magic hindsight.

But you miss the last part of my sentence. Covid is not just about you; it is about the people around you. And whilst you may be superhuman and 100% immune, there are plenty of people you might meet who were not in that lucky situation. Not all were elderly.

I would just add you do not need to be dead or totally out of it to be unable to deal with the physical effort of being POTUS at 82

My partner and I decided last week to get married although we're both 74 (wish us luck!) - we haven't bothered to think whether people will think that appropriate or difficult. Age is one of the first things one learns about people, but that shouldn't make it the most important thing. I'd rather have a competent, reasonable 82-year-old POTUS than an eccentric, unpredictable figure of any age.

I'm surprised to see all the evidence that older people tend to be more right-wing. I'm chair of my CLP and as leftish as ever. What I do notice is a certain detachment from the longer term. Will Britain become a member of the EU in 30 years, for instance? I'm in favour, but accept that coming generations will do as they think fit. But certain things, such as ridiculous inequality of income and opportunity across the world, seem as burningly intolerable as ever.

Congratulations Nick. What lovely news!

Yes, wonderful news. Congratulations @NickPalmer to you both.

Congratulations Nick!

As you may be aware I married four years ago at the age of 72. So far so good.

Sure you'll both be fine.

Laydeez and genullmen, harken to the words of Germany’s “leading” virologist Christan Drosten,

For years he’s been adamant it came from the wet market. Now, surprise surprise - as the CIA says it likely came from the lab - he’s suddenly seen the light

"The more I think about it, the more skeptical I become"

"In my initial assessment of the origin of the virus, I didn't know anything about it. In 2021, with the help of the American FOIA, it was published that American scientists had already applied for research funding in 2018 for work that, in my opinion, is by no means harmless."

"I were to insert an artificial furin cleavage site into Sars viruses, I would be doing something that may not even exist in nature and which I could already assume makes the virus more transmissible."

"The public is rightly asking...I have doubted that for a long time. But recently I have sometimes had a bad feeling."

https://taz.de/Christian-Drosten/!6061896/

Watch as they all do this. The last virologists pretending it came from the market will quietly pretend they were “skeptical” all along

I know that this subject obsesses you. Can you understand how most of us are so deeply bored of Covid that we don't care either way? It happened. It was shit. Move on. You think we can keep digging away at this and find named culprits? Individuals who can be brought to justice for Covid?

We have enough of today's problems to deal with than to worry about all that. Even your AI obsession is more relevant than Covid.

The real controversy is our response to COVID, which Leon never goes near of course..🤨😏

This is bollocks, I have been quite forceful in saying the later lockdowns were a disaster, and they were

And masking has been terrible for many societies, eg Japan, Korea - I explicitly said that on my recent visit to Japan and Korea

But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters

FFS this site gets massively exercised by the Post Office subpostmasters scandal. And that was, indeed, a scandal. But Covid dwarves it by seventy eight orders of magnitude. MILLIONS died because of out-of-control science in badly run labs

Bad as she is Paula Vennels is not quite in that league

"But the ORIGIN of Covid ALSO matters"

Why?

I'd argue it's fairly irrelevant unless you want to make something else out of it. Which, of course, you never would.

If natural via wet market, or lab-leak, the important thing is to ensure it never happens again. Brainlessly going on about one of the possibilities means that the other one get ignored. And it is not as though pandemics have ever started naturally before, is it?

Seriously? It's "fairly irrelevant" if this global pandemic was caused by dangerous science?

I mean, lol. Stupefying

Often I come to the site and feel intellectually enriched. And other times, JossiasJessop is here.

Really unnecessary.

@JosiasJessop and I have our disagreements. I don't think he particularly likes me but he is civil and I hope I am the same back. Some of his posts I agree with. No-one is right all the time and no-one agrees with others all the time. Abuse does nothing for this site, frankly. Rather detracts from it.