If I was doing an outside bet for next Tory leader, then I would look at - and don’t all laugh- Nadine Dorries.
Yes, mad as a box of frogs to many but there is a reason she has been brought into the Cabinet and that is because the Tories will fight the next GE on the culture wars - it’s the best way to keep the Red Wall voters together with traditional Home Counties Tories who may have been mixed on Brexit but aren’t keen that their kids are taught to switch genders at the drop of a hat.
I think there is something in this. If the tories lose the next election they certainly aren't going to go back to Camborne earnest centrism. I'm not sure they'll go for Trump-on-HRT in the form of Mad Nad but they will definitely want a Culture Warrior with as many comorbid psychological disorders as possible.
The next Tory leader if Boris remains in power but loses the next election is Priti....
Appreciate you're joking but Priti has no chance. She'd be excluded from the final 2 by the MPs and I don't think she'd go down a storm with the members even if she got through. It'll be Rishi, with Truss and Ben Wallace as the possible alternatives put to the final ballot of the members.
Looking back at Tory Party elections you can see how unlucky Ken Clarke was. In 1997, he would have won a members' ballot but they didn't get a vote then, so Hague won - a bad decision for him and everyone else concerned. And then, in 2001, when Euro-scepticism had gripped the party, he lost in a members' vote to IDS, who he certainly would have beaten in an MPs only poll.
Great update, @MaxPB What is the 'table' to which you refer (or rather who arranged for the people around it) ?
Reunion of university friends, all of us are chemistry or biochemistry grads plus one grad med who did a biochemistry option with us. I'm the only one who didn't stay in science. The rest are pharma types or in academia. We do it every year, except last year.
One of the reasons I'm inclined to trust them is that there was no sugar coating and in general everyone set aside their political leanings.
Tbh, most of them wanted to know what the economy was going to look like next year and when the doctor among our group was finally going to get married to her bf so we can all go to a wedding overseas.
A point that they don't seem to have registered is that many hospitals are already overwhelmed, in the sense that non-Covid emergencies are responded to very slowly (a wait of hours for an ambulance seems not uncommon if you're not actually dying, just lying on the floor unable to get up) and you have to be lucky to get a slot for a non-urgent hip/knee etc. operation. It's patchy and you can get lucky, but it's a mistake to think that things are basically OK at present and we just need to ponder whether Omicron will disutrb this satisfactory state of affairs.
Great update, @MaxPB What is the 'table' to which you refer (or rather who arranged for the people around it) ?
Reunion of university friends, all of us are chemistry or biochemistry grads plus one grad med who did a biochemistry option with us. I'm the only one who didn't stay in science. The rest are pharma types or in academia. We do it every year, except last year.
One of the reasons I'm inclined to trust them is that there was no sugar coating and in general everyone set aside their political leanings.
Tbh, most of them wanted to know what the economy was going to look like next year and when the doctor among our group was finally going to get married to her bf so we can all go to a wedding overseas.
A point that they don't seem to have registered is that many hospitals are already overwhelmed, in the sense that non-Covid emergencies are responded to very slowly (a wait of hours for an ambulance seems not uncommon if you're not actually dying, just lying on the floor unable to get up) and you have to be lucky to get a slot for a non-urgent hip/knee etc. operation. It's patchy and you can get lucky, but it's a mistake to think that things are basically OK at present and we just need to ponder whether Omicron will disutrb this satisfactory state of affairs.
This is a huge problem, and its been coming for a while, irrespective of covid. We need to address the idea that the NHS can be run like a lean business without surge capacity. Every winter is the same. We need the ability to expand capacity as required.
Best thing people can do now, today? If you are not vaccinated, book your appointment.
Mod and Pfi both work well with any original combo, though Mod is superior except for previous Mod Mod. Into the weeds of argument here though; Javid appears much more proactive than Hancock was near the end of his tenure.
How long does it take to get from South Africa to the US border though? If it's longer than the time it takes to catch Covid and then stop being contagious then any immigrants are going to be no more risky than anyone else. I remember we went to Mexico after visiting my wife's relatives in Houston, they were genuinely perplexed as to why anyone would visit Mexico. As anyone who has ever visited both cities knows, Mexico City is an infinitely more beautiful, interesting and culturally vibrant place than Houston. Let's just say that Texans have a rather ill-informed and not altogether healthy attitude towards the country to their South. Poor Mexico, so close to the United States, so far from God.
Mr. JohnL, as well as brief sports of yoga, I've added a couple of short walks to my daily routine (and often one longer one). Plus working out a timetable that naturally increases breaks helps (I don't exercise then walk, but have a working gap between them).
Mr. Jonathan, surely orange juice was a thing?
It was very high end. The aspiring middle classes got Kelloggs Rise & Shine, a powdered version.
Orange juice presumably arrived at different times, depending on where you were in the world.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
In the real world, very few people understand what the strategy is. Most people still think the goal is to ensure people don’t catch the virus and they envisage a day soon when there are very low or even no cases. When I say to people that you’ll probably catch this virus every few years for the rest of your life but it won’t be serious, I get puzzled looks. Sometimes angry looks.
Once the panic about Xi variant is the out the way, it really needs a Look Down The Camera address to carefully explain this to everyone.
I've heard multiple people saying this kind of nonsense on the radio this morning. If medics and politicians (and some of them quite senior) don't get that covid is forever, then it's hardly surprising that the public keep thinking "it will be over by Christmas" and so on.
Covid was forever from about February 1st 2020 when it reached the outside world.
The fact people can't see that shows how blinked most people can be.
I think officialdom took fright at the absurd reaction to the idea of 'herd immunity' very early on and resolved for the foreseeable future never to speak about the long term strategy for something which will, barring a dark grey swan, be with us for ever.
If they had labelled it 'community resilience' or some other weasel term at the time it may have been better.
Control by vaccination, lifestyle, travel bans, herd immunity, treatments etc are all realistic. We do it for diseases generally. Eradication by extinction is rare, smallpox being an interesting exception.
No, the general public isn't very bright, in the sense that leaders have to be alert to the amplification of the dimmest and most extreme responses. How else could the media function?
Great update, @MaxPB What is the 'table' to which you refer (or rather who arranged for the people around it) ?
Reunion of university friends, all of us are chemistry or biochemistry grads plus one grad med who did a biochemistry option with us. I'm the only one who didn't stay in science. The rest are pharma types or in academia. We do it every year, except last year.
One of the reasons I'm inclined to trust them is that there was no sugar coating and in general everyone set aside their political leanings.
Tbh, most of them wanted to know what the economy was going to look like next year and when the doctor among our group was finally going to get married to her bf so we can all go to a wedding overseas.
A point that they don't seem to have registered is that many hospitals are already overwhelmed, in the sense that non-Covid emergencies are responded to very slowly (a wait of hours for an ambulance seems not uncommon if you're not actually dying, just lying on the floor unable to get up) and you have to be lucky to get a slot for a non-urgent hip/knee etc. operation. It's patchy and you can get lucky, but it's a mistake to think that things are basically OK at present and we just need to ponder whether Omicron will disutrb this satisfactory state of affairs.
A key consideration.
But the NHS might well be "overwhelmed" for years. What do you suggest we do while the backlog unwinds.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
JCVI proving again that it can move at pace when required - expected to announce new booster guidelines today, just 48hrs after being asked to review. Some may ask why the committee cannot always act with such urgency when a pandemic is ongoing (eg decision on kids' jabs).
Mr. JohnL, as well as brief sports of yoga, I've added a couple of short walks to my daily routine (and often one longer one). Plus working out a timetable that naturally increases breaks helps (I don't exercise then walk, but have a working gap between them).
Mr. Jonathan, surely orange juice was a thing?
It was very high end. The aspiring middle classes got Kelloggs Rise & Shine, a powdered version.
Orange juice presumably arrived at different times, depending on where you were in the world.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
There's a book called Oranges by John Macphee all about the US citrus industry
Meanwhile, one has to assume that Omicron is seeded in London and three or four weeks away from supplanting Delta.
It’s been 4.9999 months since my second Moderna jab…
It would make sense for the spectacular rise on the continent to be Omicron-inspired but apparently they didn't pick it up. Perhaps one of our PB epidemiologists can let us know whether they would pick it up if they weren't looking for it and/or how South Africa discovered its presence.
Then again with travel for the past few months possible between the high-delta countries of Europe and the UK why haven't we seen a spike or is this all Omicron gathering speed.
Mr. Topping, the lack of awareness could be due to lack of testing in continental Europe. Lack of a spike here at the same time could be because most of our most vulnerable are now triple-jabbed with relatively fewer on the continent.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
Yep - the BBC article is wrong - 30 seconds on google pointed me to the minutes of the 2019 meeting where the GLAP accepted Siemen's payment for early lease termination. You have to ask why people just can't doublecheck things in a world where the data is available via Google it's not like the 1980s when you needed hours to call people.
Now I did know that the building was owned by the GLA but that's only because we used to visit the museum and I remember GLA people on one of the floors even then.
Mr. JohnL, as well as brief sports of yoga, I've added a couple of short walks to my daily routine (and often one longer one). Plus working out a timetable that naturally increases breaks helps (I don't exercise then walk, but have a working gap between them).
Mr. Jonathan, surely orange juice was a thing?
It was very high end. The aspiring middle classes got Kelloggs Rise & Shine, a powdered version.
Orange juice presumably arrived at different times, depending on where you were in the world.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
There's a book called Oranges by John Macphee all about the US citrus industry
Mr. JohnL, as well as brief sports of yoga, I've added a couple of short walks to my daily routine (and often one longer one). Plus working out a timetable that naturally increases breaks helps (I don't exercise then walk, but have a working gap between them).
Mr. Jonathan, surely orange juice was a thing?
It was very high end. The aspiring middle classes got Kelloggs Rise & Shine, a powdered version.
Orange juice presumably arrived at different times, depending on where you were in the world.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
There's a book called Oranges by John Macphee all about the US citrus industry
First published in 1966 and apparently addresses the custom of drinking orange juice for breakfast.
So orange juice not a late 80s thing.
Maybe only in Britain, given the incredibly dire state of food here until c.1998 (London only).
I do (vaguely, that said) remember a time when a standard menu of first courses at "fancy" restaurants included a glass of orange juice and a glass of tomato juice.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Will be an interesting time to unload/rent out an office building in London....
It seems ok TBH - my sister invested in an office building on Cannon Street and performance is to plan
I can't see City Hall being difficult to lease, decent office in a prime location with views to die for. I used to love working in the Hitachi office there with a view of Tower Bridge, Tower of London and HMS Belfast.
But the NHS might well be "overwhelmed" for years. What do you suggest we do while the backlog unwinds.
Do what we *reasonably* can to avoid Covid circulating too rapidly. We can debate what that means, but some things such as "encouraging wfh where there are no compelling reasons against" (vs the current ofifcially neutral stance) ought not to be very difficult. And I favour restoring the NHS some more spare capacity so that we don't start from a position of waiting lists up to 2 years before the pandemic.
It's one of those problems that doesn't really hit the headlines because most people are not having emergencies most of the time, so I'm not sure that it's generally realised just how extreme the current situation is for at least some hospitals (I only really know the position round here myself, because they report the position to local councils).
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
Health visitors. In the 90's I used to work with them when there were medicine-related issues. A fine group of women (usually).
Mr. JohnL, as well as brief sports of yoga, I've added a couple of short walks to my daily routine (and often one longer one). Plus working out a timetable that naturally increases breaks helps (I don't exercise then walk, but have a working gap between them).
Mr. Jonathan, surely orange juice was a thing?
It was very high end. The aspiring middle classes got Kelloggs Rise & Shine, a powdered version.
Orange juice presumably arrived at different times, depending on where you were in the world.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
There's a book called Oranges by John Macphee all about the US citrus industry
First published in 1966 and apparently addresses the custom of drinking orange juice for breakfast.
So orange juice not a late 80s thing.
Maybe only in Britain, given the incredibly dire state of food here until c.1998 (London only).
I do (vaguely, that said) remember a time when a standard menu of first courses at "fancy" restaurants included a glass of orange juice and a glass of tomato juice.
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
Great update, @MaxPB What is the 'table' to which you refer (or rather who arranged for the people around it) ?
Reunion of university friends, all of us are chemistry or biochemistry grads plus one grad med who did a biochemistry option with us. I'm the only one who didn't stay in science. The rest are pharma types or in academia. We do it every year, except last year.
One of the reasons I'm inclined to trust them is that there was no sugar coating and in general everyone set aside their political leanings.
Tbh, most of them wanted to know what the economy was going to look like next year and when the doctor among our group was finally going to get married to her bf so we can all go to a wedding overseas.
A point that they don't seem to have registered is that many hospitals are already overwhelmed, in the sense that non-Covid emergencies are responded to very slowly (a wait of hours for an ambulance seems not uncommon if you're not actually dying, just lying on the floor unable to get up) and you have to be lucky to get a slot for a non-urgent hip/knee etc. operation. It's patchy and you can get lucky, but it's a mistake to think that things are basically OK at present and we just need to ponder whether Omicron will disutrb this satisfactory state of affairs.
Thanks to all involved in those discussion. An excellent summary of a lot of the things we have discussed in the last few months.
The NHS stress point does not negate the need to increase immunity levels by both vaccination and infection, it should just informs how fast you should go and when we bring in NPIs.
I think masking is a weak but easy measure - with the transience of most contacts in shops and the relative low numbers of people using public transport still, I'd be surprised if we get as much as 0.1 R reduction from masking with the scope in place. But even 0.05 might get us a few weeks of reduction, a few weeks more of vaccination and give us a better start point for when Omicron seeps through and starts to infect larger numbers of people and we see how it affects infection/hospitalisation/death in the double/triple/prior infected (a crucial group)/unvaccinated (I feel with such a number of combinations, at least some of them will be favourable enough).
Mr. JohnL, as well as brief sports of yoga, I've added a couple of short walks to my daily routine (and often one longer one). Plus working out a timetable that naturally increases breaks helps (I don't exercise then walk, but have a working gap between them).
Mr. Jonathan, surely orange juice was a thing?
It was very high end. The aspiring middle classes got Kelloggs Rise & Shine, a powdered version.
Orange juice presumably arrived at different times, depending on where you were in the world.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
There's a book called Oranges by John Macphee all about the US citrus industry
First published in 1966 and apparently addresses the custom of drinking orange juice for breakfast.
So orange juice not a late 80s thing.
Maybe only in Britain, given the incredibly dire state of food here until c.1998 (London only).
I do (vaguely, that said) remember a time when a standard menu of first courses at "fancy" restaurants included a glass of orange juice and a glass of tomato juice.
I was too young and/or too poor to go to “fancy restaurants” until the mid 90s.
I do remember NZ cafes being rather sad places of instant coffee and dry lamingtons. (For some reason this all changed in the early 90s, and the invention and/or arrival of the “flat white”).
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Goldsmith ran a somewhat racist campaign, IIRC. Probably put people off.
Mr. JohnL, as well as brief sports of yoga, I've added a couple of short walks to my daily routine (and often one longer one). Plus working out a timetable that naturally increases breaks helps (I don't exercise then walk, but have a working gap between them).
Mr. Jonathan, surely orange juice was a thing?
It was very high end. The aspiring middle classes got Kelloggs Rise & Shine, a powdered version.
Orange juice presumably arrived at different times, depending on where you were in the world.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
There's a book called Oranges by John Macphee all about the US citrus industry
First published in 1966 and apparently addresses the custom of drinking orange juice for breakfast.
So orange juice not a late 80s thing.
Maybe only in Britain, given the incredibly dire state of food here until c.1998 (London only).
From memory, what really kicked off the industry was orange juice "from concentrate" which is verging on a scam - you can concentrate orange juice but the result is sugary water, so when you reconstitute you have to add the orange flavour separately, so it's really orange squash
Mr. Topping, the lack of awareness could be due to lack of testing in continental Europe. Lack of a spike here at the same time could be because most of our most vulnerable are now triple-jabbed with relatively fewer on the continent.
There was very good thread by a numbers guy at the FT, on Twitter - was posted here last week.
Essentially, a number of European nations have a non-trivial number of completely un-vax'd older people. Even a handful of percent is millions of vulnerable people, at quite high risk of hospitalisation and death.
In the UK, among the older and vulnerable groups, take up is extremely high.
Rundown of how the table felt about the UK's virus situation. Almost all were very positive, one person wasn't, now an academic, the pharma people universally disagreed with that person's assessment. The other two academics were sympathetic to the position but overall still thought we were in a favourable place to maintain our current freedom level and roll back the masks again in a few weeks.
The pharma people all said their internal modelling agreed with the LSHTM model on hospitalisations across Europe. They think Omicron will be very difficult in nations that suppressed the delta exit wave, all three academics said that they disagreed with the government's initial stance of unlock hard in July, but all have been won over by the data.
The big one - vaccine efficacy dilution. Much more mixed, but overall confidence from the pharma people that the vaccines will work to a good enough degree to prevent hospitals from being overwhelmed. The AZ person said that the UK will benefit from doing the majority of over 50s with two AZ doses and a Moderna/Pfizer booster. Their own study shows it gives the best broad spectrum t-cell and b-cell response which won't prevent any infections but will significantly reduce infection severity to the point that they said even with immune escape those people with 2x AZ and 1x Moderna/Pfizer have little to worry about. The table tended to agree that AZ/AZ/Moderna is probably the best combination. Someone suggested that the government should bring AZ back for 30+ booster shots. Another said that the WHO should make the standard three shot course mRNA/AZ/mRNA and that everyone in the UK who had three mRNA doses should be given the option of an AZ booster in the new year for the t/b-cell immunity that mRNA vaccines don't provide to as high a degree.
More generally - the group agreed that Chris Whitty was right that every single person in the country will eventually get COVID. One said that the government lulled itself into a false sense of security with the 95% efficacy on three doses but Omicron proves that we will all get it, probably multiple times over the course of life. They said the thinking in government reflects that but the masks have probably been brought back to "purchase" an R reduction of ~0.1 for a couple of weeks just in case Omicron explodes among the unvaccinated young and unboosted old in the run up to Xmas. This person is probably closest to the government and he said the the way NPIs are now rated is almost like a budget, each one is rated with its R value reduction and it is put against the cost of implementing it from an economic and social perspective. Masks have a low economic and medium social cost but also a very low R reduction. Closing schools has got a very high economic and social cost and also a very high R reduction, lockdown is rated as the highest for costs but a bit less than closing schools for R reduction.
Invaluable, and thanks again
Were there any opinions on the Reinfection issue? That's one of my primary worries, particularly re the UK
No worries, yes a few of them said that as the virus mutates we will all get it again and again but with each reinfection the severity would go down. One pointed out that this is what scientists are referring to with viruses becoming less deadly over time, it isn't that the viruses themselves become less deadly, it's that we get better at fighting them off as our immune systems are trained up on previous versions. They said it's like using an iPhone, when it first came out it was really confusing for people, some features weren't understood and it was a big change from using a Nokia, then the next version came out and it was different but similar enough so we all got used to it faster and so on until we're now at version 13 and it's not very special at all.
Fab. Reassuring. Gratitude
Also good to hear that I am AZ/AZ/Moderna and thus optimally jabbed, I shall sally forth tomorrow with renewed brio and vim, if not GRRR, vavavoom and spunk
JCVI proving again that it can move at pace when required - expected to announce new booster guidelines today, just 48hrs after being asked to review. Some may ask why the committee cannot always act with such urgency when a pandemic is ongoing (eg decision on kids' jabs).
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Goldsmith ran a somewhat racist campaign, IIRC. Probably put people off.
Bailey also got more than the 42% Steve Norris got in the runoff against Livingstone in 2000 and the 44.6% Norris got in the runoff against Livingstone in 2004.
The 44.8% Bailey got makes him the second best Tory candidate for London Mayor since it was created, after Boris
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
Given the Tories only got 32% in London at GE19 Bailey got 13% more than the generic Tory vote in the capital.
In the first round Bailey got 35% which was more than the 32% Tory candidates got on the GLA constituency vote and the 30% Tory GLA candidates got on the list in May 2021
But the NHS might well be "overwhelmed" for years. What do you suggest we do while the backlog unwinds.
Do what we *reasonably* can to avoid Covid circulating too rapidly. We can debate what that means, but some things such as "encouraging wfh where there are no compelling reasons against" (vs the current ofifcially neutral stance) ought not to be very difficult. And I favour restoring the NHS some more spare capacity so that we don't start from a position of waiting lists up to 2 years before the pandemic.
It's one of those problems that doesn't really hit the headlines because most people are not having emergencies most of the time, so I'm not sure that it's generally realised just how extreme the current situation is for at least some hospitals (I only really know the position round here myself, because they report the position to local councils).
Yes I think that we might have to live with the cost of surplus capacity for part of the year although it won't be long before someone criticises the "waste".
As for the reasonable things - as you say one man's reasonable is...
I don't even like the wfh if I'm honest. Not to say that in time it wouldn't make sense, but I am against long term changes which are neither planned nor properly thought out. And again the devil is in the "no compelling reasons" - from supporting the local Costa, etc to helping younger workers, new workers to the company, and to the workforce, etc
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
Given the Tories only got 32% in London at GE19 Bailey got 13% more than the generic Tory vote in the captal
If Rory Stewart had been the Tory candidate he’d have won. One wonders if this has been cooked up for the next London election, serve his penitence at City Hall safely out the way until Boris wants to retire.
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
You had fruit juice in the 50s? That wasn’t a thing until the late 80s, unless you count posh starters in pubs or frozen concentrate.
Here's an excerpt from a Commons debate in 1952, mentioning am apple juice industry in the uk delivering 200k gallons a year throughout the war years:
The pure unfermented apple juice industry—in which I have no vested interest—commenced in this country in 1936 as a direct outcome of the very considerable wastage of apples, as a result both of glut crops and of the development of the grading of apples for market. The consumption of the product grew very slowly, but at the beginning of the last war consumption had reached about 200,000 gallons a year, and the Minister of Food froze the production at that figure for the duration of the war. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1952-04-23/debates/50d4f33b-e8b6-454e-9fc8-ad1acb9b0856/Canteens(AppleJuice)
Fruit was off-ration. But perhaps exotic fruit (oranges !) were unobtanium.
They seem to subsist entirely on dry buttered toast and Riesling.
We didn't need to see stuff like Paul McCartney ordering his lunch....
It won't be too long for Beatles nuts. That's the sort of colour you want if you're a Beatles nut.
Perhaps it would have been better to have 2 versions, one for normal folk that was a couple of hours and the extended your a total Beatles nut edit that is the 8-9hr one they jave released.
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
Perceptions of arrogance aren't a problem for the Tories, it's fully priced in by the electorate. The problem is when, as now, voters twig that the arrogance is misplaced.
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
Given the Tories only got 32% in London at GE19 Bailey got 13% more than the generic Tory vote in the capital.
In the first round Bailey got 35% which was more than the 32% Tory candidates got on the GLA constituency vote and the 30% Tory GLA candidates got on the list in May 2021
That's mostly a consequence of PR votes being seen as more meaningful for the list vote and third party challenges being more credible in a few of the constituencies. Everyone knows that the mayoral vote was a two horse race.
So has anyone who had two AZs first then had a reaction to a Pfizer/Moderna booster?
I had no reaction to the Pfizer booster.
Ditto. Had a 48 hour light flu with the 2 AZs but nothing with my Pfizer booster.
Conversely I was perfectly fine after my 2 AZs but had a GodAlmighty 'hangover' after the Pfizer.
Very strange the way the jabs affect people differently.
I'm sure I've seen in multiple cases that if you've had Covid (even without realising) the following covid injection knocks you sideways afterwards (so revealing you've actually had Covid).
I need to cancel my vaccination booked for the 15th as given my wife had Covid last week it's a decent bet that I've had it given how grotty I've been feeling. I will reschedule for early January to leave a 5 week gap
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
Just informed (As seems the received wisdom on this thread) that HR should be able to sort my other half a decent chair (She is perma WFH and has a massive employer) if she wants. Apparently 'HR are not her friends' though
HR are no-ones friends.
The employer should have such a policy in place, anyway. They are saving a vast amount of money with her not taking up office space. And they are still liable, legally, IIRC....
I just bought myself a decent (IKEA) WFH chair after sitting on a wooden chair since last March that was starting to give me backache. I don't know if work would have got me one, they didn't offer but I didn't ask. The issue for me has been that I've never had much certainty as to how long WFH would last so I was never sure whether it was worth forking out the cash. So I waited until I was in actual pain before getting it.
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
You had fruit juice in the 50s? That wasn’t a thing until the late 80s, unless you count posh starters in pubs or frozen concentrate.
Here's an excerpt from a Commons debate in 1952, mentioning am apple juice industry in the uk delivering 200k gallons a year throughout the war years:
The pure unfermented apple juice industry—in which I have no vested interest—commenced in this country in 1936 as a direct outcome of the very considerable wastage of apples, as a result both of glut crops and of the development of the grading of apples for market. The consumption of the product grew very slowly, but at the beginning of the last war consumption had reached about 200,000 gallons a year, and the Minister of Food froze the production at that figure for the duration of the war. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1952-04-23/debates/50d4f33b-e8b6-454e-9fc8-ad1acb9b0856/Canteens(AppleJuice)
Fruit was off-ration.
(Presumably NP is talking about Denmark?)
Unconnectedly hard (I.e. alcoholic) cider was exempt from prohibition in the US.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
Given the Tories only got 32% in London at GE19 Bailey got 13% more than the generic Tory vote in the capital.
In the first round Bailey got 35% which was more than the 32% Tory candidates got on the GLA constituency vote and the 30% Tory GLA candidates got on the list in May 2021
How long does it take you to work this sort of thing out? Or has someone already prepared these sort of stats for any emergency?
They seem to subsist entirely on dry buttered toast and Riesling.
Not long enough. I could watch the Peter Jackson directors cut of 16 hours.
I watched it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Often while doing something else.
It’s waaaay too long, although I do see why Peter Jackson decided not to edit it down further.
It’s an invaluable historical document, but rather tedious entertainment, I think.
One of my takeaways was how much they really really loved each other. For some reason, I didn’t expect that.
Was ruminating on my takeaways from it. The last half hour of part one where George is visibly losing the will to live and then walks out was a marker for what was to come. John is visibly tripping his tits off on most days. Paul wants to wrestle the project into some kind of coherence even as the band fall apart being able to even agree on what they are producing.
Just listen to the songs output that month! Classics just spontaneously tossed out. Followed by another few months in early summer smashing out Abbey Road. And then they fell apart completely. Terminally. They may love each other and I agree that was there to see, but their time working together being that creative was clearly fading. Its so sad.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
Is it? I don't remember Yvette Cooper making much of an impression first time round. Then again, who has dented the Tories recently barring Angela Rayner?
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
At worst people are ambivalent to him. Nobody hates him except PBers who wouldn't vote Labour anyway
They seem to subsist entirely on dry buttered toast and Riesling.
We didn't need to see stuff like Paul McCartney ordering his lunch....
It won't be too long for Beatles nuts. That's the sort of colour you want if you're a Beatles nut.
Perhaps it would have been better to have 2 versions, one for normal folk that was a couple of hours and the extended your a total Beatles nut edit that is the 8-9hr one they jave released.
There is a 2 hour or so edit, which was played at the “premiere” in New York somewhere.
Jackson’s edit was too long even for the surviving Beatles. 🤣🤣
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
So. My youngest's school bus has simply not turned up today. On the day of A level mocks which may well count towards final grades, and which, in their wisdom it has been decreed cannot be re-sat. The bus company didn't notify anyone, not parents nor school. Nor is the school open for anyone to complain to till 8:15. Well after the time he would normally be already there. No public transport exists. Nor are there any available taxis at that time of day. So for parents without transport, or already gone to work their kids simply don't take the exam. Getting fed up of this country.
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
You had fruit juice in the 50s? That wasn’t a thing until the late 80s, unless you count posh starters in pubs or frozen concentrate.
In the 50s, we (children) were all given oblong shaped glass bottles of concentrated orange juice. It was delicious undiluted.
Because genocide isn't so bad if you wave a nice red flag when you're filling your atrocity quota.
I'm sure the legions of the victims of communism all went happily to their doom, thanking their maker that it wasn't fascists or racists that were killing them, just people who wanted the best for them...
One of the benefits of Wikipedia is that if a small number of people from PB weighed in on that it could be overturned.
When they banned the Daily Mail for being an "unreliable source", it was a result of a campaign by half a dozen activists.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's not Boris Johnson and that is enough for me. A 6/10 for me.
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
You had fruit juice in the 50s? That wasn’t a thing until the late 80s, unless you count posh starters in pubs or frozen concentrate.
Here's an excerpt from a Commons debate in 1952, mentioning am apple juice industry in the uk delivering 200k gallons a year throughout the war years:
The pure unfermented apple juice industry—in which I have no vested interest—commenced in this country in 1936 as a direct outcome of the very considerable wastage of apples, as a result both of glut crops and of the development of the grading of apples for market. The consumption of the product grew very slowly, but at the beginning of the last war consumption had reached about 200,000 gallons a year, and the Minister of Food froze the production at that figure for the duration of the war. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1952-04-23/debates/50d4f33b-e8b6-454e-9fc8-ad1acb9b0856/Canteens(AppleJuice)
Fruit was off-ration. But perhaps exotic fruit (oranges !) were unobtanium.
(Presumably NP is talking about Denmark?)
Those were the days, back when an MP would make a point of saying they had no vested interest in the subject under discussion.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
Everyone likes Khan. An oasis of decency.
I refuse to believe anyone actually “likes” Khan.
He’s done nothing for this city, and could have been replaced with a “Speak Your Weight” machine without most folks noticing.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's done a solid job in the face of a really quite nasty central government operation designed to undermine him and in the face of extremely credible death threats from both Islamists and the far right. His ULEZ extension was a brave measure to fight the number one challenge faced by London, poor air quality, that is necessary but has I am sure hurt his popularity. He hasn't set the world on fire but he's done a decent job and isn't a source of shame and embarrassment like his predecessor, nor has he wasted public money on expensive vanity projects.
Because genocide isn't so bad if you wave a nice red flag when you're filling your atrocity quota.
Wow. Is it going to be removed from Fascism too?
The mass killings under Communism are worse than the mass killings under Fascism, but because the latter happened in western Europe we tend to view the latter as worse rather than them both being evil.
So has anyone who had two AZs first then had a reaction to a Pfizer/Moderna booster?
I had no reaction to the Pfizer booster.
Ditto. Had a 48 hour light flu with the 2 AZs but nothing with my Pfizer booster.
Conversely I was perfectly fine after my 2 AZs but had a GodAlmighty 'hangover' after the Pfizer.
Very strange the way the jabs affect people differently.
I'm sure I've seen in multiple cases that if you've had Covid (even without realising) the following covid injection knocks you sideways afterwards (so revealing you've actually had Covid).
I need to cancel my vaccination booked for the 15th as given my wife had Covid last week it's a decent bet that I've had it given how grotty I've been feeling. I will reschedule for early January to leave a 5 week gap
That’s interesting. My AZ1 had me convulsing in the night in a pool of sweat. Lasted 48hrs. I’d always suspected I’d picked up the disease in Singapore in Feb 2020 at a time when there were officially about 30 cases in the country.
I remember going to the gp 4 times in a week and them saying their machine must be broken because it showed I had blood sats of 90%. I asked them whether I might have this new virus from China and they said the government had forbidden them from testing anyone who had not travelled to Wuhan. Then they gave me oral steroids, I never made a note of which.
It does make me wonder whether much of Asia was further ahead in naturally acquired immunity before this all got going than anyone has realised. Have any of those countries done testing on historic blood samples from late 2019 as in France/Italy? Always been interesting to me that Japan and Singapore had awful “flu” years in 2019. Consider that with the whole world on red alert for new viral strains and all the money now diverted to the effort of looking for them, we seem to have had a new variant bubbling under the surface basically everywhere without realising.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
You had fruit juice in the 50s? That wasn’t a thing until the late 80s, unless you count posh starters in pubs or frozen concentrate.
In the 50s, we (children) were all given oblong shaped glass bottles of concentrated orange juice. It was delicious undiluted.
An entertaining catch-up read this morning. If Sadiq Khan is so shit, we have the calm knowledge that Shaun Bailey would have been worse. How on earth did the Tories end up with such an appalling candidate running such an appalling campaign...?
Shaun Bailey got 45% in the runoff in May against Khan, more than Zac Goldsmith got in 2016 against Khan.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
Jesus. He *lost*. So I read this morning that Khan is an absolute disaster ripe for the taking. And yet you *lost*. So again, how on earth did you pick such an awful candidate and run such an awful campaign?
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
Given the Tories only got 32% in London at GE19 Bailey got 13% more than the generic Tory vote in the captal
If Rory Stewart had been the Tory candidate he’d have won. One wonders if this has been cooked up for the next London election, serve his penitence at City Hall safely out the way until Boris wants to retire.
No he wouldn't. The only London constituency Stewart might have won that Bailey didn't was Merton and Wandsworth but he might have done worse than Bailey did in Outer London too.
Not a single poll had Stewart beating Khan in the runoff even if he was the candidate (I don't think Khan is that bad by the way either, in some respects he is better than Livingstone was)
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's done a solid job in the face of a really quite nasty central government operation designed to undermine him and in the face of extremely credible death threats from both Islamists and the far right. His ULEZ extension was a brave measure to fight the number one challenge faced by London, poor air quality, that is necessary but has I am sure hurt his popularity. He hasn't set the world on fire but he's done a decent job and isn't a source of shame and embarrassment like his predecessor, nor has he wasted public money on expensive vanity projects.
A massive tax rise on the shift-working poor, at a time when the £60k Tube drivers are on strike because they don’t want to work shifts, is hardly something many would consider “a brave measure”.
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
You had fruit juice in the 50s? That wasn’t a thing until the late 80s, unless you count posh starters in pubs or frozen concentrate.
Here's an excerpt from a Commons debate in 1952, mentioning am apple juice industry in the uk delivering 200k gallons a year throughout the war years:
The pure unfermented apple juice industry—in which I have no vested interest—commenced in this country in 1936 as a direct outcome of the very considerable wastage of apples, as a result both of glut crops and of the development of the grading of apples for market. The consumption of the product grew very slowly, but at the beginning of the last war consumption had reached about 200,000 gallons a year, and the Minister of Food froze the production at that figure for the duration of the war. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1952-04-23/debates/50d4f33b-e8b6-454e-9fc8-ad1acb9b0856/Canteens(AppleJuice)
Fruit was off-ration. But perhaps exotic fruit (oranges !) were unobtanium.
(Presumably NP is talking about Denmark?)
Those were the days, back when an MP would make a point of saying they had no vested interest in the subject under discussion.
I don't recall 'a lot' of apples, or apple juice from those days, but they were available, in season. Oranges were virtually unobtainable. Seem to recall 'sometimes' having one at Christmas. And as for bananas.......
So. My youngest's school bus has simply not turned up today. On the day of A level mocks which may well count towards final grades, and which, in their wisdom it has been decreed cannot be re-sat. The bus company didn't notify anyone, not parents nor school. Nor is the school open for anyone to complain to till 8:15. Well after the time he would normally be already there. No public transport exists. Nor are there any available taxis at that time of day. So for parents without transport, or already gone to work their kids simply don't take the exam. Getting fed up of this country.
This country sets people up to fail. Successive Tory governments have stripped away all the postwar infrastructure put in place to minimise the advantages of inherited wealth and privilege. The result? A second rate country dominated by well spoken nonentities, that throws away the talents of most of the population while telling them that it's all the fault of immigrants, or the woke, or the EU.
They seem to subsist entirely on dry buttered toast and Riesling.
Not long enough. I could watch the Peter Jackson directors cut of 16 hours.
I watched it on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Often while doing something else.
It’s waaaay too long, although I do see why Peter Jackson decided not to edit it down further.
It’s an invaluable historical document, but rather tedious entertainment, I think.
One of my takeaways was how much they really really loved each other. For some reason, I didn’t expect that.
Was ruminating on my takeaways from it. The last half hour of part one where George is visibly losing the will to live and then walks out was a marker for what was to come. John is visibly tripping his tits off on most days. Paul wants to wrestle the project into some kind of coherence even as the band fall apart being able to even agree on what they are producing.
Just listen to the songs output that month! Classics just spontaneously tossed out. Followed by another few months in early summer smashing out Abbey Road. And then they fell apart completely. Terminally. They may love each other and I agree that was there to see, but their time working together being that creative was clearly fading. Its so sad.
"Once there was a way ... to get back homeward"
This kicks off one of my favourite few mins of recorded sound.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's done a solid job in the face of a really quite nasty central government operation designed to undermine him and in the face of extremely credible death threats from both Islamists and the far right. His ULEZ extension was a brave measure to fight the number one challenge faced by London, poor air quality, that is necessary but has I am sure hurt his popularity. He hasn't set the world on fire but he's done a decent job and isn't a source of shame and embarrassment like his predecessor, nor has he wasted public money on expensive vanity projects.
A massive tax rise on the shift-working poor, at a time when the £60k Tube drivers are on strike because they don’t want to work shifts, is hardly something many would consider “a brave measure”.
Is OnlyLivingBoy the handle for Sadiq Khan? Certainly seems like it given the summary.
I have noticed that Government Ministers seemed to have calmed down when talking about Omicron since Javids eyes on stalk interview last week. This and the fact that South Africa has not locked down and their President is demanding the travel ban be removed leads me to believe that the early evidence is that whilst the mutation looks bad on paper, it does not seem to be causing severe illnesses.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's done a solid job in the face of a really quite nasty central government operation designed to undermine him and in the face of extremely credible death threats from both Islamists and the far right. His ULEZ extension was a brave measure to fight the number one challenge faced by London, poor air quality, that is necessary but has I am sure hurt his popularity. He hasn't set the world on fire but he's done a decent job and isn't a source of shame and embarrassment like his predecessor, nor has he wasted public money on expensive vanity projects.
A massive tax rise on the shift-working poor, at a time when the £60k Tube drivers are on strike because they don’t want to work shifts, is hardly something many would consider “a brave measure”.
Doing something unpopular but necessary is the definition of bravery in the world of politics.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's done a solid job in the face of a really quite nasty central government operation designed to undermine him and in the face of extremely credible death threats from both Islamists and the far right. His ULEZ extension was a brave measure to fight the number one challenge faced by London, poor air quality, that is necessary but has I am sure hurt his popularity. He hasn't set the world on fire but he's done a decent job and isn't a source of shame and embarrassment like his predecessor, nor has he wasted public money on expensive vanity projects.
I do agree he’s been faced with concerted and malevolent opposition. That’s this government for you.
But the mayoralty never had enough power or money anyway. Putting across a vision for how city like London will progress is all-important.
Boris actually did this, although he ran out of steam in his second term once all the Livingstone-initiated projects had completed.
I don’t think the ULEZ is especially controversial. It’s incredibly tame, really.
That's blooming obvious Change Management - tell people what you are doing and why you are doing it. Something that clearly the husband hadn't explained to his wife.
Quite; I don't think that he'd realised the implications. And if it had been a male inspector it probably wouldn't have mattered so much. It was 'this woman inspecting my house' that irritated my colleague. Who was a very pleasant, sensible and competent person to work with; part of her duties involved inspecting other peoples workplaces, too.
in the 50s district nurses used to come round to check that kids were being given enough fruit juice etc. - almost textbook Nanny State. My mother was incensed, not so much by the intrusion but by the implication that she wouldn't have thought of it herself. (A small child at the time, I thought it wasn't unreasonable, and appreciated someone nudging her on my behalf.)
You had fruit juice in the 50s? That wasn’t a thing until the late 80s, unless you count posh starters in pubs or frozen concentrate.
In the 50s, we (children) were all given oblong shaped glass bottles of concentrated orange juice. It was delicious undiluted.
...
I do remember that Orange Concentrate. Once worked, for a short while as a student, in a pharmacy which was a distribution centre for it.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
Everyone likes Khan. An oasis of decency.
I refuse to believe anyone actually “likes” Khan.
He’s done nothing for this city, and could have been replaced with a “Speak Your Weight” machine without most folks noticing.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's done a solid job in the face of a really quite nasty central government operation designed to undermine him and in the face of extremely credible death threats from both Islamists and the far right. His ULEZ extension was a brave measure to fight the number one challenge faced by London, poor air quality, that is necessary but has I am sure hurt his popularity. He hasn't set the world on fire but he's done a decent job and isn't a source of shame and embarrassment like his predecessor, nor has he wasted public money on expensive vanity projects.
I do agree he’s been faced with concerted and malevolent opposition. That’s this government for you.
But the mayoralty never had enough power or money anyway. Putting across a vision for how city like London will progress is all-important.
Boris actually did this, although he ran out of steam in his second term once all the Livingstone-initiated projects had completed.
I don’t think the ULEZ is especially controversial. It’s incredibly tame, really.
As far as I can work out the ULEZ will be charging people for living within the the North/South Circular simply for owning an older car. And what demographic do we think mainly lives in outer-ish London with old cars.
Sadiq Khan's mayoralty in a nutshell. Moving City Hall from the iconic, purpose built Norman Foster-designed HQ right by Tower Bridge, to an anonymous, low slung glass thing somewhere in Newham, but no one knows where, a jagged blob that has few transport connections, thus degrading his office and the city governance in the eyes of voters, and not even saving that much money
He really is the Worst Mayor Ever, and this move will be his epitaph. It's terrible in every way
Even worse he is fudging the figures
Most of the saving is because no rent will be paid (£55m of the total saving of £60m over 5 years).
No rent is payable because they BOUGHT the property in 2019.
That may or may not be the right thing (I have no view) but it is misleading to present it as a cost saving measure
Surely if you no longer need to pay £11m a year in rent that is a cost saving.
And from memory - the GLA has owned the Crystal since it was built - but it was leased to Siemens who surrendered the lease in 2019 (for they weren't really using the building).
My comment was based on the BBC article which said they bought from Siemens but if your second paragraph is correct then that’s somewhat different.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
In any event, @Leon clutching at the weakest of straws to diss Khan is entirely predictable. I thinke we already get that he doesn't like Khan and is unlikely (!) to vote for him next time.
With respect, you don’t live here. Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
I live here and I like Khan.
WHY? Seriously, WHY?
These mayoralties are really, really important. Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
He's done a solid job in the face of a really quite nasty central government operation designed to undermine him and in the face of extremely credible death threats from both Islamists and the far right. His ULEZ extension was a brave measure to fight the number one challenge faced by London, poor air quality, that is necessary but has I am sure hurt his popularity. He hasn't set the world on fire but he's done a decent job and isn't a source of shame and embarrassment like his predecessor, nor has he wasted public money on expensive vanity projects.
A massive tax rise on the shift-working poor, at a time when the £60k Tube drivers are on strike because they don’t want to work shifts, is hardly something many would consider “a brave measure”.
Is OnlyLivingBoy the handle for Sadiq Khan? Certainly seems like it given the summary.
Comments
Looking back at Tory Party elections you can see how unlucky Ken Clarke was. In 1997, he would have won a members' ballot but they didn't get a vote then, so Hague won - a bad decision for him and everyone else concerned. And then, in 2001, when Euro-scepticism had gripped the party, he lost in a members' vote to IDS, who he certainly would have beaten in an MPs only poll.
Who are the three drivers on the current F1 grid who have never won a (car) championship in any category ?
Best thing people can do now, today? If you are not vaccinated, book your appointment.
Into the weeds of argument here though; Javid appears much more proactive than Hancock was near the end of his tenure.
I remember we went to Mexico after visiting my wife's relatives in Houston, they were genuinely perplexed as to why anyone would visit Mexico. As anyone who has ever visited both cities knows, Mexico City is an infinitely more beautiful, interesting and culturally vibrant place than Houston. Let's just say that Texans have a rather ill-informed and not altogether healthy attitude towards the country to their South.
Poor Mexico, so close to the United States, so far from God.
Pretty sure the Americans (with all their orange production in Florida) had access to orange juice quite early.
These days I am slightly annoyed to receive fresh orange juice as de rigeur in hotels. It’s all sugar. I won’t give it to my kids.
Bailey also won a majority of outer London suburban boroughs in the 1st round
If they had labelled it 'community resilience' or some other weasel term at the time it may have been better.
Control by vaccination, lifestyle, travel bans, herd immunity, treatments etc are all realistic. We do it for diseases generally. Eradication by extinction is rare, smallpox being an interesting exception.
No, the general public isn't very bright, in the sense that leaders have to be alert to the amplification of the dimmest and most extreme responses. How else could the media function?
But the NHS might well be "overwhelmed" for years. What do you suggest we do while the backlog unwinds.
On the first paragraph it’s not wrong, it’s just misleading. If you spend £100m to reduce your costs by £10m p.a. that may well be a sensible decision. But simply to say “it’s a cost saving” without highlighting the capital expenditure (and/or netting off the reduced income/opportunity cost of the capital spend) is only telling half the story
Meanwhile, one has to assume that Omicron is seeded in London and three or four weeks away from supplanting Delta.
It’s been 4.9999 months since my second Moderna jab…
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1465233684357951493?t=QDvFTDPALs9g6AQFikyCNA&s=19
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01BIF07WQ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Then again with travel for the past few months possible between the high-delta countries of Europe and the UK why haven't we seen a spike or is this all Omicron gathering speed.
Now I did know that the building was owned by the GLA but that's only because we used to visit the museum and I remember GLA people on one of the floors even then.
So orange juice not a late 80s thing.
Maybe only in Britain, given the incredibly dire state of food here until c.1998 (London only).
Fascinating, though, in its micro-details.
They seem to subsist entirely on dry buttered toast and Riesling.
Then Hitachi Rail stole it....
It's one of those problems that doesn't really hit the headlines because most people are not having emergencies most of the time, so I'm not sure that it's generally realised just how extreme the current situation is for at least some hospitals (I only really know the position round here myself, because they report the position to local councils).
Surely the Tory party isn't actually run by arrogant parodies like you?
The NHS stress point does not negate the need to increase immunity levels by both vaccination and infection, it should just informs how fast you should go and when we bring in NPIs.
I think masking is a weak but easy measure - with the transience of most contacts in shops and the relative low numbers of people using public transport still, I'd be surprised if we get as much as 0.1 R reduction from masking with the scope in place. But even 0.05 might get us a few weeks of reduction, a few weeks more of vaccination and give us a better start point for when Omicron seeps through and starts to infect larger numbers of people and we see how it affects infection/hospitalisation/death in the double/triple/prior infected (a crucial group)/unvaccinated (I feel with such a number of combinations, at least some of them will be favourable enough).
I do remember NZ cafes being rather sad places of instant coffee and dry lamingtons. (For some reason this all changed in the early 90s, and the invention and/or arrival of the “flat white”).
Essentially, a number of European nations have a non-trivial number of completely un-vax'd older people. Even a handful of percent is millions of vulnerable people, at quite high risk of hospitalisation and death.
In the UK, among the older and vulnerable groups, take up is extremely high.
The 44.8% Bailey got makes him the second best Tory candidate for London Mayor since it was created, after Boris
Time will tell.
Cooper making a return is good news
Often while doing something else.
It’s waaaay too long, although I do see why Peter Jackson decided not to edit it down further.
It’s an invaluable historical document, but rather tedious entertainment, I think.
One of my takeaways was how much they really really loved each other. For some reason, I didn’t expect that.
In the first round Bailey got 35% which was more than the 32% Tory candidates got on the GLA constituency vote and the 30% Tory GLA candidates got on the list in May 2021
Very strange the way the jabs affect people differently.
As for the reasonable things - as you say one man's reasonable is...
I don't even like the wfh if I'm honest. Not to say that in time it wouldn't make sense, but I am against long term changes which are neither planned nor properly thought out. And again the devil is in the "no compelling reasons" - from supporting the local Costa, etc to helping younger workers, new workers to the company, and to the workforce, etc
The pure unfermented apple juice industry—in which I have no vested interest—commenced in this country in 1936 as a direct outcome of the very considerable wastage of apples, as a result both of glut crops and of the development of the grading of apples for market. The consumption of the product grew very slowly, but at the beginning of the last war consumption had reached about 200,000 gallons a year, and the Minister of Food froze the production at that figure for the duration of the war.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1952-04-23/debates/50d4f33b-e8b6-454e-9fc8-ad1acb9b0856/Canteens(AppleJuice)
Fruit was off-ration. But perhaps exotic fruit (oranges !) were unobtanium.
(Presumably NP is talking about Denmark?)
I wrote a long post a year ago bemoaning the quality of the Labour shadows, but many of them have gone on to impress me.
Nick Thomas-Symonds is terrible. Imagine being up against Priti Patel and not being able to get any opinion over whatsoever. He’s invisible.
Kate Green is hopeless in Education, and Louise Haigh is too moronic for her post (NI) which is reasonably high profile.
I need to cancel my vaccination booked for the 15th as given my wife had Covid last week it's a decent bet that I've had it given how grotty I've been feeling. I will reschedule for early January to leave a 5 week gap
Khan has the air of a jumped up traffic warden, not the mayor of a global metropolis.
This is London, not Lillycrap-on-the-Wold.
It's powerful. Shades of Frisco 67 and all of that.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1465080282323767297
Just listen to the songs output that month! Classics just spontaneously tossed out. Followed by another few months in early summer smashing out Abbey Road. And then they fell apart completely. Terminally. They may love each other and I agree that was there to see, but their time working together being that creative was clearly fading. Its so sad.
These mayoralties are really, really important.
Khan is doing his best to relegate the London one into invisibility and irrelevance.
From Sky News this morning.
https://youtu.be/fL3doSj_mtE
Sound familiar?
Jackson’s edit was too long even for the surviving Beatles. 🤣🤣
The bus company didn't notify anyone, not parents nor school. Nor is the school open for anyone to complain to till 8:15. Well after the time he would normally be already there.
No public transport exists. Nor are there any available taxis at that time of day. So for parents without transport, or already gone to work their kids simply don't take the exam.
Getting fed up of this country.
When they banned the Daily Mail for being an "unreliable source", it was a result of a campaign by half a dozen activists.
He’s done nothing for this city, and could have been replaced with a “Speak Your Weight” machine without most folks noticing.
In fact I probably voted for him first time round. Can’t remember.
The mass killings under Communism are worse than the mass killings under Fascism, but because the latter happened in western Europe we tend to view the latter as worse rather than them both being evil.
I remember going to the gp 4 times in a week and them saying their machine must be broken because it showed I had blood sats of 90%. I asked them whether I might have this new virus from China and they said the government had forbidden them from testing anyone who had not travelled to Wuhan. Then they gave me oral steroids, I never made a note of which.
It does make me wonder whether much of Asia was further ahead in naturally acquired immunity before this all got going than anyone has realised. Have any of those countries done testing on historic blood samples from late 2019 as in France/Italy? Always been interesting to me that Japan and Singapore had awful “flu” years in 2019. Consider that with the whole world on red alert for new viral strains and all the money now diverted to the effort of looking for them, we seem to have had a new variant bubbling under the surface basically everywhere without realising.
Yours, from Lillycrap-on-the-Wold, Ben x
Not a single poll had Stewart beating Khan in the runoff even if he was the candidate (I don't think Khan is that bad by the way either, in some respects he is better than Livingstone was)
This kicks off one of my favourite few mins of recorded sound.
This and the fact that South Africa has not locked down and their President is demanding the travel ban be removed leads me to believe that the early evidence is that whilst the mutation looks bad on paper, it does not seem to be causing severe illnesses.
But the mayoralty never had enough power or money anyway. Putting across a vision for how city like London will progress is all-important.
Boris actually did this, although he ran out of steam in his second term once all the Livingstone-initiated projects had completed.
I don’t think the ULEZ is especially controversial. It’s incredibly tame, really.