"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
It is not whether they test Covid positive we should be worried about, so much as if even the vaccinated get hospitalised and die from it
This is the far right tory lie
For a start we already know that vaccinated people are now getting admitted to hospital. But as significantly, they act as viral vectors, thus spreading the virus to others who are vulnerable. So one apparently non-hospitalised "I'm alright Jack" covid positive tory is potentially killing loads of other people. Which is about par for the course for self-centred nasty capitalists.
But the other even more significant issue is that this variant looks like it's a lot more deadly. Vaccine protection is lower.
For that latter reason it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we act hard and fast.
And not selfishly like you.
What are you on about? HYUFD is just making a perfectly sensible point: we know this wretchedly infective Nu strain will sweep the world, the big question is: can it hurt or kill the vaxxed in large numbers?
Exactly, complete ignorance of the main point ie does double vaccination still stop you getting hospitalised and dying from Covid in large numbers even if you get Nu or not. Even double vaccination now is much less effective reducing case spread than it is reducing rates of hospitalisation and Covid death even without Nu.
However only if rates of hospitalisation and death rise rapidly again because double vaccination does not stop serious ill effects from Nu if you get it would we need another lockdown
I've called the Gov't/SAGE out when it's got it wrong/been too slow but with the combination of natural alpha, delta and original wild type immunity; vaccinations, sequencing, large scale availability of lft, ease of access to pcr tests, booster programs, red list and quick travel response we're in as good a place for the nu variant as we could reasonably expect to be I think.
"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
It is not whether they test Covid positive we should be worried about, so much as if even the vaccinated get hospitalised and die from it
This is the far right tory lie
For a start we already know that vaccinated people are now getting admitted to hospital. But as significantly, they act as viral vectors, thus spreading the virus to others who are vulnerable. So one apparently non-hospitalised "I'm alright Jack" covid positive tory is potentially killing loads of other people. Which is about par for the course for self-centred nasty capitalists.
But the other even more significant issue is that this variant looks like it's a lot more deadly. Vaccine protection is lower.
For that latter reason it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we act hard and fast.
And not selfishly like you.
What are you on about? HYUFD is just making a perfectly sensible point: we know this wretchedly infective Nu strain will sweep the world, the big question is: can it hurt or kill the vaxxed in large numbers?
Is it more infective or more dangerous ?
I doubt it will be both.
I believe that was the initial theory (based on previous epidemics) but Delta turned out to be more transmittable and as serious as the initial version.
And the point, as I explained earlier, is that if any of those 285 were granted asylum in the country they were sent to they could immediately return to the UK as a matter of right. That is why so little use was made of it. It was an administrative procedure, not a restriction on substantive rights.
Edit, it is also why I am more than a bit suspicious about the claims that many other EU countries grant asylum much more frequently than the UK. I dare say that they did but, before Brexit, where did they actually end up? Given our complete failure to monitor the flows of people to and from the EU which meant that we ended up giving out 6m rights to remain, we simply do not know the answer to that but I have my suspicions.
The same draws that have these refugees in little boats, the English language, the ready availability of work, the non contributory benefits system, a sense of decency and tolerance, even Man United, god help us, all applied then too.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
What's wrong with what we are doing today. Strenuously (!) discouraging migrants, having laws and processes in place to filter out genuine asylum seekers, while at the same time humanely dealing with those that ignore the warnings and come anyway.
Now of course the Tories, the party of Laura Norder, don't seem very good at the laws and processes to filter out and act upon non-genuine asylum seekers but in principle the system is just about doing what it was once designed to do. A few thousand people trying to cross the channel which they always will do regardless of illusory deals with Albania.
I don't see that the current situation is particularly broken aside from headlines in the Daily Express if you are Boris Johnson.
What's wrong with what we are doing today is we are tacitly facilitating the transportation of tens of thousands in a very deadly and dangerous crossing that will inevitably result in many, many deaths.
If anyone who crosses the Channel is immediately put on a plane and sent to a third party nation like Rwanda then the Channel crossings would drop to zero almost overnight. Its only because once they're here, they stay here, that people are doing these deadly crossings.
We should have safe, humane and legal routes into this country that take place via planes and legal boats, not sinking dinghies and rafts.
The key fact is the Tory vote went up more than the Greens, despite everything that has happened in the past month.
Not forgetting that 12 years into opposition Labour are losing votes in Local Council By-Elections
Just looked at the results from last night. Labour got clobbered in the Midlands wards - Newcastle-under-Lyme and Nuneaton. No doubt, local factors. Even so, must be concerning to Labour that they are still struggling in that crucial part of the country - smaller, post-industrial towns - where they lost so many seats in 2019.
"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
Whats missing from the Israel news is how ill the people are. We know that none of the vaccines are 100%, even after boosters, but if you don't get sick, job done.
"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
It is not whether they test Covid positive we should be worried about, so much as if even the vaccinated get hospitalised and die from it
This is the far right tory lie
For a start we already know that vaccinated people are now getting admitted to hospital. But as significantly, they act as viral vectors, thus spreading the virus to others who are vulnerable. So one apparently non-hospitalised "I'm alright Jack" covid positive tory is potentially killing loads of other people. Which is about par for the course for self-centred nasty capitalists.
But the other even more significant issue is that this variant looks like it's a lot more deadly. Vaccine protection is lower.
For that latter reason it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we act hard and fast.
And not selfishly like you.
What are you on about? HYUFD is just making a perfectly sensible point: we know this wretchedly infective Nu strain will sweep the world, the big question is: can it hurt or kill the vaxxed in large numbers?
Is it more infective or more dangerous ?
I doubt it will be both.
Is that true, though, for delta versus beta?
Not an expert and I don't know the respective R numbers for Beta, Delate the new South African variant or the new UK variant of Delta.
The Israel case came from Malawi, from whence we have not yet banned flights.
That Priti stupidity again. We Took Back Control of our borders, which means we decide to leave the sodding thing open to all and sundry. If there is a new mega variant out there that has Sajid shatting his pants live on Sky News, should we not at least be planning to impose border controls?
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism (plus I find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring).
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
What's wrong with what we are doing today. Strenuously (!) discouraging migrants, having laws and processes in place to filter out genuine asylum seekers, while at the same time humanely dealing with those that ignore the warnings and come anyway.
Now of course the Tories, the party of Laura Norder, don't seem very good at the laws and processes to filter out and act upon non-genuine asylum seekers but in principle the system is just about doing what it was once designed to do. A few thousand people trying to cross the channel which they always will do regardless of illusory deals with Albania.
I don't see that the current situation is particularly broken aside from headlines in the Daily Express if you are Boris Johnson.
What's wrong with what we are doing today is we are tacitly facilitating the transportation of tens of thousands in a very deadly and dangerous crossing that will inevitably result in many, many deaths.
If anyone who crosses the Channel is immediately put on a plane and sent to a third party nation like Rwanda then the Channel crossings would drop to zero almost overnight. Its only because once they're here, they stay here, that people are doing these deadly crossings.
We should have safe, humane and legal routes into this country that take place via planes and legal boats, not sinking dinghies and rafts.
As I keep pointing out, to render boat people to *anywhere* we need to detain them and that means catching them. Plenty of footage out there of boats landing and people just wandering off with no authorities in sight.
Rendering to wherever is a virtue-signal to the people who want the forrin well away from them. There are hard-to-do steps before you can do that as as the "diplomacy" overnight demonstrated that lot are clueless.
The key fact is the Tory vote went up more than the Greens, despite everything that has happened in the past month.
Not forgetting that 12 years into opposition Labour are losing votes in Local Council By-Elections
Just looked at the results from last night. Labour got clobbered in the Midlands wards - Newcastle-under-Lyme and Nuneaton. No doubt, local factors. Even so, must be concerning to Labour that they are still struggling in that crucial part of the country - smaller, post-industrial towns - where they lost so many seats in 2019.
I doubt that there was a single local council by election between 92-97 where Conservatives increased their vote. Labour may be polling slightly better but when it comes to actual votes people aren't changing to them.
12 GW being generated by wind of 32 GW total demand. It's not good enough, it ought to be at least double that when there's a moderate storm about.
In the longer run what we would actually need is something like 45GW (to pick a number at random) and the capacity to store the surplus efficiently for use when it is not windy. Whilst 24 GW would clearly be an improvement it too is not sufficient. Still, at least our gas consumption is temporarily reduced.
Given the increase in electricity consumption implied by electrifying land transport and domestic heating and industry I would think we need to aim for closer to ten times our current wind capacity.
And add tidal, mini-nukes, interconnectors to Moroccan solar...
There's 24GW of installed wind in the UK. Unless you are planning absolutely massive storage facilities, I don't see how the UK could possibly just that much - even including the electrification of domestic heating and road transport.
It may be 24GW in theory but most of the time it is 20% of that.
If it were up to me I would indeed be aiming for 10x that figure, which would increase our general wind from the 5-10GW range to the 50-100GW range and when we have more wind than we need then we should be able to export it via interconnectors.
Furthermore we should have a lot of storage (which will inevitably come once cars are plugged into a smart network they would act as a distributed storage network too).
Finally for those times when we really have more cheap power than we can need then there should be some low-labour, high-energy on-demand businesses that can consume that energy and turn it into something productive, while shutting down when energy is low and expensive. One example could be the electrolysis of water into hydrogen.
Those applying for asylum in the UK should apply in the first safe country they reach. Those coming in boats across the channel should not be granted asylum under any circumstances whatsoever
And why is that? There is this myth presented by the Tories to the gullible that asylum has to be requested in the first safe country.
Even if it were true about applying in the first safe country (it’s not):
should-a, could-a, would-a
as they say on Judge Judy.
There is an issue with this. There is no requirement to request asylum in the first safe country. Fair enough. But when someone doesn't do so, in many eyes they are casting doubt on their level of fear and need for asylum.
The truth is that many or most of those trying to get here are seeking a better life, not actively being persecuted. i don't blame them, and its possible to admire them for trying to improve their lot in life. The issues that arise are mainly cultural. People in the UK have their culture and values, and its not right if incomers wish to change that. Not everyone will agree with me on this. Many will. And westerners are hypocrites too, travelling the world and expecting to behave as they would at home.
The Israel case came from Malawi, from whence we have not yet banned flights.
It seems likely it didn't come from South Africa, but rather they are the only southern African country that has good testing and monitoring of variants and so were the first to pick it up.
Those applying for asylum in the UK should apply in the first safe country they reach. Those coming in boats across the channel should not be granted asylum under any circumstances whatsoever
And why is that? There is this myth presented by the Tories to the gullible that asylum has to be requested in the first safe country.
Even if it were true about applying in the first safe country (it’s not):
should-a, could-a, would-a
as they say on Judge Judy.
There is an issue with this. There is no requirement to request asylum in the first safe country. Fair enough. But when someone doesn't do so, in many eyes they are casting doubt on their level of fear and need for asylum.
The truth is that many or most of those trying to get here are seeking a better life, not actively being persecuted. i don't blame them, and its possible to admire them for trying to improve their lot in life. The issues that arise are mainly cultural. People in the UK have their culture and values, and its not right if incomers wish to change that. Not everyone will agree with me on this. Many will. And westerners are hypocrites too, travelling the world and expecting to behave as they would at home.
Again, that’s a lovely nuance. But it doesn’t affect the channel sitch one iota.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
What's wrong with what we are doing today. Strenuously (!) discouraging migrants, having laws and processes in place to filter out genuine asylum seekers, while at the same time humanely dealing with those that ignore the warnings and come anyway.
Now of course the Tories, the party of Laura Norder, don't seem very good at the laws and processes to filter out and act upon non-genuine asylum seekers but in principle the system is just about doing what it was once designed to do. A few thousand people trying to cross the channel which they always will do regardless of illusory deals with Albania.
I don't see that the current situation is particularly broken aside from headlines in the Daily Express if you are Boris Johnson.
What's wrong with what we are doing today is we are tacitly facilitating the transportation of tens of thousands in a very deadly and dangerous crossing that will inevitably result in many, many deaths.
If anyone who crosses the Channel is immediately put on a plane and sent to a third party nation like Rwanda then the Channel crossings would drop to zero almost overnight. Its only because once they're here, they stay here, that people are doing these deadly crossings.
We should have safe, humane and legal routes into this country that take place via planes and legal boats, not sinking dinghies and rafts.
As I keep pointing out, to render boat people to *anywhere* we need to detain them and that means catching them. Plenty of footage out there of boats landing and people just wandering off with no authorities in sight.
Rendering to wherever is a virtue-signal to the people who want the forrin well away from them. There are hard-to-do steps before you can do that as as the "diplomacy" overnight demonstrated that lot are clueless.
We only need to detain them if they don't intend to apply for asylum and wish to disappear altogether.
If they present themselves for asylum, or are met by people as they arrive on shore, then they can be taken straight to the asylum processing centre wherever that may be.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
The Israel case came from Malawi, from whence we have not yet banned flights.
It's probably across most of Africa by now. I would reckon the UK is the most common European country for SA tourists/emigrants, so here too.
If we want to slow this down in any meaningful way you'd want much more comprehensive travel restrictions.
Has to be said, if we're going to slow the advance of the new variant we may need to suspend passenger flights entirely for a couple of weeks, I suspect it is absolutely everywhere already.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
The Israel case came from Malawi, from whence we have not yet banned flights.
It seems likely it didn't come from South Africa, but rather they are the only southern African country that has goodany testing and monitoring of variants and so were the first to pick it up.only ones who could have possibly picked it up
"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
It is not whether they test Covid positive we should be worried about, so much as if even the vaccinated get hospitalised and die from it
This is the far right tory lie
For a start we already know that vaccinated people are now getting admitted to hospital. But as significantly, they act as viral vectors, thus spreading the virus to others who are vulnerable. So one apparently non-hospitalised "I'm alright Jack" covid positive tory is potentially killing loads of other people. Which is about par for the course for self-centred nasty capitalists.
But the other even more significant issue is that this variant looks like it's a lot more deadly. Vaccine protection is lower.
For that latter reason it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we act hard and fast.
And not selfishly like you.
Got evidence for it being more deadly? Thought not.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
French Interior Ministry: ‘We consider Boris Johnson’s public letter unacceptable and in opposition with discussions between counterparts. As a consequence, Priti Patel is not invited anymore to the meeting on Sunday.’
So the French are still trying to play politics, rather than conduct talks with the intention of stopping people drowning in the Channel.
To be frank, it looks as though our PM is the one playing politics, setting out a suggestion which he knew in advance would be unacceptable.
Most, if not all, of those presently waiting in N. France would be an asset to this country, although, of course we have, in concert with the EU, to do 'something' about the continued drift of people to Northern and Western Europe.
On what basis are you making the judgement in the second paragraph? (The one about being an asset to the country). Interested in your evidentiary support.
Young or relatively young people keen to to provide better lives for themselves and their dependents. And prepared to go through considerable difficulties to do so.
Like the guy who blew himself in Liverpool?
If these are people keen to make a better life for themselves and a potential asset to the country then let's consider their application in the normal way. They can compete with everyone else seeking to migrate here. But they get no advantage because they can make an asylum claim and have been able to raise the money to pay people traffickers.
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
This would require a level of candour amongst our ruling class that is almost unimaginable. Far better to continue saying that we simply don't believe your story and refuse the application but then fail to do anything about it letting the person remain here for a decade or more. Or so seems to go the thinking.
"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
It is not whether they test Covid positive we should be worried about, so much as if even the vaccinated get hospitalised and die from it
This is the far right tory lie
For a start we already know that vaccinated people are now getting admitted to hospital. But as significantly, they act as viral vectors, thus spreading the virus to others who are vulnerable. So one apparently non-hospitalised "I'm alright Jack" covid positive tory is potentially killing loads of other people. Which is about par for the course for self-centred nasty capitalists.
But the other even more significant issue is that this variant looks like it's a lot more deadly. Vaccine protection is lower.
For that latter reason it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we act hard and fast.
And not selfishly like you.
What are you on about? HYUFD is just making a perfectly sensible point: we know this wretchedly infective Nu strain will sweep the world, the big question is: can it hurt or kill the vaxxed in large numbers?
Is it more infective or more dangerous ?
I doubt it will be both.
I believe that was the initial theory (based on previous epidemics) but Delta turned out to be more transmittable and as serious as the initial version.
Those applying for asylum in the UK should apply in the first safe country they reach. Those coming in boats across the channel should not be granted asylum under any circumstances whatsoever
And why is that? There is this myth presented by the Tories to the gullible that asylum has to be requested in the first safe country.
Even if it were true about applying in the first safe country (it’s not):
should-a, could-a, would-a
as they say on Judge Judy.
There is an issue with this. There is no requirement to request asylum in the first safe country. Fair enough. But when someone doesn't do so, in many eyes they are casting doubt on their level of fear and need for asylum.
The truth is that many or most of those trying to get here are seeking a better life, not actively being persecuted. i don't blame them, and its possible to admire them for trying to improve their lot in life. The issues that arise are mainly cultural. People in the UK have their culture and values, and its not right if incomers wish to change that. Not everyone will agree with me on this. Many will. And westerners are hypocrites too, travelling the world and expecting to behave as they would at home.
That puts the position very well, but I think that most refugees probably have a mixture of motives. If you are, say, a mechanic in a poor country AND also in an oppressed group, then (a) you want to stop being oppressed (b) you want a better life and (c) because you're oppressed, you have a fair chance of success.
Being more welcoming but aggressively insistent on learning English and accepting UK rules may be an approach (adopted in widely-respected countries like Norway) which many people could accept.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
What's wrong with what we are doing today. Strenuously (!) discouraging migrants, having laws and processes in place to filter out genuine asylum seekers, while at the same time humanely dealing with those that ignore the warnings and come anyway.
Now of course the Tories, the party of Laura Norder, don't seem very good at the laws and processes to filter out and act upon non-genuine asylum seekers but in principle the system is just about doing what it was once designed to do. A few thousand people trying to cross the channel which they always will do regardless of illusory deals with Albania.
I don't see that the current situation is particularly broken aside from headlines in the Daily Express if you are Boris Johnson.
What's wrong with what we are doing today is we are tacitly facilitating the transportation of tens of thousands in a very deadly and dangerous crossing that will inevitably result in many, many deaths.
If anyone who crosses the Channel is immediately put on a plane and sent to a third party nation like Rwanda then the Channel crossings would drop to zero almost overnight. Its only because once they're here, they stay here, that people are doing these deadly crossings.
We should have safe, humane and legal routes into this country that take place via planes and legal boats, not sinking dinghies and rafts.
As I keep pointing out, to render boat people to *anywhere* we need to detain them and that means catching them. Plenty of footage out there of boats landing and people just wandering off with no authorities in sight.
Rendering to wherever is a virtue-signal to the people who want the forrin well away from them. There are hard-to-do steps before you can do that as as the "diplomacy" overnight demonstrated that lot are clueless.
We only need to detain them if they don't intend to apply for asylum and wish to disappear altogether.
If they present themselves for asylum, or are met by people as they arrive on shore, then they can be taken straight to the asylum processing centre wherever that may be.
Regardless of that - we also need to ensure migrants don't have any desire to disappear altogether. Which means we need to crack down a lot further on illegal workers with strict and serious punishments for employing / using them.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
From memory Rwanda have such a deal with Denmark, Israel and the United Nations Human Rights Council. Maybe more too.
And Australia has a comparable deal elsewhere.
It may be politically unpopular with some, but its not out of the question.
Rwanda is not an empty place.
Who said it is?
They're a place that is willing and happy to sign such a deal with other countries (and the United Nations).
For them there's quite an incentive to play along. They get fiscal transfers from richer countries (and the UN) to deal with a 'problem' that other countries don't want to deal with . . . and the migrants who arrive there, most of them move on anyway since Rwanda wasn't where they wanted to go so they're paid to take someone who voluntarily moves themselves on to somewhere else anyway.
The Israel case came from Malawi, from whence we have not yet banned flights.
It seems likely it didn't come from South Africa, but rather they are the only southern African country that has good testing and monitoring of variants and so were the first to pick it up.
Except that’s not the whole truth in this instance. The Nunu was picked up by normal PCR tests - the same way as Alpha. This explains why some people are misinterpreting the data as “but South Africa only has 67 cases” and so on
That’s 67 properly sequenced cases. The PCR tests suggest they have many multiples of that
eg yesterday SA reported ~2500 cases. It is reckoned 70-100% of them will be Nu
French Interior Ministry: ‘We consider Boris Johnson’s public letter unacceptable and in opposition with discussions between counterparts. As a consequence, Priti Patel is not invited anymore to the meeting on Sunday.’
So the French are still trying to play politics, rather than conduct talks with the intention of stopping people drowning in the Channel.
To be frank, it looks as though our PM is the one playing politics, setting out a suggestion which he knew in advance would be unacceptable.
Most, if not all, of those presently waiting in N. France would be an asset to this country, although, of course we have, in concert with the EU, to do 'something' about the continued drift of people to Northern and Western Europe.
On what basis are you making the judgement in the second paragraph? (The one about being an asset to the country). Interested in your evidentiary support.
Young or relatively young people keen to to provide better lives for themselves and their dependents. And prepared to go through considerable difficulties to do so.
Like the guy who blew himself in Liverpool?
If these are people keen to make a better life for themselves and a potential asset to the country then let's consider their application in the normal way. They can compete with everyone else seeking to migrate here. But they get no advantage because they can make an asylum claim and have been able to raise the money to pay people traffickers.
There needs to be a serious disadvantage from turning up via an inflatable boat and making an asylum claim - I suspect the impossible to fix (but needs to be fixed) issue is where do you send people to if you don't know where they come from.
I was musing on the classic 1942 film Casablanca the other day. There are several plot strands but perhaps the most interesting is the "letters of transit" stolen by the Peter Lorre character and hidden by Bogarts character Rick, who later passes them on. These stolen documents permit the bearer free travel to neutral Portugal, and then onwards to the USA.
Is Rick the most celebrated "People Trafficker" in movie history? And should the Lazlos had to claim asylum in Portugal rather than the USA?
Not many days go by that I don't muse on Casablanca, the greatest film ever made. It's one of those films that covers so many themes and whose humanity and heart is so deep that it has something to say on pretty much anything you care to think of. Certainly it has a message on refugees and migration. Not just the Bulgarian couple escaping oppression there ("the devil has the people by the throat") who Rick rescues from the awful moral compromise they are almost forced into in order to escape, but the elderly Austrian couple speaking only English ("what watch? Such much!") in preparation for their trip, who Carl reassures will "get along beautiful in America". The greatest irony of the film is that the actor who plays Major Strasser, the Nazi baddie, was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Indeed, the whole film was made by European emigrees, which perhaps explains why it is so sympathetic to the plight of refugees.
Never not a good excuse to play this, especially when PB descends into one of its recurring Francophobic whines.
I don't really buy the argument that Boris is rationally, if cynically, playing to his base with that idiotic letter to Macron. Yes, it might play well in the short term to blame the French, but he's not facing an election in the short term. Instead, in pure electoral terms (even leaving aside the humanitarian and policy objectives), what he should be doing is trying to get to a position where this issue is seen as having been well handled by the time he is facing election, to defuse the issue during the next couple of years. There's no easy way to do that, of course, but one absolute certainty is that making any progress at all is completely dependent on good relations with and maximum cooperation by France and the EU in general.
In other words, this looks like not only a major blunder of government, but also a major blunder of politics. Boris has the reputation of being good at winning elections, but I'm not sure that reputation is going to last.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
What's wrong with what we are doing today. Strenuously (!) discouraging migrants, having laws and processes in place to filter out genuine asylum seekers, while at the same time humanely dealing with those that ignore the warnings and come anyway.
Now of course the Tories, the party of Laura Norder, don't seem very good at the laws and processes to filter out and act upon non-genuine asylum seekers but in principle the system is just about doing what it was once designed to do. A few thousand people trying to cross the channel which they always will do regardless of illusory deals with Albania.
I don't see that the current situation is particularly broken aside from headlines in the Daily Express if you are Boris Johnson.
What's wrong with what we are doing today is we are tacitly facilitating the transportation of tens of thousands in a very deadly and dangerous crossing that will inevitably result in many, many deaths.
If anyone who crosses the Channel is immediately put on a plane and sent to a third party nation like Rwanda then the Channel crossings would drop to zero almost overnight. Its only because once they're here, they stay here, that people are doing these deadly crossings.
We should have safe, humane and legal routes into this country that take place via planes and legal boats, not sinking dinghies and rafts.
As I keep pointing out, to render boat people to *anywhere* we need to detain them and that means catching them. Plenty of footage out there of boats landing and people just wandering off with no authorities in sight.
Rendering to wherever is a virtue-signal to the people who want the forrin well away from them. There are hard-to-do steps before you can do that as as the "diplomacy" overnight demonstrated that lot are clueless.
We only need to detain them if they don't intend to apply for asylum and wish to disappear altogether.
If they present themselves for asylum, or are met by people as they arrive on shore, then they can be taken straight to the asylum processing centre wherever that may be.
You need to detain them in all circumstances. Applying for asylum? Off you go to the processing centre wherever that is. Planning to disappear? Off you go returned to either where you came from or to the processing centre until we determine where you came from.
The problem remains that we do not have the police or home office resources to meet people nor the navy and coast guard resources to track them.
Better to panic early and be wrong than panic late and have an unfixable disaster.
Disagreed.
Better to keep calm and carry on and if there's a disaster to deal with its aftermath, than to panic unnecessarily time and time again.
Disagreed.
Prevention is often cheaper than the cure. That said, if what we fear about Nu is true, we are in for a rough ride because we can't keep it bay indefinitely. Maybe we buy time for a tweaked vaccine, but this raises to me the possibility that the biological clock of mutation for this virus is really against us. Maybe science and regulations can outrun it eventually, we get a little bit quicker each time, and eventually various iterative vaccines and the accumulated immune memory drives infection down, but maybe not. If the virus can change substantially enough to always escape before we starve it of new bodies, then we're stuffed. Of all the variants, this one has me down the most. Hopefully we're wrong about it. Hopefully it's less likely to cause severe illness and could be the saving of us. Bah! Perhaps we should just engineer a less deadly but super infectious variant and give those gain of function researchers that Leon hates something to do!
Those applying for asylum in the UK should apply in the first safe country they reach. Those coming in boats across the channel should not be granted asylum under any circumstances whatsoever
And why is that? There is this myth presented by the Tories to the gullible that asylum has to be requested in the first safe country.
Even if it were true about applying in the first safe country (it’s not):
should-a, could-a, would-a
as they say on Judge Judy.
There is an issue with this. There is no requirement to request asylum in the first safe country. Fair enough. But when someone doesn't do so, in many eyes they are casting doubt on their level of fear and need for asylum.
The truth is that many or most of those trying to get here are seeking a better life, not actively being persecuted. i don't blame them, and its possible to admire them for trying to improve their lot in life. The issues that arise are mainly cultural. People in the UK have their culture and values, and its not right if incomers wish to change that. Not everyone will agree with me on this. Many will. And westerners are hypocrites too, travelling the world and expecting to behave as they would at home.
That puts the position very well, but I think that most refugees probably have a mixture of motives. If you are, say, a mechanic in a poor country AND also in an oppressed group, then (a) you want to stop being oppressed (b) you want a better life and (c) because you're oppressed, you have a fair chance of success.
Being more welcoming but aggressively insistent on learning English and accepting UK rules may be an approach (adopted in widely-respected countries like Norway) which many people could accept.
Absolutely agree. Multiculturalism has a lot to answer for.
I don't really buy the argument that Boris is rationally, if cynically, playing to his base with that idiotic letter to Macron. Yes, it might play well in the short term to blame the French, but he's not facing an election in the short term. Instead, in pure electoral terms (even leaving aside the humanitarian and policy objectives), what he should be doing is trying to get to a position where this issue is seen as having been well handled by the time he is facing election, to defuse the issue during the next couple of years. There's no easy way to do that, of course, but one absolute certainty is that making any progress at all is completely dependent on good relations with and maximum cooperation by France and the EU in general.
In other words, this looks like not only a major blunder of government, but also a major blunder of politics. Boris has the reputation of being good at winning elections, but I'm not sure that reputation is going to last.
Boris won the last election because there was a single issue that could be focussed on (Brexit). And Boris can cope with a single idea at a time.
The next election won't be a single issue - it will be a lot of issues many of which Boris won't have good stories to talk about
It amazes me as a non-scientist, that a variant could be several orders more infectious than Delta.
What the fuck does it do? Land on your face and crawl down your throat?
Seriously - we don't know that it is several orders more infectious. Calm down.
⚠️My god—the new #B11259 variant being possibly ~500% more competitively infectious is the most staggering stat yet. Also, #NuVariant has more than >2x the number of bad spike mutations than Delta. Here’s an updated 🧵👇
The Israel case came from Malawi, from whence we have not yet banned flights.
It seems likely it didn't come from South Africa, but rather they are the only southern African country that has good testing and monitoring of variants and so were the first to pick it up.
Except that’s not the whole truth in this instance. The Nunu was picked up by normal PCR tests - the same way as Alpha. This explains why some people are misinterpreting the data as “but South Africa only has 67 cases” and so on
That’s 67 properly sequenced cases. The PCR tests suggest they have many multiples of that
eg yesterday SA reported ~2500 cases. It is reckoned 70-100% of them will be Nu
Here's what I predict will happen in next few weeks wrt Nu - (wading back into #CovidTwitter after a looong time.. big risk indeed) 1. Within days, many countries close borders to SA and Botswana - personal rating 7/10, maybe reasonable decision but big picture impact?
It’s 20 years since I had to ask a PR firm to remove Priti Patel from the account of the conservation charity I was running because she was so rude to our junior staff, and I see she is still being uninvited to meetings even now she holds one of the great offices of state.
12 GW being generated by wind of 32 GW total demand. It's not good enough, it ought to be at least double that when there's a moderate storm about.
In the longer run what we would actually need is something like 45GW (to pick a number at random) and the capacity to store the surplus efficiently for use when it is not windy. Whilst 24 GW would clearly be an improvement it too is not sufficient. Still, at least our gas consumption is temporarily reduced.
Given the increase in electricity consumption implied by electrifying land transport and domestic heating and industry I would think we need to aim for closer to ten times our current wind capacity.
And add tidal, mini-nukes, interconnectors to Moroccan solar...
There's 24GW of installed wind in the UK. Unless you are planning absolutely massive storage facilities, I don't see how the UK could possibly just that much - even including the electrification of domestic heating and road transport.
It may be 24GW in theory but most of the time it is 20% of that.
If it were up to me I would indeed be aiming for 10x that figure, which would increase our general wind from the 5-10GW range to the 50-100GW range and when we have more wind than we need then we should be able to export it via interconnectors.
Furthermore we should have a lot of storage (which will inevitably come once cars are plugged into a smart network they would act as a distributed storage network too).
Finally for those times when we really have more cheap power than we can need then there should be some low-labour, high-energy on-demand businesses that can consume that energy and turn it into something productive, while shutting down when energy is low and expensive. One example could be the electrolysis of water into hydrogen.
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
It amazes me as a non-scientist, that a variant could be several orders more infectious than Delta.
What the fuck does it do? Land on your face and crawl down your throat?
Seriously - we don't know that it is several orders more infectious. Calm down.
⚠️My god—the new #B11259 variant being possibly ~500% more competitively infectious is the most staggering stat yet. Also, #NuVariant has more than >2x the number of bad spike mutations than Delta. Here’s an updated 🧵👇
At the end of the day there's only two viable solutions to stop people crossing by boats.
1: Provide safe transport for everyone who wants it, no restrictions. Hundreds of thousands would take up the offer, but if you're OK with that then that's safe and humane.
2: Provide off shore processing. Anyone who crosses by boat is immediately, without access to any courts, deported straight to a third party country for processing. If their claim is denied, then they remain in the nation they're deported to. Most notable Rwanda already offer this service for other countries and for the United Nations Human Rights Council themselves.
Neither option is superficially attractive, but both would work. You simply have to pick your poison. Talking about or to France won't do anything at all, its up to the UK to resolve this by themselves.
Yes, those are clear extreme alternatives. Although (1) is probably impossible politically (don't you think?) and (2) for me reeks of a kind of twisted colonialism and I (thankfully) find it hard to envisage something like that actually occurring.
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
2 is much more realistic than you think, Denmark has a deal with Rwanda
Well I share the negative view on it of Amnesty in your link but, ok, I see Denmark are actually going that route. Hadn't realized that. Can you really see us doing it though? Shipping refugees who want to come here to a poor African country and throwing them some change to deal with it? Just seems wrong to me.
Better to panic early and be wrong than panic late and have an unfixable disaster.
Disagreed.
Better to keep calm and carry on and if there's a disaster to deal with its aftermath, than to panic unnecessarily time and time again.
Disagreed.
Prevention is often cheaper than the cure. That said, if what we fear about Nu is true, we are in for a rough ride because we can't keep it bay indefinitely. Maybe we buy time for a tweaked vaccine, but this raises to me the possibility that the biological clock of mutation for this virus is really against us. Maybe science and regulations can outrun it eventually, we get a little bit quicker each time, and eventually various iterative vaccines and the accumulated immune memory drives infection down, but maybe not. If the virus can change substantially enough to always escape before we starve it of new bodies, then we're stuffed. Of all the variants, this one has me down the most. Hopefully we're wrong about it. Hopefully it's less likely to cause severe illness and could be the saving of us. Bah! Perhaps we should just engineer a less deadly but super infectious variant and give those gain of function researchers that Leon hates something to do!
I actually suggested that several months ago. Go back to Wuhan and get the bat woman and the evil Daszak to create a new super infectious Covid that outcompetes EVERY variant, but only causes a sniffle. Push it along the evolutionary path. Sorted
I was musing on the classic 1942 film Casablanca the other day. There are several plot strands but perhaps the most interesting is the "letters of transit" stolen by the Peter Lorre character and hidden by Bogarts character Rick, who later passes them on. These stolen documents permit the bearer free travel to neutral Portugal, and then onwards to the USA.
Is Rick the most celebrated "People Trafficker" in movie history? And should the Lazlos had to claim asylum in Portugal rather than the USA?
Not many days go by that I don't muse on Casablanca, the greatest film ever made. It's one of those films that covers so many themes and whose humanity and heart is so deep that it has something to say on pretty much anything you care to think of. Certainly it has a message on refugees and migration. Not just the Bulgarian couple escaping oppression there ("the devil has the people by the throat") who Rick rescues from the awful moral compromise they are almost forced into in order to escape, but the elderly Austrian couple speaking only English ("what watch? Such much!") in preparation for their trip, who Carl reassures will "get along beautiful in America". The greatest irony of the film is that the actor who plays Major Strasser, the Nazi baddie, was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Indeed, the whole film was made by European emigrees, which perhaps explains why it is so sympathetic to the plight of refugees.
Never not a good excuse to play this, especially when PB descends into one of its recurring Francophobic whines.
Oh dear, Fraser Nelson is asking in the Telegraph whether Brexit was “worth it after all”.
I liked this that I found on last night's thread. Particularly in this age of the simple (otherwise known as the Hartlepool) soundbite. This is a train worth jumping on.....'The Traffic Light Coalition'
Here's what I predict will happen in next few weeks wrt Nu - (wading back into #CovidTwitter after a looong time.. big risk indeed) 1. Within days, many countries close borders to SA and Botswana - personal rating 7/10, maybe reasonable decision but big picture impact?
Oh dear, Fraser Nelson is asking in the Telegraph whether Brexit was “worth it after all”.
I liked this that I found on last night's thread. Particularly in this age of the simple (otherwise known as the Hartlepool) soundbite. This is a train worth jumping on.....
On immigration the relevant factors to me seem to be:
(1) that the proposition that a refugee who reaches a safe country A has no right to seek asylum in a further country B but is obliged to make their application in A is simply wrong in fact and law. It is incompatible with the UN Convention on refugees.
(2) The Dublin Convention sought, despite that, to require the receiving Member States to process the application. The logic of this, such as it was, was that once a refugee was given asylum within the EU freedom of movement entitled them to go anywhere within it. The right of the refugee given by the UN Convention was accordingly not prejudiced.
(3) The EU refused to continue the Dublin Convention with the UK on Brexit. That was their right because the scenario had changed. Determination of the right to asylum in, say, Greece, no longer gave that person freedom of movement to the UK.
(4) The proposition that France has any obligation to process these refugees and, if appropriate, to grant them asylum in the EU is therefore wrong. Similarly, if they do make the UK or make an application to our authorities we have duties under the UN Convention to determine their application to us.
(5) The UK government is therefore being deliberately misleading in at least two respects. Firstly, their argument that the French are somehow failing in their duty has no basis. They have no duty to determine the right of these refugees if no application is made to them. Secondly, even if they did, this would not abrogate our duty to make our determination on the merits of the refugee's case should an application be made to us.
There are much broader questions as to whether the UN Convention is fit for purpose in circumstances where very large number of people have become much more mobile; where countries may have legitimate concerns about whether these refugees carry dangerous illnesses or have malicious intent and whether the right to asylum needs to be curtailed. These are very difficult questions to answer. But the way the story of these refugees in boats is being portrayed by both our government and our media is simply misleading.
Your last paragraph nails it and echoes something I wrote yesterday. There is no numerical limit on the number of refugees a country has to accept. If they qualify they get asylum. That is simply untenable because it removes all democratic control away from the receiving country. If the Convention is not changed then pretty soon countries will start ignoring it, formally as well as in practice.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
I don't think it's unthinkable, I think given the general easy of movement (across Europe) and the sheer number of potential asylum seekers, the existing rules are unfit for the modern day and over the next few years the pressure is going to be unbearable as migrant numbers increase.
It is interesting to see the difference in rhetoric -
1) the people freezing to death on the Polish border are a Threat To Europe. 2) The Channel sailors are victims who need to be let in.
Or the reverse, of course.
I am liberal but defending my homeland You are braking the UN convention on refugees He is running a concentration camp
It amazes me as a non-scientist, that a variant could be several orders more infectious than Delta.
What the fuck does it do? Land on your face and crawl down your throat?
Seriously - we don't know that it is several orders more infectious. Calm down.
Delta has an R of 5+
Orders of magnitude would mean 50, 500, or 5000 - all of which are ridiculous/impossible
Measles is 15 or something??
A guy on Twitter yesterday did some napkin-maths and estimated that Nu has a R0 of 24 (Delta is R6). Seemed mad back then in the golden age of, er, yesterday afternoon, but now seems quite plausible
"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
It is not whether they test Covid positive we should be worried about, so much as if even the vaccinated get hospitalised and die from it
This is the far right tory lie
For a start we already know that vaccinated people are now getting admitted to hospital. But as significantly, they act as viral vectors, thus spreading the virus to others who are vulnerable. So one apparently non-hospitalised "I'm alright Jack" covid positive tory is potentially killing loads of other people. Which is about par for the course for self-centred nasty capitalists.
But the other even more significant issue is that this variant looks like it's a lot more deadly. Vaccine protection is lower.
For that latter reason it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we act hard and fast.
And not selfishly like you.
What are you on about? HYUFD is just making a perfectly sensible point: we know this wretchedly infective Nu strain will sweep the world, the big question is: can it hurt or kill the vaxxed in large numbers?
Exactly, complete ignorance of the main point ie does double vaccination still stop you getting hospitalised and dying from Covid in large numbers even if you get Nu or not. Even double vaccination now is much less effective reducing case spread than it is reducing rates of hospitalisation and Covid death even without Nu.
However only if rates of hospitalisation and death rise rapidly again because double vaccination does not stop serious ill effects from Nu if you get it would we need another lockdown
Thinking about this Nu variant, there's just the one big question for me as regards the impact here - does it mean we'll need a nu vaccine and if so will we have to lockdown again until it's rolled out? Don't think we know this yet, do we?
Red wind warning for the NE coast. The last time I experienced a red wind warning was at a castle in County Galway on 29th February 2020.
So the Nu variant is giving me a sense of deja vu. Still missing is the music, food and an engagement party (all the fun stuff). There's still time, I guess.
Oh dear, Fraser Nelson is asking in the Telegraph whether Brexit was “worth it after all”.
I liked this that I found on last night's thread. Particularly in this age of the simple (otherwise known as the Hartlepool) soundbite. This is a train worth jumping on.....
Fionna O'Leary, 🕯Flag of European Union @fascinatorfun · 48m Flight arriving in London from Gauteng (the most affected Flag of South Africa province) this morning
So…the passengers did what? Just got on the Trains or into taxis after an 11.5 hour flight, plus all the mixing in the airport before and after?
Here's what I predict will happen in next few weeks wrt Nu - (wading back into #CovidTwitter after a looong time.. big risk indeed) 1. Within days, many countries close borders to SA and Botswana - personal rating 7/10, maybe reasonable decision but big picture impact?
It amazes me as a non-scientist, that a variant could be several orders more infectious than Delta.
What the fuck does it do? Land on your face and crawl down your throat?
Seriously - we don't know that it is several orders more infectious. Calm down.
Delta has an R of 5+
Orders of magnitude would mean 50, 500, or 5000 - all of which are ridiculous/impossible
Measles is 15 or something??
A guy on Twitter yesterday did some napkin-maths and estimated that Nu has a R0 of 24 (Delta is R6). Seemed mad back then in the golden age of, er, yesterday afternoon, but now seems quite plausible
Today I am starting to publish a detailed, annotated record of the lies, falsehoods and misleading statements made by Boris Johnson and colleagues dating back to his appointment as prime minister in July 2019. They are available here:
Before being too sanctimonious about the current liar in No 10, remember that Oborne wrote "The Rise of Political Lying", which made much of a certain T. Blair, a previous No 10 incumbent...
So the fact that Oborne sees Boris as even worse than Blair counts for something.
Oborne is a moaning Myrtle.
Who was the last leader he wasn't moaning about?
He's one of those people who isn't happy unless he's complaining.
Yes but his view of Boris's veracity and integrity are shared by many other Conservatives.
I was musing on the classic 1942 film Casablanca the other day. There are several plot strands but perhaps the most interesting is the "letters of transit" stolen by the Peter Lorre character and hidden by Bogarts character Rick, who later passes them on. These stolen documents permit the bearer free travel to neutral Portugal, and then onwards to the USA.
Is Rick the most celebrated "People Trafficker" in movie history? And should the Lazlos had to claim asylum in Portugal rather than the USA?
Not many days go by that I don't muse on Casablanca, the greatest film ever made. It's one of those films that covers so many themes and whose humanity and heart is so deep that it has something to say on pretty much anything you care to think of. Certainly it has a message on refugees and migration. Not just the Bulgarian couple escaping oppression there ("the devil has the people by the throat") who Rick rescues from the awful moral compromise they are almost forced into in order to escape, but the elderly Austrian couple speaking only English ("what watch? Such much!") in preparation for their trip, who Carl reassures will "get along beautiful in America". The greatest irony of the film is that the actor who plays Major Strasser, the Nazi baddie, was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Indeed, the whole film was made by European emigrees, which perhaps explains why it is so sympathetic to the plight of refugees.
Never not a good excuse to play this, especially when PB descends into one of its recurring Francophobic whines.
“A woman accused of indecent exposure, masturbating in public and using a sex toy in a public place, will stand trial early next year.
Chloe Thompson, of Borough Road, Middlesbrough, appeared at Teesside Magistrates' Court on Wednesday after denying the offences.
She is charged with committing a public nuisance by indecently exposing her penis to other members of the public, whilst masturbating from a property window.”
Oh dear, Fraser Nelson is asking in the Telegraph whether Brexit was “worth it after all”.
I liked this that I found on last night's thread. Particularly in this age of the simple (otherwise known as the Hartlepool) soundbite. This is a train worth jumping on.....
Oh dear, Fraser Nelson is asking in the Telegraph whether Brexit was “worth it after all”.
Well I voted for BREXIT and had every right to expect we wouldn't end up with Johnsons crap deal.
Politicians on all sides turned down far better forms of BREXIT Change UK and LDs particularly opposed Ken Clarkes iteration that would otherwise have passed
I was musing on the classic 1942 film Casablanca the other day. There are several plot strands but perhaps the most interesting is the "letters of transit" stolen by the Peter Lorre character and hidden by Bogarts character Rick, who later passes them on. These stolen documents permit the bearer free travel to neutral Portugal, and then onwards to the USA.
Is Rick the most celebrated "People Trafficker" in movie history? And should the Lazlos had to claim asylum in Portugal rather than the USA?
Not many days go by that I don't muse on Casablanca, the greatest film ever made. It's one of those films that covers so many themes and whose humanity and heart is so deep that it has something to say on pretty much anything you care to think of. Certainly it has a message on refugees and migration. Not just the Bulgarian couple escaping oppression there ("the devil has the people by the throat") who Rick rescues from the awful moral compromise they are almost forced into in order to escape, but the elderly Austrian couple speaking only English ("what watch? Such much!") in preparation for their trip, who Carl reassures will "get along beautiful in America". The greatest irony of the film is that the actor who plays Major Strasser, the Nazi baddie, was himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Indeed, the whole film was made by European emigrees, which perhaps explains why it is so sympathetic to the plight of refugees.
Never not a good excuse to play this, especially when PB descends into one of its recurring Francophobic whines.
I am definitely going to have to watch that again.
I had exactly the same thought. Amazing how perfectly Lazlo, Rick, and Captain Renault cover the gamut of heroism - pure idealist, cynical idealist and unadulterated cynic. Bergman acting her feelings just through facial expression is also a thing of beauty.
Here's what I predict will happen in next few weeks wrt Nu - (wading back into #CovidTwitter after a looong time.. big risk indeed) 1. Within days, many countries close borders to SA and Botswana - personal rating 7/10, maybe reasonable decision but big picture impact?
Thing is at this point we dont know There have been other variants that appear and then disappear. I posted last night about the enhanced testing that has happened in a number of locations in the last year, mainly variant hunting, including one of the SA ones. In the end they fizzled. Delta has been hugely successful, so Nu will have to do even better. It might do, but it also might not. I think some on here enjoy the drama of it all, the rest just want to get on with our lives.
"We're getting better at understanding this virus." (Professor James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute)
Therein lies our best hope viz a viz this most significant and worst variant yet. Despite three flights arriving this morning, the UK Gov't have acted swiftly.
But I do note that three people in Israel found covid positive with the variant were all vaccinated.
It is not whether they test Covid positive we should be worried about, so much as if even the vaccinated get hospitalised and die from it
This is the far right tory lie
For a start we already know that vaccinated people are now getting admitted to hospital. But as significantly, they act as viral vectors, thus spreading the virus to others who are vulnerable. So one apparently non-hospitalised "I'm alright Jack" covid positive tory is potentially killing loads of other people. Which is about par for the course for self-centred nasty capitalists.
But the other even more significant issue is that this variant looks like it's a lot more deadly. Vaccine protection is lower.
For that latter reason it is absolutely ESSENTIAL that we act hard and fast.
And not selfishly like you.
What are you on about? HYUFD is just making a perfectly sensible point: we know this wretchedly infective Nu strain will sweep the world, the big question is: can it hurt or kill the vaxxed in large numbers?
Exactly, complete ignorance of the main point ie does double vaccination still stop you getting hospitalised and dying from Covid in large numbers even if you get Nu or not. Even double vaccination now is much less effective reducing case spread than it is reducing rates of hospitalisation and Covid death even without Nu.
However only if rates of hospitalisation and death rise rapidly again because double vaccination does not stop serious ill effects from Nu if you get it would we need another lockdown
Thinking about this Nu variant, there's just the one big question for me as regards the impact here - does it mean we'll need a nu vaccine and if so will we have to lockdown again until it's rolled out? Don't think we know this yet, do we?
Comments
However only if rates of hospitalisation and death rise rapidly again because double vaccination does not stop serious ill effects from Nu if you get it would we need another lockdown
Edit, it is also why I am more than a bit suspicious about the claims that many other EU countries grant asylum much more frequently than the UK. I dare say that they did but, before Brexit, where did they actually end up? Given our complete failure to monitor the flows of people to and from the EU which meant that we ended up giving out 6m rights to remain, we simply do not know the answer to that but I have my suspicions.
The same draws that have these refugees in little boats, the English language, the ready availability of work, the non contributory benefits system, a sense of decency and tolerance, even Man United, god help us, all applied then too.
What the fuck does it do? Land on your face and crawl down your throat?
If anyone who crosses the Channel is immediately put on a plane and sent to a third party nation like Rwanda then the Channel crossings would drop to zero almost overnight. Its only because once they're here, they stay here, that people are doing these deadly crossings.
We should have safe, humane and legal routes into this country that take place via planes and legal boats, not sinking dinghies and rafts.
Anyone here have that data ?
But the main point I'd make is that the issue in general - people fleeing places ravaged by poverty and war and wishing to settle in the rich and stable west - cries out for co-operation between countries rather than competition as to who can take the least and make it the hardest to reach their soil.
Rendering to wherever is a virtue-signal to the people who want the forrin well away from them. There are hard-to-do steps before you can do that as as the "diplomacy" overnight demonstrated that lot are clueless.
If we want to slow this down in any meaningful way you'd want much more comprehensive travel restrictions.
If it were up to me I would indeed be aiming for 10x that figure, which would increase our general wind from the 5-10GW range to the 50-100GW range and when we have more wind than we need then we should be able to export it via interconnectors.
Furthermore we should have a lot of storage (which will inevitably come once cars are plugged into a smart network they would act as a distributed storage network too).
Finally for those times when we really have more cheap power than we can need then there should be some low-labour, high-energy on-demand businesses that can consume that energy and turn it into something productive, while shutting down when energy is low and expensive. One example could be the electrolysis of water into hydrogen.
The truth is that many or most of those trying to get here are seeking a better life, not actively being persecuted. i don't blame them, and its possible to admire them for trying to improve their lot in life. The issues that arise are mainly cultural. People in the UK have their culture and values, and its not right if incomers wish to change that. Not everyone will agree with me on this. Many will. And westerners are hypocrites too, travelling the world and expecting to behave as they would at home.
Better to keep calm and carry on and if there's a disaster to deal with its aftermath, than to panic unnecessarily time and time again.
But it doesn’t affect the channel sitch one iota.
@Dr_D_Robertson
·
18m
*At the very minimum* Plan B should be implemented now.
If they present themselves for asylum, or are met by people as they arrive on shore, then they can be taken straight to the asylum processing centre wherever that may be.
If some of the people arriving are immigrants that a country would want - as some claim - and the difference between economic migrant and refugee is becoming increasingly hard to identify - then maybe - and I'm thinking the unthinkable here - it is time to fold asylum into normal immigration applications i.e. let them apply in the normal way. Fleeing a failed state no longer comes with an automatic right of entry - but only one of the factors which a country can take into account when determining who is allowed to migrate here.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/05/denmark-plans-to-send-asylum-seekers-to-rwanda-unconscionable-and-potentially-unlawful/
Patel was talking about joining in in June.
Remember folks, no flights > more lockdowns.
Rock solid evidence first.
And Australia has a comparable deal elsewhere.
It may be politically unpopular with some, but its not out of the question.
If these are people keen to make a better life for themselves and a potential asset to the country then let's consider their application in the normal way. They can compete with everyone else seeking to migrate here. But they get no advantage because they can make an asylum claim and have been able to raise the money to pay people traffickers.
Or will it be able to reinfect?
Being more welcoming but aggressively insistent on learning English and accepting UK rules may be an approach (adopted in widely-respected countries like Norway) which many people could accept.
Improving population immunity ahead of a new variant is the best thing we can do. We can only delay the inevitable via travel bans etc.
They're a place that is willing and happy to sign such a deal with other countries (and the United Nations).
For them there's quite an incentive to play along. They get fiscal transfers from richer countries (and the UN) to deal with a 'problem' that other countries don't want to deal with . . . and the migrants who arrive there, most of them move on anyway since Rwanda wasn't where they wanted to go so they're paid to take someone who voluntarily moves themselves on to somewhere else anyway.
That’s 67 properly sequenced cases. The PCR tests suggest they have many multiples of that
eg yesterday SA reported ~2500 cases. It is reckoned 70-100% of them will be Nu
https://youtu.be/HM-E2H1ChJM
In other words, this looks like not only a major blunder of government, but also a major blunder of politics. Boris has the reputation of being good at winning elections, but I'm not sure that reputation is going to last.
The problem remains that we do not have the police or home office resources to meet people nor the navy and coast guard resources to track them.
Prevention is often cheaper than the cure. That said, if what we fear about Nu is true, we are in for a rough ride because we can't keep it bay indefinitely. Maybe we buy time for a tweaked vaccine, but this raises to me the possibility that the biological clock of mutation for this virus is really against us. Maybe science and regulations can outrun it eventually, we get a little bit quicker each time, and eventually various iterative vaccines and the accumulated immune memory drives infection down, but maybe not. If the virus can change substantially enough to always escape before we starve it of new bodies, then we're stuffed. Of all the variants, this one has me down the most. Hopefully we're wrong about it. Hopefully it's less likely to cause severe illness and could be the saving of us.
Bah! Perhaps we should just engineer a less deadly but super infectious variant and give those gain of function researchers that Leon hates something to do!
The next election won't be a single issue - it will be a lot of issues many of which Boris won't have good stories to talk about
⚠️My god—the new #B11259 variant being possibly ~500% more competitively infectious is the most staggering stat yet. Also, #NuVariant has more than >2x the number of bad spike mutations than Delta. Here’s an updated 🧵👇
Model by @JPWeiland matches up with graph by @jburnmurdoch”
https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1464120315806691354?s=21
YES this guy has a reputation as an alarmist. Perhaps this is more alarmism. But he is citing reliable sources
Here's what I predict will happen in next few weeks wrt Nu - (wading back into #CovidTwitter after a looong time.. big risk indeed)
1. Within days, many countries close borders to SA and Botswana - personal rating 7/10, maybe reasonable decision but big picture impact?
https://twitter.com/iamgkadam/status/1463942620015742986?s=20
https://twitter.com/bmay/status/1464152455403421697?s=21
That idea is also devloped here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ-HlykM1LU&list=RDCMUCa5-1-Vaz8YQB2RoI95ZWkw&index=2
Orders of magnitude would mean 50, 500, or 5000 - all of which are ridiculous/impossible
Measles is 15 or something??
109 hectares of flattish uninhabited British soil about 30 miles from anywhere else.
I liked this that I found on last night's thread. Particularly in this age of the simple (otherwise known as the Hartlepool) soundbite. This is a train worth jumping on.....'The Traffic Light Coalition'
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/german-government-will-push-for-a-european-federation/
Britain Predicts — model update
Hung parliament, Cons the largest party
CON: 291 MPs (-74)
LAB: 268 (+66)
SNP: 55 (+7)
LDEM: 12 (+1)
GRN: 1 (-)
1) the people freezing to death on the Polish border are a Threat To Europe.
2) The Channel sailors are victims who need to be let in.
Or the reverse, of course.
I am liberal but defending my homeland
You are braking the UN convention on refugees
He is running a concentration camp
https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1463973204456878080?s=20
So the Nu variant is giving me a sense of deja vu. Still missing is the music, food and an engagement party (all the fun stuff). There's still time, I guess.
@fascinatorfun
·
48m
Flight arriving in London from Gauteng (the most affected Flag of South Africa province) this morning
So…the passengers did what? Just got on the Trains or into taxis after an 11.5 hour flight, plus all the mixing in the airport before and after?
How many? 300?
His point was that anyone making bold predictions now is talking out of their derriere....
What we had (pre-Brexit) was mostly fine. Could have been better, but wasn’t too bad. For the most part, in this messy world, it worked.
Fully federal Europe? Fugeddaboutit.
Politicians on all sides turned down far better forms of BREXIT Change UK and LDs particularly opposed Ken Clarkes iteration that would otherwise have passed
Amazing how perfectly Lazlo, Rick, and Captain Renault cover the gamut of heroism - pure idealist, cynical idealist and unadulterated cynic. Bergman acting her feelings just through facial expression is also a thing of beauty.