The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Gallophone?
I might have got the term wrong. Always thought that meant welsh speaking.
It means French speaking. I don't know of a word that means Welsh-speaking, but doubtless someone here does.
Er Welsh-speaking? Why use an incorrect* Latin-Greek word when an English one will do?
*incorrect because originally Gallic originally referred to the Gauls, whou would have spoken something like the Britons did at the time.
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Gallophone?
I might have got the term wrong. Always thought that meant welsh speaking.
It means French speaking. I don't know of a word that means Welsh-speaking, but doubtless someone here does.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Nah we won't. This is going to be endemic and varying just like flu. The idea we will ever be rid of this thing is for the fairies. Might as well get used to it as just another of those many persistent low level threats that we live with.
If it was a low-level threat then fine. It isn't. The NHS are genuinely bricking it over how they get us all through the winter. What does seem clear is that it dissipates significantly over the summer. So we need to have a concerted drive next summer to get booster 3 / 4 into everyone's arms. A tax break or cash incentive for getting it - something. Or we really do end up stuck with this as a real problem not just another winter bug that nobody need be that worried about.
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Wolves chant to Shrewsbury Town fans in cup match 3 years ago: "You're Welsh and you know you are".
Dunno if it's the case but I guess 'You're English and you know you are' would be a viable chant for opposition fans of Berwick Rangers. And then there's 'Yer Scottish and we know ye hate it' for the actual Rangers..
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
Jesus Christ, Jonathan Van-Tam, the "qualified" man you revere on this issue, famously said "masks are useless, my friend in Hong Kong told me" (this despite everyone in Hong Kong wearing a mask. Odd that)
He's a fricking idiot. You are pathetically grovelling to establishment half-wits. Grow a spine
And in case you didn’t notice, the entire premise of his response is wrong (yet again) as nowhere did I suggest that he was advocating the closure of pubs. I was talking about mask mandates, which really ought to have been clear from my question which cited, er, mask mandates.
I still don't understand your point about masks in pubs. Either they are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not. You think based on your opinion, I know based on evidence.
So what was your point? Oh yes. You are an anti-masker. The "significant imposition" you project onto pubs, theatres etc is actually on you. If that's your position then why not just say so?
I was at a Christmas market yesterday with tens of thousands of people squashed together so they could hardly move. Almost none of them were wearing masks.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
Jesus Christ, Jonathan Van-Tam, the "qualified" man you revere on this issue, famously said "masks are useless, my friend in Hong Kong told me" (this despite everyone in Hong Kong wearing a mask. Odd that)
He's a fricking idiot. You are pathetically grovelling to establishment half-wits. Grow a spine
And in case you didn’t notice, the entire premise of his response is wrong (yet again) as nowhere did I suggest that he was advocating the closure of pubs. I was talking about mask mandates, which really ought to have been clear from my question which cited, er, mask mandates.
I still don't understand your point about masks in pubs. Either they are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not. You think based on your opinion, I know based on evidence.
So what was your point? Oh yes. You are an anti-masker. The "significant imposition" you project onto pubs, theatres etc is actually on you. If that's your position then why not just say so?
Glasgow pub I was in yesterday was absolutely rammed, they were turning away (masked) folk at the door.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
It might be the "general view" of the ill-informed. Its not the general view of health professionals. We need to keep wearing them for now to stop the current sustained high-level of infections becoming another mega spike which leads to calamity over the winter. Once we get to the spring Covid seems to drop into the background and we can stop to rethink.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
Jesus Christ, Jonathan Van-Tam, the "qualified" man you revere on this issue, famously said "masks are useless, my friend in Hong Kong told me" (this despite everyone in Hong Kong wearing a mask. Odd that)
He's a fricking idiot. You are pathetically grovelling to establishment half-wits. Grow a spine
And in case you didn’t notice, the entire premise of his response is wrong (yet again) as nowhere did I suggest that he was advocating the closure of pubs. I was talking about mask mandates, which really ought to have been clear from my question which cited, er, mask mandates.
I still don't understand your point about masks in pubs. Either they are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not. You think based on your opinion, I know based on evidence.
So what was your point? Oh yes. You are an anti-masker. The "significant imposition" you project onto pubs, theatres etc is actually on you. If that's your position then why not just say so?
I was at a Christmas market yesterday with tens of thousands of people squashed together so they could hardly move. Almost none of them were wearing masks.
Why would they need to? People in England have been told go back to normal, no mask needed, look at the government crushed into the commons mocking people asking for masks etc etc etc.
Getting some kind of control again is going to be hard. Double-jabbed = free, thats been the consistent message. Go back to your normal lives.
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
The Chancellor can have a quiet word with Bailey if he wants, but the MPC votes by majority and his vote is only one of nine. I suspect he knew that if he had voted for a hike last week he would have been outvoted. I didn't expect them to raise rates last week but I was surprised they didn't do more to tee up December. Right now February looks the most likely date for lift off, although December is still on the table.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
Well, they're not. That was the point, really...
I did just unearth this minor nugget
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
Yes I understood it was because of external factors that interest rates can't influence eg wholesale energy prices, but I wonder if a rise to a trivial level would have a physiological impact.
Wage growth, labour shortages and global logistical disruptions are all going to drive inflation up. We can expect a winter of discontent in the public sector too, I think.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Gallophone?
I might have got the term wrong. Always thought that meant welsh speaking.
It means French speaking. I don't know of a word that means Welsh-speaking, but doubtless someone here does.
Er Welsh-speaking? Why use an incorrect* Latin-Greek word when an English one will do?
*incorrect because originally Gallic originally referred to the Gauls, whou would have spoken something like the Britons did at the time.
The beauty of the English language is it's a mongrel and there are several ways to say the same things. It problem is it gives us different registers and people get judged unconsciously on the basis of which words they use. For example "to buy" / "to purchase".
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
Well, they're not. That was the point, really...
I did just unearth this minor nugget
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
Well, I have. But then, I speak Welsh. So maybe that's not so surprising.
I'm not sure we need a massive re-think on second jobs at the minute. The standards committee seems to be working okay with the current rules.
Just increase the number of days the HoC and don't pay them if they don't clock in. Then the fuckers won't have the time or energy for second jobs and being on the fiddle.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
Well, they're not. That was the point, really...
I did just unearth this minor nugget
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
Well, I have. But then, I speak Welsh. So maybe that's not so surprising.
I've got to go to the Marches, soon, to investigate sheelagh-na-gigs. I might pootle up to Oswestry to Listen In Pubs
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Gallophone?
I might have got the term wrong. Always thought that meant welsh speaking.
It means French speaking. I don't know of a word that means Welsh-speaking, but doubtless someone here does.
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
Yes I understood it was because of external factors that interest rates can't influence eg wholesale energy prices, but I wonder if a rise to a trivial level would have a physiological impact.
Wage growth, labour shortages and global logistical disruptions are all going to drive inflation up. We can expect a winter of discontent in the public sector too, I think.
Yes. I'm a little worried about it. So worried it stopped me being able to spell in my last post. Hope it made sense.
the evidence suggests that all types of face coverings are, to some extent, effective in reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in both healthcare and public, community settings – this is through a combination of source control and protection to the wearer (high confidence) laboratory data shows that non-medical masks (such as cloth masks) made of 2 or 3 layers may have similar filtration efficiency to surgical masks (high confidence) epidemiological evidence (usually of low or very low certainty) from SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses suggests that, in healthcare settings, N95 respirators (or equivalent) may be more effective than surgical masks in reducing the risk of infection in the mask wearer [footnote 3] (low confidence) evidence, mainly from laboratory studies, suggests that face coverings should be well-fitted and cover the mouth and nose to increase effectiveness (as fit is a limiting factor in the overall mask protective efficiency independently of the filtration efficiency of its fabric) (high confidence) there is a need for improved training (in health and care settings) and public health messaging (in community settings) on mask fitting (and quality in the community) (medium confidence) there is insufficient evidence to support the use of double-masking in a healthcare setting (not ranked due to insufficient evidence)
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
You didn't try very hard
"The wards of Oswestry South (1.15%), Oswestry East (0.86%) and St Oswald (0.71%) had the highest percentage of residents giving Welsh as their main language."
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
Jesus Christ, Jonathan Van-Tam, the "qualified" man you revere on this issue, famously said "masks are useless, my friend in Hong Kong told me" (this despite everyone in Hong Kong wearing a mask. Odd that)
He's a fricking idiot. You are pathetically grovelling to establishment half-wits. Grow a spine
You misunderstand RP, he wants the government to u-turn on plan b or c or masks regardless of what's actually happening on the ground. If England (and the rest of the UK) has hit herd immunity and we continue to see the current big drops in cases it will prove the UK government position was right (run hot in the summer and autumn, no restrictions) and that Europe was wrong (prevent spread, retain NPIs). In his small world the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. This would upend that as European countries head into lockdown 4 and the UK exits the pandemic entirely.
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Gallophone?
I might have got the term wrong. Always thought that meant welsh speaking.
It means French speaking. I don't know of a word that means Welsh-speaking, but doubtless someone here does.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
The Chancellor can have a quiet word with Bailey if he wants, but the MPC votes by majority and his vote is only one of nine. I suspect he knew that if he had voted for a hike last week he would have been outvoted. I didn't expect them to raise rates last week but I was surprised they didn't do more to tee up December. Right now February looks the most likely date for lift off, although December is still on the table.
It's probably going to take more than a year to reach the giddy heights of 1% but its time we got started. We have had seriously strong deflationary effects since 2008 but I think that period may now be over following the disruption by and monetary responses to Covid. The more inflation takes off the harder it will be to contain it again.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
Well, they're not. That was the point, really...
I did just unearth this minor nugget
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
Well, I have. But then, I speak Welsh. So maybe that's not so surprising.
I've got to go to the Marches, soon, to investigate sheelagh-na-gigs. I might pootle up to Oswestry to Listen In Pubs
On a serious note, the border country around Oswestry and Chirk, particularly the Ceiriog Valley, is truly beautiful and much underrated. Well worth a visit.
I have spent many happy evenings in this particular pub, although it has changed hands since I last visited:
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
Yes I understood it was because of external factors that interest rates can't influence eg wholesale energy prices, but I wonder if a rise to a trivial level would have a physiological impact.
Wage growth, labour shortages and global logistical disruptions are all going to drive inflation up. We can expect a winter of discontent in the public sector too, I think.
Yes. I'm a little worried about it. So worried it stopped me being able to spell in my last post. Hope it made sense.
There is a tidal surge of inflation on prices already. Leaving interest rates alone seemed rather hopeful rather than realistic.
I don't think the Midlands is particularly important next time round in terms of marginals.
The most efficient path to denying the Tories a majority next time round involves a 3% swing to the NNVTP (Next non viable Tory party).
3% 7 Midlands 10m 8 South 21m 5 London 9m 12 North 15.5m 3 Scotland 5.5m 5 Wales 3m
As there'll be some random variability - here are the 4% numbers, I'd say the North is the most important region of England tbh. Per head of population it is very clearly Wales.
4% 8 Midlands 10m 13 South 21m 6 London 9m 17 North 15.5m 4 Scotland 5.5m 8 Wales 3m
the evidence suggests that all types of face coverings are, to some extent, effective in reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in both healthcare and public, community settings – this is through a combination of source control and protection to the wearer (high confidence) laboratory data shows that non-medical masks (such as cloth masks) made of 2 or 3 layers may have similar filtration efficiency to surgical masks (high confidence) epidemiological evidence (usually of low or very low certainty) from SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses suggests that, in healthcare settings, N95 respirators (or equivalent) may be more effective than surgical masks in reducing the risk of infection in the mask wearer [footnote 3] (low confidence) evidence, mainly from laboratory studies, suggests that face coverings should be well-fitted and cover the mouth and nose to increase effectiveness (as fit is a limiting factor in the overall mask protective efficiency independently of the filtration efficiency of its fabric) (high confidence) there is a need for improved training (in health and care settings) and public health messaging (in community settings) on mask fitting (and quality in the community) (medium confidence) there is insufficient evidence to support the use of double-masking in a healthcare setting (not ranked due to insufficient evidence)
Indeed “to some extent” - very much congruent with my OP that said moderate impact. Moderate is still significant. Hardly a controversial point.
While we are rightly focusing on those voters abandoning the Tories because they are a bunch of corrupt incompetent shits, they are likely to be bleeding support on another flank.
With COP26 putting the spotlight on 'green crap', those of a swivel eyed climate change denier persuasion are also likely to be jumping ship. ReFuk is the obvious destination for them.
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Gallophone?
I might have got the term wrong. Always thought that meant welsh speaking.
It means French speaking. I don't know of a word that means Welsh-speaking, but doubtless someone here does.
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Fascinating, thanks. Are the signs bilingual or are the Gallophone population ostracised/ignored?
Gallophone?
I might have got the term wrong. Always thought that meant welsh speaking.
It means French speaking. I don't know of a word that means Welsh-speaking, but doubtless someone here does.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
Well, they're not. That was the point, really...
I did just unearth this minor nugget
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
Yes I understood it was because of external factors that interest rates can't influence eg wholesale energy prices, but I wonder if a rise to a trivial level would have a physiological impact.
Wage growth, labour shortages and global logistical disruptions are all going to drive inflation up. We can expect a winter of discontent in the public sector too, I think.
Yes. I'm a little worried about it. So worried it stopped me being able to spell in my last post. Hope it made sense.
"I sometimes hear Welsh in the streets and shops of Oswestry. I chatted in Welsh to a shopkeeper the other day in what used to be Martin Britton’s. Shows that it’s worth making the first scary move and addressing someone in Welsh, in case you get a pleasant surprise!" -
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Do you think that people in the overflowing pubs are wearing masks?
The LDs have a pretty good chance of winning North Shropshire IMO. I can't see it being a Labour win, even though they were in second place last time.
Er - really?
That would be a 26% swing in a seat where they've never got over 25% of the vote.
In a Leave seat. In a place where all the actual left-wingness is a Welsh-speaking area.
The Richter scale will actually snap if they win this one.
There is a Welsh-speaking part of North Shropshire. That I did not know. PB really is a source of fascinating nuggets.
The area around Oswestry stretching to the Welsh border. My father's home country (not that he's Welsh speaking). Oswestry itself used to be Welsh-speaking although I think (not that I know it particularly well) it's become steadily more anglicised. It was helped by the fact that until about 1966 all of its major transport links other than the A5 were with Wales rather than England.
The Liberal party used to be strong in that area, but in common with the fortunes in neighbouring Powys they have increasingly withered away with one last hurrah in 2010 where they came second overall.
Google says the Welsh speakers have now disappeared. Shame. It was a nice mental image
I remember as a boy in Hereford hearing Welsh farmers speaking Welsh in the Butter Market. It was fantastically exotic. An ancient language come down from the hills, for the day...
"in view of the above mentioned Sheela-na-geeg, one could assert that Ireland also leads the world in the field of stone carved sex-toys"
My understanding was that Oswestry ended up on the 'wrong' side of the border, as did the Maelor. Welsh speaking in Oswestry persisted quite late - post WW2 - but has now near-enough died out (as is any feeling of Welshness), while the Maelor never really had very much in the way of Welsh speakers - it was part of Cheshire that ended up attahed to Flintshire for dynastic reasons in the medeival period.
There also used to be a significant Welsh-speaking presence in Liverpool, of course. That wasn't a historical hangover, that was the result of immigration from North Wales to Liverpool in the nineteenth century. There are still traces of it from place to place. And in my view the Liverpool accent owes far more to North Wales than it does its more commonly supposed ancestor of Ireland.
While we are rightly focusing on those voters abandoning the Tories because they are a bunch of corrupt incompetent shits, they are likely to be bleeding support on another flank.
With COP26 putting the spotlight on 'green crap', those of a swivel eyed climate change denier persuasion are also likely to be jumping ship. ReFuk is the obvious destination for them.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
Aged aunt in hospital for fall. Acquired chest infection since being admitted. Okay that's totally expected in the NHS. Spoke to a nurse last night, she said I could come and visit. Turn up this morning and the ward's closed as they have a Covid outbreak and it has been closed for several days.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
Aged aunt in hospital for fall. Acquired chest infection since being admitted. Okay that's totally expected in the NHS. Spoke to a nurse last night, she said I could come and visit. Turn up this morning and the ward's closed as they have a Covid outbreak and it has been closed for several days.
Fucking useless.
Sorry to hear that, hope she gets better and home soon!
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
You didn't try very hard
"The wards of Oswestry South (1.15%), Oswestry East (0.86%) and St Oswald (0.71%) had the highest percentage of residents giving Welsh as their main language."
My Google Fu was not good, I confess. I am, happily, wrong. There IS a very small but discernible cluster of Welsh speakers in west Shropshire
Also, as I dig deeper, it seems this is the last remnants of a larger Welsh language presence, not a troop of new immigrants, so these Cymraegers in Oswestry are like those aboriginal tribes that still drink in their burned out cars in the billabongs near Alice Springs, speaking like the ancestors did 50,000 years ago, even though no one else can understand
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
Yes I understood it was because of external factors that interest rates can't influence eg wholesale energy prices, but I wonder if a rise to a trivial level would have a physiological impact.
Wage growth, labour shortages and global logistical disruptions are all going to drive inflation up. We can expect a winter of discontent in the public sector too, I think.
Yes. I'm a little worried about it. So worried it stopped me being able to spell in my last post. Hope it made sense.
There is a tidal surge of inflation on prices already. Leaving interest rates alone seemed rather hopeful rather than realistic.
3.1%? Hardly a "tidal surge already". And if most of those rises are due to exogenous effects, interest rates make no difference. And growth has faltered a bit so the economy still needs a boost. I am also not sure why we are so hooked on the annual rate. Prices have risen by 5% since March 2019, just under 2% a year.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
FFP2, so yes.
Upgrade it. That was about 60% efficacy from memory. The N95/FFP3/KN95 was ~95%, if you're double vaxxed then it's still all a bit pointless.
Aged aunt in hospital for fall. Acquired chest infection since being admitted. Okay that's totally expected in the NHS. Spoke to a nurse last night, she said I could come and visit. Turn up this morning and the ward's closed as they have a Covid outbreak and it has been closed for several days.
Fucking useless.
Sorry to hear that, hope she gets better and home soon!
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
We've also had various studies showing that different vaccines in different environments have different levels of effectiveness. I can provide links to Israeli research where they have realised their initial 89% rate doesn't last. If they did then Israel wouldn't be doing boosters with scientific evidence to prove why they are needed.
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
I wear an N95 mask to the supermarket and other crowded indoor places.
I always do a little mime after putting it on, to keep it performative.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
Surely it is the N95 wearers who are being selfish. Cloth/surgical mask wearers are being entirely altruistic.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
Well, they're not. That was the point, really...
I did just unearth this minor nugget
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
Well, I have. But then, I speak Welsh. So maybe that's not so surprising.
At my prep school in Penmaenmawr all the cleaners and cooks spoke only Welsh as did the local shopkeepers but when I revisited it a few years ago I couldn't hear the language spoken anywhere
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
Yes I understood it was because of external factors that interest rates can't influence eg wholesale energy prices, but I wonder if a rise to a trivial level would have a physiological impact.
Wage growth, labour shortages and global logistical disruptions are all going to drive inflation up. We can expect a winter of discontent in the public sector too, I think.
Yes. I'm a little worried about it. So worried it stopped me being able to spell in my last post. Hope it made sense.
There is a tidal surge of inflation on prices already. Leaving interest rates alone seemed rather hopeful rather than realistic.
3.1%? Hardly a "tidal surge already". And if most of those rises are due to exogenous effects, interest rates make no difference. And growth has faltered a bit so the economy still needs a boost. I am also not sure why we are so hooked on the annual rate. Prices have risen by 5% since March 2019, just under 2% a year.
In the real economy (the numbers that get massaged for statistics) there have been some 100%+ rises and they are still going. The price of fence posts was one example given to me yesterday, more than doubled in a few months. Farmers up here feeding neeps to cows because they can't afford the latest price rises on Barley. Concerns about fertiliser production next year because the price is now silly.
A tidal surge starts small. Thats why its a surge, not yet a wave. Its coming though.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
FFP2, so yes.
If you are wearing FFP2s then you are being selfish. FFP2s have an exhalation valve which means you still expel aerosols onto others. Surgical masks are actually BETTER at protecting others. You are only protecting yourself
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
So you think it IS either or? You think if you're double vaxxed the elastic won't hold and you can't wear a mask? You fucking fool.
"I sometimes hear Welsh in the streets and shops of Oswestry. I chatted in Welsh to a shopkeeper the other day in what used to be Martin Britton’s. Shows that it’s worth making the first scary move and addressing someone in Welsh, in case you get a pleasant surprise!" -
That's from late 2018
You certainly hear Welsh on the streets of Chester. But then it is the Big City for a lot of people who live in Wales.
Why should they struggle to hold those seats in 2024 when they didn't in 2019? I see no sign of a Lib Dem recovery and think it is unlikely under Davey's leadership. I do agree with @OnlyLivingBoy that the key area next time is going to be the midlands and it is interesting that the swings against Boris seem highest there.
I wonder how far Johnson can push "decent" Southern Tories before they just sit on their hands next time in large numbers. His government is beginning to stink of incompetence and sleaze.
The budget seems to have been pretty well received. The economy is growing pretty fast, at least in the short term. We have full employment and rising wages. The boosters are being delivered at a good clip. The number of cases of the virus have clearly peaked and the government's policy of letting things rip over the summer is very likely to pay significant dividends in the winter. COP26 is looking like a solid piece of work if not quite a spectacular success.
There are plenty of things on the other side of the balance sheet, many of them self-inflicted, but I think your assessment of the government is excessively partial.
Although I hope you are wrong David, those last two posts were good. I also can't see the LD taking too many of those seats on current numbers. Some but not enough to matter. Sadly as a LD.
Also I hadn't really considered the positives because of the negatives and you mention a few. One negative not mentioned is potentially inflation. That is a worry particularly for the generation that votes Conservative.
I was personally surprised that the BoE did not start the process of raising interest rates last week. I think doing so, even to the derisory level of 0.25%, would have given indications that inflation was a concern and that the Bank would take action. That alone might have tempered future inflationary expectations somewhat. I think it was a mistake.
The Bank is, of course, independent, but the generation you talk about who vote Tory do not, by and large, have mortgages and have been getting a terrible return on their savings. They would have no problem with rising rates. I suspect the Chancellor may well have a quiet word with the Governor.
Yes I understood it was because of external factors that interest rates can't influence eg wholesale energy prices, but I wonder if a rise to a trivial level would have a physiological impact.
Wage growth, labour shortages and global logistical disruptions are all going to drive inflation up. We can expect a winter of discontent in the public sector too, I think.
Yes. I'm a little worried about it. So worried it stopped me being able to spell in my last post. Hope it made sense.
There is a tidal surge of inflation on prices already. Leaving interest rates alone seemed rather hopeful rather than realistic.
3.1%? Hardly a "tidal surge already". And if most of those rises are due to exogenous effects, interest rates make no difference. And growth has faltered a bit so the economy still needs a boost. I am also not sure why we are so hooked on the annual rate. Prices have risen by 5% since March 2019, just under 2% a year.
In the real economy (the numbers that get massaged for statistics) there have been some 100%+ rises and they are still going. The price of fence posts was one example given to me yesterday, more than doubled in a few months. Farmers up here feeding neeps to cows because they can't afford the latest price rises on Barley. Concerns about fertiliser production next year because the price is now silly.
A tidal surge starts small. Thats why its a surge, not yet a wave. Its coming though.
The fact that a small selection of goods are being affected a lot, as opposed to a lot of goods being affected a bit, should tell you it is not endemic,
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
I wear an N95 mask to the supermarket and other crowded indoor places.
I always do a little mime after putting it on, to keep it performative.
My wife and I have just had our flu vaccines today and I did not know there are two vaccines, one for over 65s and one for under 65s
It was amusing to see how many patients in the waiting room were not wearing their marks properly especially below the nose would you believe
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
Both of which are permanent, I’m not sure that will be the case for masks.
Aged aunt in hospital for fall. Acquired chest infection since being admitted. Okay that's totally expected in the NHS. Spoke to a nurse last night, she said I could come and visit. Turn up this morning and the ward's closed as they have a Covid outbreak and it has been closed for several days.
Fucking useless.
Sorry to hear that, hope she gets better and home soon!
Thanks v much we're now chatting in the corridor.
We have had very similar experiences in the last 2 weeks with both my brother and mother in law. Its a pretty small sample but that is also 2 from 2 in terms of wards where someone acquired a Covid infection in hospital.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
You said the latest Israeli studies show double vax to be 89% effective. That just isn't true - their latest studies - into why they're having another wave - are demonstrating that a 3rd shot is needed to patch over the decline in effectiveness over time.
If Pfizer / AZ / Moderna etc was 89% effective and stayed there this would all be over.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
Both of which are permanent, I’m not sure that will be the case for masks.
I think at some point in the distant future we might also stop vaccinating for this too. But not yet.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
It is getting less - but then Welsh speaking is getting less even in the north-west of Wales. In Shropshire, it doesn't have Welsh-medium education to keep it alive, which is a hindrance, but you can still find plenty of Welsh speakers in that area if you know where to look.
Generally, they tend in my admittedly fairly limited experience to be more Labour/Liberal inclined than their English-speaking equivalents elsewhere. But as there are fewer of them, there are fewer such voters to draw on.
Which means - to come back to my original point - that the Liberal Democrats really do not have a significant chance here. It's not like Chesham and Amersham, where the demographics and underlying politics increasingly favoured them. Indeed, if anything it's moving against them.
Unless Labour or the Liberal Democrats have something to offer people living in small market towns with bad communication links that survive on a mixture of agriculture and tourism, they're not going to progress here.
Not that the Tories have anything to offer either.
I've been Googling for several minutes and I have not found evidence of any contemporary Welsh speakers in Shropshire, let alone a cluster so large they can be politically significant. I am calling this out as nonsense, tho I would be delighted if I am wrong
Well, they're not. That was the point, really...
I did just unearth this minor nugget
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
You said the latest Israeli studies show double vax to be 89% effective. That just isn't true - their latest studies - into why they're having another wave - are demonstrating that a 3rd shot is needed to patch over the decline in effectiveness over time.
If Pfizer / AZ / Moderna etc was 89% effective and stayed there this would all be over.
That’s just not seen in the ONS survey, the rate has been flat for the oldest cohort. If there was significant fading of effectiveness you would expect that number to be rising significantly.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
FFP2, so yes.
If you are wearing FFP2s then you are being selfish. FFP2s have an exhalation valve which means you still expel aerosols onto others. Surgical masks are actually BETTER at protecting others. You are only protecting yourself
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
Wow! Get on the phone to the German government quick, tell them how selfish they were in making me buy a box of them!
Why do I have a stack of FFP2 masks? Because they were a legal requirement. And your article states clearly they are better for both wearer and others vs "community masks" - cloth.
You've travelled a lot Sean. You know why FFP2 are mandated in so many places. You've been there.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
So you think it IS either or? You think if you're double vaxxed the elastic won't hold and you can't wear a mask? You fucking fool.
No it's living in a world of pharmaceutical intervention vs a world of non-pharmaceutical intervention. We have moved into the first category now that vaccines and other treatments exist. Non-pharmaceutical intervention is no longer necessary. The whole point of having NPIs was to wait until the PIs were available. Well they're available and if there's people stupid enough to not get what's available that's on them. In a vaccinated population NPIs are not necessary. You might make yourself feel superior to others by putting on your mask (or as I suspect, telling us you do) but it's nothing more than COVID theatre for dickheads.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
Both of which are permanent, I’m not sure that will be the case for masks.
I think at some point in the distant future we might also stop vaccinating for this too. But not yet.
If it’s anything like the flu we are going to be with it, and vaccinating against it, for a very long time. I doubt we’ll be wearing masks then.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
You said the latest Israeli studies show double vax to be 89% effective. That just isn't true - their latest studies - into why they're having another wave - are demonstrating that a 3rd shot is needed to patch over the decline in effectiveness over time.
If Pfizer / AZ / Moderna etc was 89% effective and stayed there this would all be over.
That’s just not seen in the ONS survey, the rate has been flat for the oldest cohort. If there was significant fading of effectiveness you would expect that number to be rising significantly.
So the ONS statistical survey is medically more accurate than the virologists study?
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
You said the latest Israeli studies show double vax to be 89% effective. That just isn't true - their latest studies - into why they're having another wave - are demonstrating that a 3rd shot is needed to patch over the decline in effectiveness over time.
If Pfizer / AZ / Moderna etc was 89% effective and stayed there this would all be over.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
FFP2, so yes.
If you are wearing FFP2s then you are being selfish. FFP2s have an exhalation valve which means you still expel aerosols onto others. Surgical masks are actually BETTER at protecting others. You are only protecting yourself
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
Wow! Get on the phone to the German government quick, tell them how selfish they were in making me buy a box of them!
Why do I have a stack of FFP2 masks? Because they were a legal requirement. And your article states clearly they are better for both wearer and others vs "community masks" - cloth.
You've travelled a lot Sean. You know why FFP2 are mandated in so many places. You've been there.
Could it be that the German government made a mistake? Surely not.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
You don't need to be an expert to look at the actual results in practice of the various interventions that have been tried - if you do you can easily see that the pharmaceutical interventions have had a much greater impact than the non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Masks in particular have in practice had no discernable impact. I suspect this is because (1)a small but significant proportion of us are medically exempt; (2) the most popular masks have been the cloth ones which don't filter out that much aerosols even under ideal conditions (I've found studies ranging from claims of 10% to 37%) - and virtually nobody uses them properly anyway.
There's a reason why the pandemic preparedness plan recommended against them. When the inevitable public enquiry comes it really needs to look at why the government was panicked into binning its plan.
I'm sorry, but when anyone refers to the Pandemic Influenza Response Plan and glosses over that it was specifically about influenza, I tend to filter out what they're saying. Even if it may well be otherwise accurate. Probably a fault in myself.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
Jesus Christ, Jonathan Van-Tam, the "qualified" man you revere on this issue, famously said "masks are useless, my friend in Hong Kong told me" (this despite everyone in Hong Kong wearing a mask. Odd that)
He's a fricking idiot. You are pathetically grovelling to establishment half-wits. Grow a spine
You misunderstand RP, he wants the government to u-turn on plan b or c or masks regardless of what's actually happening on the ground. If England (and the rest of the UK) has hit herd immunity and we continue to see the current big drops in cases it will prove the UK government position was right (run hot in the summer and autumn, no restrictions) and that Europe was wrong (prevent spread, retain NPIs). In his small world the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. This would upend that as European countries head into lockdown 4 and the UK exits the pandemic entirely.
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
Max you are accusing RP of hating the UK and loving Europe just like you were with me. I think we can argue about stuff without resorting to people's lack of patriotism.
Re the 3rd jab it did start as a bit of a shambles but then got turned around pretty impressively. I saw the change in action as I was on the verge of my booster when it was all wrong and with in a couple of weeks they turned it around to become a very effective experience. The 1st two were very successful throughout I thought.
If you are wearing FFP2s then you are being selfish. FFP2s have an exhalation valve which means you still expel aerosols onto others. Surgical masks are actually BETTER at protecting others. You are only protecting yourself
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
You said the latest Israeli studies show double vax to be 89% effective. That just isn't true - their latest studies - into why they're having another wave - are demonstrating that a 3rd shot is needed to patch over the decline in effectiveness over time.
If Pfizer / AZ / Moderna etc was 89% effective and stayed there this would all be over.
That’s just not seen in the ONS survey, the rate has been flat for the oldest cohort. If there was significant fading of effectiveness you would expect that number to be rising significantly.
So the ONS statistical survey is medically more accurate than the virologists study?
It could be, certainly the ONS data will be more relevant for the UK since it’s data actually taken in the UK. Or do you think the ONS data is wrong?
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
Both of which are permanent, I’m not sure that will be the case for masks.
I think at some point in the distant future we might also stop vaccinating for this too. But not yet.
That's extremely unlikely. If anything we'll get everyone done, old people get an annual shot and kids get one at some point and then another one when they turn 16.
COVID is with us forever, the pharmaceutical interventions will also be here forever.
Google does not immediately throw up any obvious clusters of Welsh-speakers in Shropshire. Indeed the first few references are all about Welsh speaking persisting "around Oswestry" into the 1970s. Which rather suggests the opposite?
I think the OP said that didn’t he? I read his post as meaning the Gallophone area stretched from OUTSIDE Oswestry, west to the border, an area that seems to roughly equate to (the very Welsh sounding!) English village of Nant-y-Gollen and environs when looking at the map?
To be fair I didn't see the original comment which kicked off this intriguing debate.
I'd love there to be a remote, lost, Welsh speaking village in England, in the Marches, but having seen the last Welsh speakers in Herefordshire (invading farmers) disappear in my childhood I doubt there are any in Shropshire.
I wonder how many businesses have chosen to set up just on the English side of the border due to the required bilingualism for businesses in Wales?
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
It might be the "general view" of the ill-informed. Its not the general view of health professionals. We need to keep wearing them for now to stop the current sustained high-level of infections becoming another mega spike which leads to calamity over the winter. Once we get to the spring Covid seems to drop into the background and we can stop to rethink.
Why would the "current sustained high-level of infections" become another mega spike? Why do you think numbers are dropping so much at the moment? The question at the moment seems to be more how far they will fall and at what overall level they will settle. It is interesting to note that positive tests recorded (by specimen date) have been flat in Scotland for weeks. It seems like that something similar will happen soon in England (although what level is a bit unclear as half term testing is distorting the trend figures a bit - in the sense of exaggerating the falls during half term and but consequently underplaying the falls since)
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
Jesus Christ, Jonathan Van-Tam, the "qualified" man you revere on this issue, famously said "masks are useless, my friend in Hong Kong told me" (this despite everyone in Hong Kong wearing a mask. Odd that)
He's a fricking idiot. You are pathetically grovelling to establishment half-wits. Grow a spine
And in case you didn’t notice, the entire premise of his response is wrong (yet again) as nowhere did I suggest that he was advocating the closure of pubs. I was talking about mask mandates, which really ought to have been clear from my question which cited, er, mask mandates.
I still don't understand your point about masks in pubs. Either they are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not. You think based on your opinion, I know based on evidence.
So what was your point? Oh yes. You are an anti-masker. The "significant imposition" you project onto pubs, theatres etc is actually on you. If that's your position then why not just say so?
I was at a Christmas market yesterday with tens of thousands of people squashed together so they could hardly move. Almost none of them were wearing masks.
Why would they need to? People in England have been told go back to normal, no mask needed, look at the government crushed into the commons mocking people asking for masks etc etc etc.
Getting some kind of control again is going to be hard. Double-jabbed = free, thats been the consistent message. Go back to your normal lives.
"Double-jabbed = free" was the plan to get us out of authoritarian measures. The silver bullet. If you are now saying "Double-jabbed = still not free" then are changing the goalposts and part of the problem.
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
The UK booster programme started relatively late compared to some other nations, but is going at a decent pace now. It's a shame it didn't get an earlier approval.
They occasionally even spark off an incipient panic attack - that "I can't breathe." I've been twitchy about anything restricting my ability to breathe for as long as I can remember; there's a very real possibility that this is due to a very severe bout of pertussis when I was a baby. (An antivax scare at the time collapsed herd immunity. Before it was all over, over a hundred died. I was very nearly amongst them).
However, I don't conflate "I don't like them" with "They don't work." As Spiegelhalter says: try spitting on someone when wearing a mask.
The balance of the decent studies points to them helping by a small amount. Maybe 10-20% reduction in R. Sometimes that makes a difference. Frequently, it won't make a serious difference.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
This isn't like seatbelts and speed limits. That you think it is shows you don't know what you're talking about.
Whatever, it's still not either/or.
Again you've got no idea what you're chatting about.
So you think it IS either or? You think if you're double vaxxed the elastic won't hold and you can't wear a mask? You fucking fool.
No it's living in a world of pharmaceutical intervention vs a world of non-pharmaceutical intervention. We have moved into the first category now that vaccines and other treatments exist. Non-pharmaceutical intervention is no longer necessary. The whole point of having NPIs was to wait until the PIs were available. Well they're available and if there's people stupid enough to not get what's available that's on them. In a vaccinated population NPIs are not necessary. You might make yourself feel superior to others by putting on your mask (or as I suspect, telling us you do) but it's nothing more than COVID theatre for dickheads.
So you're shifting all your chips onto the word "necessary" which is an interesting move. I'm not sure if you realise that there's a whole word of stuff in between "performative" and "necessary". There are concepts in between such as "useful but not desirable", "probably a good idea", and so on.
Masks work. Vaccines work too. If you have to choose one or the other, choose vaccines, but you don't HAVE to choose one or the other. This is so basic, I think even you can get there eventually.
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
The UK booster programme started relatively late compared to some other nations, but is going at a decent pace now. It's a shame it didn't get an earlier approval.
The booster jabs and schoolkids’ jabs both started late in the UK, because the scientists advising the government decided to become political, kept suggesting that giving away vaccines to the rest of the world was more important than using them at home.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
FFP2, so yes.
If you are wearing FFP2s then you are being selfish. FFP2s have an exhalation valve which means you still expel aerosols onto others. Surgical masks are actually BETTER at protecting others. You are only protecting yourself
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
Wow! Get on the phone to the German government quick, tell them how selfish they were in making me buy a box of them!
Why do I have a stack of FFP2 masks? Because they were a legal requirement. And your article states clearly they are better for both wearer and others vs "community masks" - cloth.
You've travelled a lot Sean. You know why FFP2 are mandated in so many places. You've been there.
Could it be that the German government made a mistake? Surely not.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
So actually what you are saying is that in practice we will maintain masks forever. No thanks.
Forever? We will get to the point where there is sufficient protection in the vaccinations most of us have had to discard them. I'd quite like to burn mine I hate them that much.
Er, a quick recap of your posts:
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
Oh dear God. I despise wearing a mask. But its become routine. I will rejoice when we don't need them, but me wearing one protects others.
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
Are you wearing an N95 surgical mask? If not then you are being basically as selfish as the rest of us who don't bother post vaccination.
FFP2, so yes.
If you are wearing FFP2s then you are being selfish. FFP2s have an exhalation valve which means you still expel aerosols onto others. Surgical masks are actually BETTER at protecting others. You are only protecting yourself
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
Wow! Get on the phone to the German government quick, tell them how selfish they were in making me buy a box of them!
Why do I have a stack of FFP2 masks? Because they were a legal requirement. And your article states clearly they are better for both wearer and others vs "community masks" - cloth.
You've travelled a lot Sean. You know why FFP2 are mandated in so many places. You've been there.
No, I'm right and you're wrong. FFP2s are less good at protecting others, because of the valve, if they have one
"FFP2 masks are intended to protect the carrier from the inhalation of airborne particles. The FFP2 testing procedure requires also a maximal level of microbial contaminated air that leaks through a respirator. This is the reason why they require fit-testing to ensure a tight seal around the user’s face. Many users perceive this as discomfort, which may interfere with compliance [43]. Of importance, FFP2 masks with expiratory valves are not indicated in the COVID-19 setting, as they DO NOT PROTECT OTHERS."
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
The UK booster programme started relatively late compared to some other nations, but is going at a decent pace now. It's a shame it didn't get an earlier approval.
Yeah agree, and I think the artificial limitation on 50+ age is stupid too. It's clear that we're demand limited to about 70-80% of the eligible cohort, reducing the gap to 5 months and making all 18+ eligible would basically end this in 3-4 weeks, even faster than what's currently happening.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
No. Wrong again. I didn’t even suggest you would ban pubs. You said you would impose a mask mandate, which of course would include pubs.
My question to you is would you also mandate vaccinations?
You know my position on this. I'm against vaccine passports so why would I be in favour of pinning people down to vaccinate them?
So whats your point? Here and everywhere else you need to wear a mask indoors in public buildings. You take them off when sat eating or drinking. They remain open and thriving and with less infections which means more people available to work and go out spending money. A "significant imposition" that pretty much everywhere else manages without a fuss.
Ultimately its down to who is the expert here. I am not. You apparently are. Perhaps the NHS should listen to you.
I don’t claim to be an expert, and never have. My view is that we should retain the status quo. I’ve been clear about that. I would mandate neither vaccinations nor masks, although I would advocate a stronger public campaign on vaccinations to whittle down the refuseniks.
I find your position absolutely irrational. You would mandate masks - which are a daily imposition, affect 100% of the population and have only a moderate impact. But you would not mandate vaccinations, which are a minor inconvenience, affect just 5% of the population (the unvaxxed cohort) and have a huge impact. That is a bizarre position in my view. Deeply irrational.
I'm happy to be "irrational" in your eyes. As my position is shared by much of the developed world I'll take your comments under advisement.
The rational view would of course be mandatory vaccinations AND masks until completed. Then again as vaccinations have proven to be ineffective at wholly stopping the virus (unlike some other vaccines for other viruses) we would need to retain masks even with a full mandatory vaccination programme until we had all had sufficient rounds of boosters to stop this thing.
I do love the "moderate impact" lie from you ant-maskers. It doesn't matter how much the scientists prove the significant reduction in transmission gained from the proper wearing of masks, you and your still say "not proven".
I’m not anti mask, I simply wouldn’t make them a legal requirement. I often wear one myself on busy trains etc.
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
He's also completely wrong. Being double vaxxed has got a much bigger reduction in spread than wearing a cloth mask. The only mask that actually prevents spread entirely is the N95, everything else has got efficacy worse than being double jabbed.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
It isn't either/or. We use seatbelts and speed limits.
Both of which are permanent, I’m not sure that will be the case for masks.
I think at some point in the distant future we might also stop vaccinating for this too. But not yet.
If it’s anything like the flu we are going to be with it, and vaccinating against it, for a very long time. I doubt we’ll be wearing masks then.
I agree that vaccines will be around longer than widespread mask-wearing.
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
Jesus Christ, Jonathan Van-Tam, the "qualified" man you revere on this issue, famously said "masks are useless, my friend in Hong Kong told me" (this despite everyone in Hong Kong wearing a mask. Odd that)
He's a fricking idiot. You are pathetically grovelling to establishment half-wits. Grow a spine
You misunderstand RP, he wants the government to u-turn on plan b or c or masks regardless of what's actually happening on the ground. If England (and the rest of the UK) has hit herd immunity and we continue to see the current big drops in cases it will prove the UK government position was right (run hot in the summer and autumn, no restrictions) and that Europe was wrong (prevent spread, retain NPIs). In his small world the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. This would upend that as European countries head into lockdown 4 and the UK exits the pandemic entirely.
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
Max you are accusing RP of hating the UK and loving Europe just like you were with me. I think we can argue about stuff without resorting to people's lack of patriotism.
Re the 3rd jab it did start as a bit of a shambles but then got turned around pretty impressively. I saw the change in action as I was on the verge of my booster when it was all wrong and with in a couple of weeks they turned it around to become a very effective experience. The 1st two were very successful throughout I thought.
It seems to me that one of the things about the booster jab is that it's being portrayed constantly in a negative light ("only x done out of y eligible"). When one could just as easily present it in a positive light ("x done and growing by y per day"). To portray it as something of a failure when (assuming it does something) every booster improves the UK position is disingenuous. And it is understandable for many reasons that boosters will never be at a pace of the original rollout. Whether it be because of deaths, feeling that double vax gives reasonable protection, significant numbers having contracted Covid and feel that Double Vax + infection generated immunity is enough etc etc
You would mandate mask wearing in England now. Okay. You would introduce a law that makes it illegal to visit pubs, bars, theatres, clubs and shops without a mask. That’s a very significant imposition.
Would you then also mandate vaccination in England from today?
?
Where did I say ban visiting pubs etc? They aren't banned up here or in Germany or in the rest of the world that hasn't been as daft as England in dropping the requirement to wear masks. England - like the rest of the developed world - should have maintained a mask mandate.
You didn't. you can't put the genie back in the bottle. Politically any new restrictions will be difficult because so many people down there think its all over. Hence the need for Plan B, Plan C, "Jabbed or Christmas gets it" etc etc
You keep asking what I think. I don't think. But I listen to what Whitty, Vallance, Van-Tam, Taylor etc think. I know nothing on this subject, I am not a doctor or a virologist or someone qualified to disagree with them. Unlike you and many on here apparently.
You don't need to be an expert to look at the actual results in practice of the various interventions that have been tried - if you do you can easily see that the pharmaceutical interventions have had a much greater impact than the non-pharmaceutical interventions.
Masks in particular have in practice had no discernable impact. I suspect this is because (1)a small but significant proportion of us are medically exempt; (2) the most popular masks have been the cloth ones which don't filter out that much aerosols even under ideal conditions (I've found studies ranging from claims of 10% to 37%) - and virtually nobody uses them properly anyway.
There's a reason why the pandemic preparedness plan recommended against them. When the inevitable public enquiry comes it really needs to look at why the government was panicked into binning its plan.
Wrong. Masks do work, in practice.
Then why does the imposition and removal or mask mandates not show up in the positive test data?
If you are wearing FFP2s then you are being selfish. FFP2s have an exhalation valve which means you still expel aerosols onto others. Surgical masks are actually BETTER at protecting others. You are only protecting yourself
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
FFP2 masks come with or without valves, but generally with, as they are more comfortable to breathe through. However if you are wearing a mask with a valve you are NOT protecting your fellow humans, just yourself
They occasionally even spark off an incipient panic attack - that "I can't breathe." I've been twitchy about anything restricting my ability to breathe for as long as I can remember; there's a very real possibility that this is due to a very severe bout of pertussis when I was a baby. (An antivax scare at the time collapsed herd immunity. Before it was all over, over a hundred died. I was very nearly amongst them).
However, I don't conflate "I don't like them" with "They don't work." As Spiegelhalter says: try spitting on someone when wearing a mask.
The balance of the decent studies points to them helping by a small amount. Maybe 10-20% reduction in R. Sometimes that makes a difference. Frequently, it won't make a serious difference.
It is possible to agree that masks make a 10-20% reduction in R, or whatever, and still disagree with people wearing them on principle - especially post Freedom Day. Aside from the fearmongering and totalitarian tones, they make the difference between partially deaf people being able to function and not for one thing.
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
The UK booster programme started relatively late compared to some other nations, but is going at a decent pace now. It's a shame it didn't get an earlier approval.
The booster jabs and schoolkids’ jabs both started late in the UK, because the scientists advising the government decided to become political, kept suggesting that giving away vaccines to the rest of the world was more important than using them at home.
I really wish we had tried to vaccinate children over the summer. It would have saved a lot of disruption and stopped cases rising so fast.
Comments
*incorrect because originally Gallic originally referred to the Gauls, whou would have spoken something like the Britons did at the time.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Walloon
When the Saxons came over they labelled the people already living on these islands as "foreigners".
Masks have a moderate mitigating impact on spread, I think that’s the general view. As for vaccinations “proving ineffective at wholly stopping the virus” did anyone ever claim they were 100% effective? I’m fairly certain that nobody in any authoritative position claimed such a thing. You posts are increasingly outlandish - they are bordering on antivaxxery now!
Getting some kind of control again is going to be hard. Double-jabbed = free, thats been the consistent message. Go back to your normal lives.
"The 2011 Census recorded approximately 200 households in the area [ie Oswestry] where Welsh was the family language. Whether any of these were native Shropshire families or whether they were immigrants from over the border, we cannot tell."
So perhaps a few dozen are left..... but do they ever speak it? I wonder if it is ever heard in the pubs or shops?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/face-coverings-and-covid-19-statement-from-an-expert-panel
Post 1: Either [masks] are a massive hindrance to the pub / theatre / cinema as you suggest or they are not. You think they are. I know they are not.
Post 2: I'd quite like to burn [my mask] I hate them that much.
Are there two Rochdale Pioneers on this forum? I guess the plural avatar name should have given me a clue!
It problem is it gives us different registers and people get judged unconsciously on the basis of which words they use. For example "to buy" / "to purchase".
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Cymrophone
the evidence suggests that all types of face coverings are, to some extent, effective in reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in both healthcare and public, community settings – this is through a combination of source control and protection to the wearer (high confidence)
laboratory data shows that non-medical masks (such as cloth masks) made of 2 or 3 layers may have similar filtration efficiency to surgical masks (high confidence)
epidemiological evidence (usually of low or very low certainty) from SARS-CoV-2 and other respiratory viruses suggests that, in healthcare settings, N95 respirators (or equivalent) may be more effective than surgical masks in reducing the risk of infection in the mask wearer [footnote 3] (low confidence)
evidence, mainly from laboratory studies, suggests that face coverings should be well-fitted and cover the mouth and nose to increase effectiveness (as fit is a limiting factor in the overall mask protective efficiency independently of the filtration efficiency of its fabric) (high confidence)
there is a need for improved training (in health and care settings) and public health messaging (in community settings) on mask fitting (and quality in the community) (medium confidence)
there is insufficient evidence to support the use of double-masking in a healthcare setting (not ranked due to insufficient evidence)
"The wards of Oswestry South (1.15%), Oswestry East (0.86%) and St Oswald (0.71%) had the highest percentage of residents giving Welsh as their main language."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language?wprov=sfla1
See the bit on Geographic Distributuon
Just look at his bluster over the supposedly failing booster programme which has now done 10m doses. The facts don't matter to him, just that the UK is always wrong and Europe always right. Weirdly he voted leave. 🤷♂️
I still have to wear a mask to shop. To go out. Our shops are full. Pubs overflowing as described by uniondivvie. Gigs are happening. Masks are not stopping people going out even if many people like me hate having to wear them.
It really isn't hard to follow. I would like not not wear a mask. But as I am not a selfish git I wear one.
I have spent many happy evenings in this particular pub, although it has changed hands since I last visited:
https://www.thewestarms.com/
The most efficient path to denying the Tories a majority next time round involves a 3% swing to the NNVTP (Next non viable Tory party).
3%
7 Midlands 10m
8 South 21m
5 London 9m
12 North 15.5m
3 Scotland 5.5m
5 Wales 3m
As there'll be some random variability - here are the 4% numbers, I'd say the North is the most important region of England tbh. Per head of population it is very clearly Wales.
4%
8 Midlands 10m
13 South 21m
6 London 9m
17 North 15.5m
4 Scotland 5.5m
8 Wales 3m
With COP26 putting the spotlight on 'green crap', those of a swivel eyed climate change denier persuasion are also likely to be jumping ship. ReFuk is the obvious destination for them.
I don't know where RP is getting his facts from, the latest Israeli studies show that a double vaxxed person is 89% less able to spread the virus. Cloth masks are somewhere around 30-40% depending on which study you look at.
Mask wearing is a performative act in a vaccinated population.
https://forum.saysomethingin.com/t/is-oswestry-welsh/2721/116
Seems it might be encountered occasionally:
"I sometimes hear Welsh in the streets and shops of Oswestry. I chatted in Welsh to a shopkeeper the other day in what used to be Martin Britton’s. Shows that it’s worth making the first scary move and addressing someone in Welsh, in case you get a pleasant surprise!" -
That's from late 2018
There also used to be a significant Welsh-speaking presence in Liverpool, of course. That wasn't a historical hangover, that was the result of immigration from North Wales to Liverpool in the nineteenth century. There are still traces of it from place to place. And in my view the Liverpool accent owes far more to North Wales than it does its more commonly supposed ancestor of Ireland.
Aged aunt in hospital for fall. Acquired chest infection since being admitted. Okay that's totally expected in the NHS. Spoke to a nurse last night, she said I could come and visit. Turn up this morning and the ward's closed as they have a Covid outbreak and it has been closed for several days.
Fucking useless.
Also, as I dig deeper, it seems this is the last remnants of a larger Welsh language presence, not a troop of new immigrants, so these Cymraegers in Oswestry are like those aboriginal tribes that still drink in their burned out cars in the billabongs near Alice Springs, speaking like the ancestors did 50,000 years ago, even though no one else can understand
Yay
Full capacity 12,500 people at Wembley Arena last night for a rave.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/fatboy-slim-come-long-way-together-review-joyous-post-lockdown/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WbIKhRT3DsA
I always do a little mime after putting it on, to keep it performative.
A tidal surge starts small. Thats why its a surge, not yet a wave. Its coming though.
"In contrast to community masks, FFP2 masks are designed to not only protect others, but also yourself. However, masks with exhalation valves provide a considerably lower level of protection to others than masks without exhalation valves."
https://www.zusammengegencorona.de/en/masking-up-ffp2-masks-to-protect-others-and-yourself/
It was amusing to see how many patients in the waiting room were not wearing their marks properly especially below the nose would you believe
If Pfizer / AZ / Moderna etc was 89% effective and stayed there this would all be over.
But not yet.
https://twitter.com/SquireForYou/status/1457121009362952198
In Greece, antivaxxers have been paying doctors 400 euros to give them shots of bacteriostatic water instead of th #COVID19 vaccine.
Except the doctors have been pocketing the money and giving them the real shot anyway:
Why do I have a stack of FFP2 masks? Because they were a legal requirement. And your article states clearly they are better for both wearer and others vs "community masks" - cloth.
You've travelled a lot Sean. You know why FFP2 are mandated in so many places. You've been there.
Excellent.
Re the 3rd jab it did start as a bit of a shambles but then got turned around pretty impressively. I saw the change in action as I was on the verge of my booster when it was all wrong and with in a couple of weeks they turned it around to become a very effective experience. The 1st two were very successful throughout I thought.
COVID is with us forever, the pharmaceutical interventions will also be here forever.
They occasionally even spark off an incipient panic attack - that "I can't breathe." I've been twitchy about anything restricting my ability to breathe for as long as I can remember; there's a very real possibility that this is due to a very severe bout of pertussis when I was a baby.
(An antivax scare at the time collapsed herd immunity. Before it was all over, over a hundred died. I was very nearly amongst them).
However, I don't conflate "I don't like them" with "They don't work." As Spiegelhalter says: try spitting on someone when wearing a mask.
The balance of the decent studies points to them helping by a small amount. Maybe 10-20% reduction in R. Sometimes that makes a difference. Frequently, it won't make a serious difference.
Masks work. Vaccines work too. If you have to choose one or the other, choose vaccines, but you don't HAVE to choose one or the other. This is so basic, I think even you can get there eventually.
"FFP2 masks are intended to protect the carrier from the inhalation of airborne particles. The FFP2 testing procedure requires also a maximal level of microbial contaminated air that leaks through a respirator. This is the reason why they require fit-testing to ensure a tight seal around the user’s face. Many users perceive this as discomfort, which may interfere with compliance [43]. Of importance, FFP2 masks with expiratory valves are not indicated in the COVID-19 setting, as they DO NOT PROTECT OTHERS."
Caps mine
https://aricjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13756-020-00763-0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FFP_standards