The Scottish Tories and their media chums have just spent the last month slagging off vaccine passports, and now their English brethren follow the SG lead.
Ditto Scottish Labour and WG.
Ditto WFH.
Aha! Working from home.
I think I’m acronymed-out.
Here's one: Boris can FOAD
While I’m with you on the FO part, I want BJ to stick around for ages as an object of general contempt and derision, and to suffer extreme penury as his brand becomes so stinky that they won’t even hire him to open a Poundstretcher.
Senior Government sources tell Sky news PM is minded to move to plan B as early as this week, and he is worried he will regret if he does not move now
What do people reckon the thinking is behind going to Plan B now?
(1) To buy time for more scientific investigation? (2) To buy time for more boosters? (3) (Being cynicial.) Because they have already decided a full lodckdown will be necessary and they think this will allow them to delay it until after Christmas?
(4) Because they've been driven mad by Covid and corrupted into thinking lockdowns are acceptable under the circumstances.
Senior Government sources tell Sky news PM is minded to move to plan B as early as this week, and he is worried he will regret if he does not move now
What do people reckon the thinking is behind going to Plan B now?
(1) To buy time for more scientific investigation? (2) To buy time for more boosters? (3) (Being cynicial.) Because they have already decided a full lodckdown will be necessary and they think this will allow them to delay it until after Christmas?
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP unless you live in a marginal seat then your vote really makes little difference at a general election and I include myself in that as I live in safe Tory Epping Forest not a marginal
Dude. You're not supposed to point this out to people, or they might start wanting to try and change it.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
But plan B isn't going to prevent that? We can see across the whole of Europe that plan b measures are of low value. France just clicked in 58k cases despite all having all of this in place, Germany has been clocking in 70k+ per day for a while despite tougher than plan B. The Netherlands is in pretty much lockdown and getting our equivalent of 80k cases per day.
You're aiming a hose pipe at a forest fire and expecting it to make a difference, it won't. If anything you're falling for their bullshit lies that Plan B will miraculously make everything go away. It won't. All it means is we're all living in a police state where the government has the ability to exclude people from normal life if they feel like it.
...This combination of city densities and thriving centres transforms public transport planning and so has a huge impact on drivers. For example, Leeds and Marseille have a similar population but, according to a recent Centre for Cities report, because Marseille is denser, 87 per cent of people can reach its centre in 30 minutes by public transport, compared with just 38 per cent in Leeds. Indeed, in Europe 67 per cent of people can commute to city centres in 30 minutes, compared with just 40 per cent in Britain. Our scattered cities make public transport trickier and send more of us flocking to our cars. And that time wasted is money wasted. Rome and Manchester are the same size but the Italian capital, despite its notoriously chaotic road traffic, is 55 per cent more productive, “partly because a much larger share of its workforce can travel into the city centre by public transport”."
(snipped)
In this, as so many things, we seem to be a half way house between Europe and the US.
It’s also though a historical feature of the why cities in Europe and the U.K. developed
As the first industrial nation, cities in the U.K. developed around their industries. Birmingham, Manchester etc all had factories right in the heart of the City Centre. Go back to the 1930s and their populations were concentrated as they had to be close to the factories. When these factories closed, there was no need to be close. Moreover, because factories occupied space close to the city centres, slum clearance meant replacement housing had to be built further out.
European cities were not designed in the same way. Factories were put in specific districts away from the city centres. It was a lot more planned. Often, population control concerns meant the building of large wide roads which were difficult to barricade against and could allow the rapid deployment of troops.
Yes, this is true. Noticeable differences in layout. I prefer the European model although it does sometimes mean some pretty ugly suburbs, especially in S Europe (Italy: Centro Storico with the target sign - beautiful; suburbs outside, not so much). The most extreme examples I can think of are in the low countries, e.g. Antwerp: very nice historical centre that feels like you're in a small town; then a vast, really quite breathtaking series of industrial complexes between the city and the sea that are of a scale unlike anything in the UK except possibly Grangemouth.
I know what you mean although the other problem you can get with the European cities is that they are segregated by class in a way that (some) U.K. cities are not. Try building a low income housing project in Paris’ 16th….
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
The Bridge of HYUFD Acceptability is narrow. Only one man has ever crossed it.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
There is no such thing as a temporary Prime Minister. So which Tory MP will be appointed PM while a vote for Tory party leader is held or will the party think blow it and just ask Rishi to take the job?
I think there is for betting purposes. CBA to look despite having money on it but I think caretaker PMs are excluded
Betfair
This market will be settled based on the first official announcement of the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
As I said there is no such thing as a temporary or caretaker PM - and I now suspect if Boris goes he won't be sitting in No 10 for 3 months while a successor is selected via a vote.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
The Bridge of HYUFD Acceptability is narrow. Only one man has ever crossed it.
Is FUDHY the troll or the fat little billy goat?
Do you mean an African or European HYUFD? Laden or unladen?
I think I'm in the minority here, but I think Boris will apologise. Well, he'll try to give a weaselly non-apology in an attempt to deflate Starmer's balloon before PMQs. Whether that is sufficient for the public is a different question.
‘I’m sorry if anyone who wasn’t able to be with their dying relatives in their last hours is offended…’
Indeed. Johnson has refined the fine art of making apologies even more provocative than the sin.
The party - and I would not be in the least bit surprised to find that a number of Cabinet Ministers were present for rather longer than Boris, if indeed he attended it at all - is an amuse bouche to the much more worrying legislation and other proposals coming from this government.
- The very wide-ranging powers effectively stopping any form of protest - The curbs on judicial review - The refusal of a Minister yesterday to confirm that the government would remain within the ECHR (something they have always previously done) - The powers to take away British passports on a whim from British citizens
This is a dangerous government. Starmer should not just focus on the PM, easy and fun as it is to do. He needs to nail the Cabinet - who have been complicit in supporting Boris, in destroying the only worthwhile policy this government has (Levelling Up) and who are supporting the above dangerously authoritarian policies.
Sunak, Patel, Javid, Truss: they all need to be tied to Boris because the reality is that he is PM because these and all the other Tory MPs crying their crocodile tears now supported him.
This would be a mistake I think. Corruption & Tories breaking the rules is an issue that unites the voters Starmer needs.
Attacking Johnson's plans on rescinding British passports & authoritarianism is just talking to people who are going to vote Labour/Lib Dem anyway.
Sadly, you'll find that nearly no-one in the Labour party is interested in the "libertarian" argument. Such things are seen as right wing. All that is needed is for a "proper" (Labour) government to be in control. The original idea of removing citizenship as a Home Office procedure (for example) didn't start under this government.
I actually went as far as meeting MPs over the national ID card thing (really the databases behind it). And the NHS encryption stuff, way back.
About 80% of the MPs I talked to would give the Police/Security Service *any* powers they asked for. Most of the rest regarded *nearly any* request as justified. The most terrifying thing was realising, when I briefed them on encryption, that I was actually getting them to line up behind the insane attempts on encryption bans/back doors.
There seemed to be a sprinkling of "libertarian" minded across the parties - about equal Labour and Conservative. Only met one LibDem - and he was of the I'm-against-it-but-it's-not-a-core-issue type.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Omicron seems to be only minimally inconvenienced by vaccines. OTOH the same goes for lockdowns
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
This is a betting site. The liberal tories who are making the noise do not hold the balance of power in the Tory party.
BJ is safe, for now.
Sampling bias. The tories making a noise are not red wall tories, certainly not on here and not in op ed media pieces or the bits of twitter anyone here follows. I wouldn't automatically assume the red wallers don't give a toss about any of paterson, planes and parties.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
The point of the story was Midas starved to death because literally everything he touched etc etc
This is a betting site. The liberal tories who are making the noise do not hold the balance of power in the Tory party.
BJ is safe, for now.
We're nearly at Christmas, and a prolonged break. Luckily for Boris. All the same, the impression will remain. This has real cut-through, and compounds the Paterson farrago.
Internal Tory critics of the Boris regime will have been emboldened, and that possibly will be even more significant than the public reaction. Can the whips keep things from bubbling over?
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
The point of the story was Midas starved to death because literally everything he touched etc etc
That's true so it still works. But I meant reverse anyway, everything she touches turns to shit.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP it doesn't matter if you win a seat by 80-20 or 60-40 or 50-30-20.
This creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the parties to prioritise only that small number of constituencies that are currently competitive.
It also creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the voters to vote negatively against things, rather than positively for things, and this means that weak candidates can prosper where they wear the right colour of rosette.
A number of alternative voting systems, like STV, or open-list PR, solve these and other problems. Obviously we wouldn't want to use some abomination of a closed list PR system.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Omicron seems to be only minimally inconvenienced by vaccines. OTOH the same goes for lockdowns
LD 11/10 in NS now. Doesn't look value, but in a couple of hours it might retrospectively do
Looks like massive value to me.
They should be heavy odds-on favourites. I don't see any possible way that the Tories win this seat in a mid-term by-election mired in scandal.
I wouldn't turn out to vote for this shower of shite. Who would?
I would vote Lib Dem next Thursday if I could
This is just wrong. The 41 fold decrease widely reported (which is actually only 6 fold decrease vs delta) still equates to vaccine effectiveness vs hospitalisation in the upper 80 percents, and that it with 2 doses. The booster increase in antibodies entirely offsets this so 3 doses vs O is as effective as 2 doses was vs D.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Omicron seems to be only minimally inconvenienced by vaccines. OTOH the same goes for lockdowns
This is a betting site. The liberal tories who are making the noise do not hold the balance of power in the Tory party.
BJ is safe, for now.
We're nearly at Christmas, and a prolonged break. Luckily for Boris. All the same, the impression will remain. This has real cut-through, and compounds the Paterson farrago.
Internal Tory critics of the Boris regime will have been emboldened, and that possibly will be even more significant than the public reaction. Can the whips keep things from bubbling over?
And we don't know who leaked this video, and whether they have more to come.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
I think you may have misunderstood that Midas touch thing.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Omicron seems to be only minimally inconvenienced by vaccines. OTOH the same goes for lockdowns
Where are you seeing that? Disease severity looks like it will be greatly reduced even by two doses of vaccine. If people catch it and get the sniffles for a few days it's all over and so far that's what two dose and natural protection looks like, three doses may be even better because of the higher t-cell response.
It's what my university friends were saying last week, Omicron has removed the last few bits of hope that a scenario exists where people don't get COVID, everyone in the world is going to catch it, multiple times. That's the world we live in.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP it doesn't matter if you win a seat by 80-20 or 60-40 or 50-30-20.
This creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the parties to prioritise only that small number of constituencies that are currently competitive.
It also creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the voters to vote negatively against things, rather than positively for things, and this means that weak candidates can prosper where they wear the right colour of rosette.
A number of alternative voting systems, like STV, or open-list PR, solve these and other problems. Obviously we wouldn't want to use some abomination of a closed list PR system.
Out of curiosity any idea what proportion of seats have never changed hands from 1992 to today? Ie covering both Labour gaining power last time they did, and the Tories doing so, to date.
People talk about "safe seats" but the reality is the number of constituencies that can change are a lot larger than people realise.
If we only relied upon the swing seats of the past then the Conservatives would never have bothered campaigning in seats like Leigh last election, would they?
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
If Omicron is very dangerous we need to protect the NHS. If Omicron in not so dangerous we need to protect the NHS.
Must logically be a sweet spot somewhere in between - or are we being run the NHS now?
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Senior Government sources tell Sky news PM is minded to move to plan B as early as this week, and he is worried he will regret if he does not move now
What do people reckon the thinking is behind going to Plan B now?
(1) To buy time for more scientific investigation? (2) To buy time for more boosters? (3) (Being cynicial.) Because they have already decided a full lodckdown will be necessary and they think this will allow them to delay it until after Christmas?
I suspect that it will be poorly complied with, and make little difference, but peak omicron coinciding with the holiday break is the perfect storm for the NHS. Certainly I will be lying low the next 2 weeks as I am the holiday on call cover for my department. If I have to isolate, then it will be very thin cover indeed.
If it can be put off until Jan then there is a bit more slack in the system.
I could vote Labour in the right circumstances to get rid of Boris Johnson and those who enabled him.
The unfortunate thing is though that the only way to get rid of Boris is to replace him with Starmer, who is even more of a lockdown fanatic.
But Starmer would be less of a **** about it.
Starmer would be worse, he's been lockdown mad since this began.
There's something in that. The big barrier to centrist, left-leaning and even some centre-right Covid doves voting for Labour is that they consider Starmer way too hawkish.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
At that rate the R value will naturally get lower because so many people are entering the immunity funnel.
Clearly Starmer would be the better PM, this is clearly not in doubt to anyone sane
I'm calling for Boris to go, but I still doubt that.
That's like saying clearly a shit sandwich is better than shit on toast.
Starmer's answer to everything for the past two years is to lock us up. He can piss right off too, if the answer is Starmer you're asking the wrong question.
Senior Government sources tell Sky news PM is minded to move to plan B as early as this week, and he is worried he will regret if he does not move now
What do people reckon the thinking is behind going to Plan B now?
(1) To buy time for more scientific investigation? (2) To buy time for more boosters? (3) (Being cynicial.) Because they have already decided a full lodckdown will be necessary and they think this will allow them to delay it until after Christmas?
None of those, it's because they need to drive attention away from their dodgy Christmas parties and saving animals instead of people. That's what this is.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Omicron seems to be only minimally inconvenienced by vaccines. OTOH the same goes for lockdowns
I could vote Labour in the right circumstances to get rid of Boris Johnson and those who enabled him.
The unfortunate thing is though that the only way to get rid of Boris is to replace him with Starmer, who is even more of a lockdown fanatic.
But Starmer would be less of a **** about it.
Starmer would be worse, he's been lockdown mad since this began.
There's something in that. The big barrier to centrist, left-leaning and even some centre-right Covid doves voting for Labour is that they consider Starmer way too hawkish.
Indeed, Starmer would have gone down the standard European route ages ago and we'd have 8-10m people with little to no immunity heading into the Omicron wave. We really would be facing a disaster.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
If Omicron is very dangerous we need to protect the NHS. If Omicron in not so dangerous we need to protect the NHS.
Must logically be a sweet spot somewhere in between - or are we being run the NHS now?
That assumes it's a trough not a peak - it could be worst in the middle for all we know.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I don't think that is true. Thatcher was an election winner, but is there anyone who seriously believed she would've managed a better result in 1992 (or 1991) than John Major?
And whilst we'll never know for certain, would Blair have managed better than Brown in 2010? Even if you think he might've got more seats (and I could possibly see that - though he might lose more in Scotland whereas Brown held 41 in 2010 so maybe not) I cannot see Labour with a majority under Blair in 2010.
Winners run out of steam and need replacing. The replacement might not win either (Brown) but leaving things as they are usually guarantee a heavy defeat eventually. Has Johnson reached his '1990 Thatcher' or '2007 Blair' point yet? I'm not sure, but 2024 just got that little bit harder if he chooses to go for it.
As a matter of fact, I think Blair would have done better than Brown in 2010. Cameron and Osborne were, rightly, mightily relieved when he stepped down.
Correct, but Blair wouldn’t have done better in Scotland. Brown holding 41 seats was a truly astonishing feat, so even if Blair had done better in England, he would still have lacked a majority in 2010.
Where Blair would have far-surpassed Brown was *post* election: he would not have shirked - as Brown did - from building a grand anti-Tory coalition. His slightly better arithmetic would have greatly oiled the wheels.
Also, to be clear, just as the whole package of extra restrictions is a blatent and disgraceful exercise in media management, equally the floating of vaccine passports is just designed to make it seem balanced when they announce a load of other disruptive and economically destructive bullshit, but leave out that bit.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP unless you live in a marginal seat then your vote really makes little difference at a general election and I include myself in that as I live in safe Tory Epping Forest not a marginal
I wonder how many ex Tory MPs thought the same as you up until election night 1997?
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
The scary thing is how would new restrictions ever get released? We're not waiting for vaccines, we're not waiting for hospital numbers to decline - there will never be a non arbitrary time to remove restrictions which were created arbitrarily.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
But plan B isn't going to prevent that? We can see across the whole of Europe that plan b measures are of low value. France just clicked in 58k cases despite all having all of this in place, Germany has been clocking in 70k+ per day for a while despite tougher than plan B. The Netherlands is in pretty much lockdown and getting our equivalent of 80k cases per day.
You're aiming a hose pipe at a forest fire and expecting it to make a difference, it won't. If anything you're falling for their bullshit lies that Plan B will miraculously make everything go away. It won't. All it means is we're all living in a police state where the government has the ability to exclude people from normal life if they feel like it.
The view from the health experts and NHS managers is that it will help. Who am I to tell them they are wrong? The difference between us and the countries you mention is that because they kept restrictions on things like masks, they were able to keep case numbers very low. We did not and hence suffered 40k new cases a day month after month which put the service under such massive prolonged pressure.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
At that rate it would surpass Delta in about a fortnight. And then it will carry on doubling at a similar rate until it has infected a large proportion of the susceptible population. Given that even without immune escape the efficacy of the vaccines against infection was limited (around 50% for AstraZeneca), the susceptible population will be huge. The current rate of infection amounts to only about 1% of the population a week. Obviously there is scope for the rate of infection to be many times greater than it is now if it is left uncontrolled.
Clearly Starmer would be the better PM, this is clearly not in doubt to anyone sane
I'm calling for Boris to go, but I still doubt that.
That's like saying clearly a shit sandwich is better than shit on toast.
Starmer's answer to everything for the past two years is to lock us up. He can piss right off too, if the answer is Starmer you're asking the wrong question.
Quote: Starmer's answer to everything for the past two years is to lock us up.
What else would you expect of a prosecuting barrister?
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened.
Largely because vaccination reduced the susceptible population so that the R number fell to about one.
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
But plan B isn't going to prevent that? We can see across the whole of Europe that plan b measures are of low value. France just clicked in 58k cases despite all having all of this in place, Germany has been clocking in 70k+ per day for a while despite tougher than plan B. The Netherlands is in pretty much lockdown and getting our equivalent of 80k cases per day.
You're aiming a hose pipe at a forest fire and expecting it to make a difference, it won't. If anything you're falling for their bullshit lies that Plan B will miraculously make everything go away. It won't. All it means is we're all living in a police state where the government has the ability to exclude people from normal life if they feel like it.
The view from the health experts and NHS managers is that it will help. Who am I to tell them they are wrong? The difference between us and the countries you mention is that because they kept restrictions on things like masks, they were able to keep case numbers very low. We did not and hence suffered 40k new cases a day month after month which put the service under such massive prolonged pressure.
And ensured we had better immunity when the really infective variant came along.
I fail to see what Plan B will achieve, other than political cover. It will have only a marginal effect on the outcome of Omicron, whatever that might be (and we don't know yet).
The government should really admit the truth - they've done everything they can (vax, vax, vax) and we'll all just have to take what is coming.
It might turn out to be OK, and it might not, but that's not really within the government's control.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened.
Largely because vaccination reduced the susceptible population so that the R number fell to about one.
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
South Africa has not locked down, according to sewage data cases are rampant there, yet their hospitals are quiet.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP unless you live in a marginal seat then your vote really makes little difference at a general election and I include myself in that as I live in safe Tory Epping Forest not a marginal
I wonder how many ex Tory MPs thought the same as you up until election night 1997?
Epping Forest stayed Tory even in 1997.
Plus 1997 was a once a half century general election result, Blair had 20%+ poll leads midterm, miles ahead of where Starmer is now
Lots of Shopping cart action today - Martin need a fucking dead cat army matey, yeah yeah Plan B great.... [thumbs up run from room] CRASH. Noooooo that will make the party story worrrrrse Martin, need something else. SMASH. [183 whatsapps in 4 mins from flat] Argh poor MEEEEEEE CRASH Shopping cartShopping cart
Senior Government sources tell Sky news PM is minded to move to plan B as early as this week, and he is worried he will regret if he does not move now
What do people reckon the thinking is behind going to Plan B now?
(1) To buy time for more scientific investigation? (2) To buy time for more boosters? (3) (Being cynicial.) Because they have already decided a full lodckdown will be necessary and they think this will allow them to delay it until after Christmas?
I suspect that it will be poorly complied with, and make little difference, but peak omicron coinciding with the holiday break is the perfect storm for the NHS. Certainly I will be lying low the next 2 weeks as I am the holiday on call cover for my department. If I have to isolate, then it will be very thin cover indeed.
If it can be put off until Jan then there is a bit more slack in the system.
You really think that the NHS can cope with this without a lockdown?
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
The scary thing is how would new restrictions ever get released? We're not waiting for vaccines, we're not waiting for hospital numbers to decline - there will never be a non arbitrary time to remove restrictions which were created arbitrarily.
I am not advocating another lockdown, but what you say is not true. The first wave abated by June 2020, with no vaccines for another 6 months.
It is the nature of pandemic waves that they peak and then decline.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened.
Largely because vaccination reduced the susceptible population so that the R number fell to about one.
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
It will spread, people will catch it, they will gain acquired immunity to Omicron and life will move on.
Time to put this Covid BS behind us.
What do you think will get R below 1 without restrictions?
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP unless you live in a marginal seat then your vote really makes little difference at a general election and I include myself in that as I live in safe Tory Epping Forest not a marginal
I wonder how many ex Tory MPs thought the same as you up until election night 1997?
The late Tony Newton for one (Braintree constituency, 1992 maj 17,494. 1997 Alan Hurst Lab maj 1,451)
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened.
Largely because vaccination reduced the susceptible population so that the R number fell to about one.
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
Vaccination probably. Cases in South Africa appear to have peaked and not managed to spread beyond the young.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Omicron seems to be only minimally inconvenienced by vaccines. OTOH the same goes for lockdowns
LD 11/10 in NS now. Doesn't look value, but in a couple of hours it might retrospectively do
Looks like massive value to me.
They should be heavy odds-on favourites. I don't see any possible way that the Tories win this seat in a mid-term by-election mired in scandal.
I wouldn't turn out to vote for this shower of shite. Who would?
I would vote Lib Dem next Thursday if I could
I might have another 1,000 on the strength of that
I see you have rolled rapidly back from your claim that vaccines were "marzipan dildos"!!
Um, no, it says much the same
Sorry, I misread read your post.
Yes, you remain as antivax as ever!
I'm jabbed and boosted and passionately keen everybody else should be. It just doesn't do quite what it says on the tin, compared to any othe vaccine I have ever had.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened.
Largely because vaccination reduced the susceptible population so that the R number fell to about one.
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
It will spread, people will catch it, they will gain acquired immunity to Omicron and life will move on.
Time to put this Covid BS behind us.
What do you think will get R below 1 without restrictions?
Ignoring reality has consequences of course. Wishing life was normal doesn't make it so.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP unless you live in a marginal seat then your vote really makes little difference at a general election and I include myself in that as I live in safe Tory Epping Forest not a marginal
I wonder how many ex Tory MPs thought the same as you up until election night 1997?
Epping Forest stayed Tory even in 1997.
Plus 1997 was a once a half century general election result, Blair had 20%+ poll leads midterm, miles ahead of where Starmer is now
Christ, I still remember election night 1997. What a time to be alive...
I could vote Labour in the right circumstances to get rid of Boris Johnson and those who enabled him.
The unfortunate thing is though that the only way to get rid of Boris is to replace him with Starmer, who is even more of a lockdown fanatic.
But Starmer would be less of a **** about it.
Starmer would be worse, he's been lockdown mad since this began.
There's something in that. The big barrier to centrist, left-leaning and even some centre-right Covid doves voting for Labour is that they consider Starmer way too hawkish.
Indeed, pre-Covid I would 100% have voted tactically for Labour over Conservative if I was in a marginal seat. I just couldn't do that now because the prospect of having lockdowns hanging over my life for the indefinite future outweighs almost every other political consideration that I have.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
But plan B isn't going to prevent that? We can see across the whole of Europe that plan b measures are of low value. France just clicked in 58k cases despite all having all of this in place, Germany has been clocking in 70k+ per day for a while despite tougher than plan B. The Netherlands is in pretty much lockdown and getting our equivalent of 80k cases per day.
You're aiming a hose pipe at a forest fire and expecting it to make a difference, it won't. If anything you're falling for their bullshit lies that Plan B will miraculously make everything go away. It won't. All it means is we're all living in a police state where the government has the ability to exclude people from normal life if they feel like it.
The view from the health experts and NHS managers is that it will help. Who am I to tell them they are wrong? The difference between us and the countries you mention is that because they kept restrictions on things like masks, they were able to keep case numbers very low. We did not and hence suffered 40k new cases a day month after month which put the service under such massive prolonged pressure.
And yet now the Netherlands has got more people in hospital than their first wave peak, Germany has got more in the ICU than their second wave peak, France is heading in the same direction. All that's different about what they did is they will end up with the same number of people hospitalised, except in a much shorter timeframe. However you slice this, everyone will get COVID and for unvaccinated people ~10% will end up in hospital for vaccinated people about ~0.5%, most countries are trending towards 70-75% people vaccinated, which means there's a lot of people who are potentially going to enter the funnel and end up in hospital. That is going to happen today, tomorrow or three months from now because COVID isn't going to go away.
That's the grim reality of COVID, we're all going to get it multiple times and people are going to die from it every year, it is the new influenza and will take the lives of the vulnerable every year just as the flu does. That's the reality, whether the NHS managers want to admit it or whether they think they can eliminate death is simply irrelevant. Chris Whitty has said multiple times that everyone in the country is going to get COVID, I sat around a table of pharma and academic experts who all said the same thing, there is no escaping COVID, it's coming for all of us and sadly for some older and more vulnerable people it is going to kill them, even with vaccines just as the flu does.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
The scary thing is how would new restrictions ever get released? We're not waiting for vaccines, we're not waiting for hospital numbers to decline - there will never be a non arbitrary time to remove restrictions which were created arbitrarily.
Indeed, last time they said "this is until the vaccine", this time I'm not really sure what the break point is, this is going to become the new normal just as it has become all across Europe and all because the PM couldn't tell his wife to get fucked about those animals and sack those No 10 staffers who had the Xmas party.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
The scary thing is how would new restrictions ever get released? We're not waiting for vaccines, we're not waiting for hospital numbers to decline - there will never be a non arbitrary time to remove restrictions which were created arbitrarily.
I am not advocating another lockdown, but what you say is not true. The first wave abated by June 2020, with no vaccines for another 6 months.
It is the nature of pandemic waves that they peak and then decline.
My point is that there isn't a pandemic wave (of hospitalisations) triggering this. I appreciate the current covid levels in hospitals aren't making your life any easier, but it's 6k in England vs 34k at peak, and it's not rising yet. If you lockdown before a wave starts, and it never comes, when and why do you unlock.
Senior Government sources tell Sky news PM is minded to move to plan B as early as this week, and he is worried he will regret if he does not move now
What do people reckon the thinking is behind going to Plan B now?
(1) To buy time for more scientific investigation? (2) To buy time for more boosters? (3) (Being cynicial.) Because they have already decided a full lodckdown will be necessary and they think this will allow them to delay it until after Christmas?
I suspect that it will be poorly complied with, and make little difference, but peak omicron coinciding with the holiday break is the perfect storm for the NHS. Certainly I will be lying low the next 2 weeks as I am the holiday on call cover for my department. If I have to isolate, then it will be very thin cover indeed.
If it can be put off until Jan then there is a bit more slack in the system.
You really think that the NHS can cope with this without a lockdown?
I think it will be a mess either way.
Lockdown needs a bit of clarification too, there is a world of difference between "Plan B" and a Wuhan 2020 style lockdown.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
Angela Merkel finished her time in office after 16 years and 16 days. 10 days shorter than Helmut Kohl. Only four chancellors have every served even half that.
A political titan leaves the stage.
Good riddance. A political Midas touch.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
Er, exactly what do you think "Midas touch" means?
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
The point of the story was Midas starved to death because literally everything he touched etc etc
I realise, which is why I was specific about it being unusual usage, rather than strictly incorrect usage.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened.
Largely because vaccination reduced the susceptible population so that the R number fell to about one.
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
It will spread, people will catch it, they will gain acquired immunity to Omicron and life will move on.
Time to put this Covid BS behind us.
What do you think will get R below 1 without restrictions?
Ignoring reality has consequences of course. Wishing life was normal doesn't make it so.
We don't need to wish life normal, we need to make life normal.
The NHS needs to drop all the distancing that is constraining capacity, get back to normal, and treat people as well as they can.
We need to reject any impositions on our life. If it needs to be the time for civil disorder to restore our civil liberties then that's what we need to do.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP unless you live in a marginal seat then your vote really makes little difference at a general election and I include myself in that as I live in safe Tory Epping Forest not a marginal
I wonder how many ex Tory MPs thought the same as you up until election night 1997?
Epping Forest stayed Tory even in 1997.
Plus 1997 was a once a half century general election result, Blair had 20%+ poll leads midterm, miles ahead of where Starmer is now
Christ, I still remember election night 1997. What a time to be alive...
The first time I voted labour to be followed by the next GE
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP unless you live in a marginal seat then your vote really makes little difference at a general election and I include myself in that as I live in safe Tory Epping Forest not a marginal
I wonder how many ex Tory MPs thought the same as you up until election night 1997?
The late Tony Newton for one (Braintree constituency, 1992 maj 17,494. 1997 Alan Hurst Lab maj 1,451)
If you live in a seat which stayed Tory in 1997-2005 as I do or stayed Labour in 2019 then it will be pretty much always Tory or Labour (only exception Canterbury because it is now full of students)
Clearly Starmer would be the better PM, this is clearly not in doubt to anyone sane
Though it beggars belief, as bad as the last 18 months have been they would have been far worse under Starmer. Who would have signed up to the EU vaccine procurement scheme, and kept us locked down over summer so that we would be heading into winter with little in the way of natural immunity. Not to mention the lost life opportunities. And who would have enthusiastically signed us up to a CCP-style police state months ago. We might not evade that last one even still. But it is madness to think that Starmer would have prevented us getting there.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP it doesn't matter if you win a seat by 80-20 or 60-40 or 50-30-20.
This creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the parties to prioritise only that small number of constituencies that are currently competitive.
It also creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the voters to vote negatively against things, rather than positively for things, and this means that weak candidates can prosper where they wear the right colour of rosette.
A number of alternative voting systems, like STV, or open-list PR, solve these and other problems. Obviously we wouldn't want to use some abomination of a closed list PR system.
Out of curiosity any idea what proportion of seats have never changed hands from 1992 to today? Ie covering both Labour gaining power last time they did, and the Tories doing so, to date.
People talk about "safe seats" but the reality is the number of constituencies that can change are a lot larger than people realise.
If we only relied upon the swing seats of the past then the Conservatives would never have bothered campaigning in seats like Leigh last election, would they?
Thirty years is a long time to wait for, possibly, a change of party. I know that no seat I've voted in has ever changed hands at an election in which I've voted, nor even looked close, and that's been four different seats in six different general elections.
A lot of the time when a seat does change hands it has been because of "demographic change" - so different voters living there, which means that people's personal experience of being able to create change is even lower than looking at the seats would suggest.
The one slightly redeeming feature about this government to me has been the willingness to base Covid policy in 2021 on vaccination coverage rather than behavioural restrictions.
If they lead us step by step into some kind of lockdown that just delays the inevitable and prolongs the pandemic then they lose even that. (Not that my vote was ever up for grabs, so I am therefore of course irrelevant from a HYUFD perspective).
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
The scary thing is how would new restrictions ever get released? We're not waiting for vaccines, we're not waiting for hospital numbers to decline - there will never be a non arbitrary time to remove restrictions which were created arbitrarily.
I am not advocating another lockdown, but what you say is not true. The first wave abated by June 2020, with no vaccines for another 6 months.
It is the nature of pandemic waves that they peak and then decline.
My point is that there isn't a pandemic wave (of hospitalisations) triggering this. I appreciate the current covid levels in hospitals aren't making your life any easier, but it's 6k in England vs 34k at peak, and it's not rising yet. If you lockdown before a wave starts, and it never comes, when and why do you unlock.
I can't really see a good way out of this for the Tories.
What a mess.
Boris gets pushed out.
And the Tories probably face a decade or more in opposition.
Removing proven election winners rarely works. After forcing Thatcher out the Tories lost 3 out of 4 of the next general elections, after Blair went Labour has lost 4 General elections in a row.
There is a reason non Tories want Boris out as he is the most successful Tory election winner since Thatcher and also the leader with most appeal to the RedWall. Remove him and Starmer's job becomes easier
I concur.
Keep Boris. Please.
HYUFD as tone death as ever is see.
HYUFD - I’ve voted conservative. Consistently. Not anymore.
And there’s plenty more who’ll do the same until Bojo is gone. It was funny when he was mayor and plummeting down zip wires. It stopped being funny when he became prime minister
Do you live in a RedWall seat or seat in the top 100 Labour targets or a seat in the top 50 LD targets? If not then your opinion does not really matter under FPTP, your seat will stay Tory or Labour anyway however you vote
I live in a Red Wall seat. 3 Cyclefree family votes.
I look forward to my opinion now mattering to the Tory party.
Did you vote Tory in 2019? No.
Your opinion only matters if you not only live in those seats but voted for the Tory MP in 2019 too
Bullshit!
Everyone has a vote and everybody's votes matters. Everyone starts from zero votes when they get counted.
If anyone's vote didn't matter it'd be yours as someone who never changes how they vote and lives in a safe seat and can be completely taken for granted.
Under FPTP it doesn't matter if you win a seat by 80-20 or 60-40 or 50-30-20.
This creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the parties to prioritise only that small number of constituencies that are currently competitive.
It also creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the voters to vote negatively against things, rather than positively for things, and this means that weak candidates can prosper where they wear the right colour of rosette.
A number of alternative voting systems, like STV, or open-list PR, solve these and other problems. Obviously we wouldn't want to use some abomination of a closed list PR system.
Out of curiosity any idea what proportion of seats have never changed hands from 1992 to today? Ie covering both Labour gaining power last time they did, and the Tories doing so, to date.
People talk about "safe seats" but the reality is the number of constituencies that can change are a lot larger than people realise.
If we only relied upon the swing seats of the past then the Conservatives would never have bothered campaigning in seats like Leigh last election, would they?
Thirty years is a long time to wait for, possibly, a change of party. I know that no seat I've voted in has ever changed hands at an election in which I've voted, nor even looked close, and that's been four different seats in six different general elections.
A lot of the time when a seat does change hands it has been because of "demographic change" - so different voters living there, which means that people's personal experience of being able to create change is even lower than looking at the seats would suggest.
If a seat doesn't change hands that simply means the voters there haven't changed their minds. There's nothing wrong with that.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
The scary thing is how would new restrictions ever get released? We're not waiting for vaccines, we're not waiting for hospital numbers to decline - there will never be a non arbitrary time to remove restrictions which were created arbitrarily.
Indeed, last time they said "this is until the vaccine", this time I'm not really sure what the break point is, this is going to become the new normal just as it has become all across Europe and all because the PM couldn't tell his wife to get fucked about those animals and sack those No 10 staffers who had the Xmas party.
The break point would be rollout of a mRNA Omicron-targeted vaccine booster shot to the vulnerable bits of the population, but that's basically a year away. There's no way the country will tolerate that.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened. Now we go into the Omicron wave with average case severity down significantly because of vaccines and prior infection, this is nothing more than a plan to divert attention away from the Xmas party.
The scary thing is how would new restrictions ever get released? We're not waiting for vaccines, we're not waiting for hospital numbers to decline - there will never be a non arbitrary time to remove restrictions which were created arbitrarily.
Indeed, last time they said "this is until the vaccine", this time I'm not really sure what the break point is, this is going to become the new normal just as it has become all across Europe and all because the PM couldn't tell his wife to get fucked about those animals and sack those No 10 staffers who had the Xmas party.
Yeh, I say you have the measure of it. If only Laura K would blurt that out on World at One.
Boris tells the Commons if it turns out attendees at the Downing Street party last year broke lockdown rules in force then they will face disciplinary action.
What's even more stupid is that today we actually had pretty good information on the level of immunity escape that Omicron has, it's much better than was initially feared with two and three doses of vaccine or natural immunity providing a pretty big shield against severe disease. I simply don't see what Plan B achieves in a largely vaccinated or naturally immune population.
Because very high transmission and not as high health impacts still creates a tidal wave of people sick and in hospital and dying. The scenario seems to be that fewer people will get really sick from Omicron than Delta, but if as transmittable as suggested there will be a lot of them.
You keep saying this, but your conclusion rests entirely what the ratio is. If it's twice as many infections, with half the hospitalisation rate, then nothing has changed.
Unfortunately the number doesn't stay constant. If Neil Ferguson's estimate today is right, if the number of Omicron infections is twice as many on a given day, it will be 14 times as many a week later.
Well the current number is 1/32nd of the delta total so there's plenty of doubling slack in the system. And anyone who thinks it's going to keep doubling forever has not been paying attention.
Indeed, they said that about Delta, that it would double until we got to 200-300k cases per day and 2000-3000 hospitalisations per day. Yet that never happened.
Largely because vaccination reduced the susceptible population so that the R number fell to about one.
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
Vaccination probably. Cases in South Africa appear to have peaked and not managed to spread beyond the young.
And if we go to plan B, and cases fall, that will of course be "thanks to plan B". We just need to vaccinate vaccinate vaccinate. That always was, and continues to be, the way out.
Comments
I could move to one of the Red Wall properties and vote there.
You're aiming a hose pipe at a forest fire and expecting it to make a difference, it won't. If anything you're falling for their bullshit lies that Plan B will miraculously make everything go away. It won't. All it means is we're all living in a police state where the government has the ability to exclude people from normal life if they feel like it.
Shame her successor doesn't look like he'll be any better.
This is a betting site. The liberal tories who are making the noise do not hold the balance of power in the Tory party.
BJ is safe, for now.
*disclaimer* my past performance at predicting con leader exits is hopeless. I’ve lost money every time!
I actually went as far as meeting MPs over the national ID card thing (really the databases behind it). And the NHS encryption stuff, way back.
About 80% of the MPs I talked to would give the Police/Security Service *any* powers they asked for. Most of the rest regarded *nearly any* request as justified. The most terrifying thing was realising, when I briefed them on encryption, that I was actually getting them to line up behind the insane attempts on encryption bans/back doors.
There seemed to be a sprinkling of "libertarian" minded across the parties - about equal Labour and Conservative. Only met one LibDem - and he was of the I'm-against-it-but-it's-not-a-core-issue type.
I don't think I've ever seen it used as anything other than a compliment.
Internal Tory critics of the Boris regime will have been emboldened, and that possibly will be even more significant than the public reaction. Can the whips keep things from bubbling over?
This creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the parties to prioritise only that small number of constituencies that are currently competitive.
It also creates an unhealthy set of incentives for the voters to vote negatively against things, rather than positively for things, and this means that weak candidates can prosper where they wear the right colour of rosette.
A number of alternative voting systems, like STV, or open-list PR, solve these and other problems. Obviously we wouldn't want to use some abomination of a closed list PR system.
It's what my university friends were saying last week, Omicron has removed the last few bits of hope that a scenario exists where people don't get COVID, everyone in the world is going to catch it, multiple times. That's the world we live in.
People talk about "safe seats" but the reality is the number of constituencies that can change are a lot larger than people realise.
If we only relied upon the swing seats of the past then the Conservatives would never have bothered campaigning in seats like Leigh last election, would they?
If Omicron in not so dangerous we need to protect the NHS.
Must logically be a sweet spot somewhere in between - or are we being run the NHS now?
If it can be put off until Jan then there is a bit more slack in the system.
That's like saying clearly a shit sandwich is better than shit on toast.
Starmer's answer to everything for the past two years is to lock us up. He can piss right off too, if the answer is Starmer you're asking the wrong question.
Yes, you remain as antivax as ever!
Where Blair would have far-surpassed Brown was *post* election: he would not have shirked - as Brown did - from building a grand anti-Tory coalition. His slightly better arithmetic would have greatly oiled the wheels.
What else would you expect of a prosecuting barrister?
What do you suppose is going to reduce the susceptible population drastically for Omicron in the next month?
I fail to see what Plan B will achieve, other than political cover. It will have only a marginal effect on the outcome of Omicron, whatever that might be (and we don't know yet).
The government should really admit the truth - they've done everything they can (vax, vax, vax) and we'll all just have to take what is coming.
It might turn out to be OK, and it might not, but that's not really within the government's control.
Plus 1997 was a once a half century general election result, Blair had 20%+ poll leads midterm, miles ahead of where Starmer is now
Lots of Shopping cart action today - Martin need a fucking dead cat army matey, yeah yeah Plan B great.... [thumbs up run from room] CRASH. Noooooo that will make the party story worrrrrse Martin, need something else. SMASH. [183 whatsapps in 4 mins from flat] Argh poor MEEEEEEE CRASH Shopping cartShopping cart
https://twitter.com/Dominic2306/status/1468531753979678725?s=20
It is the nature of pandemic waves that they peak and then decline.
Time to put this Covid BS behind us.
What do you think will get R below 1 without restrictions?
That's the grim reality of COVID, we're all going to get it multiple times and people are going to die from it every year, it is the new influenza and will take the lives of the vulnerable every year just as the flu does. That's the reality, whether the NHS managers want to admit it or whether they think they can eliminate death is simply irrelevant. Chris Whitty has said multiple times that everyone in the country is going to get COVID, I sat around a table of pharma and academic experts who all said the same thing, there is no escaping COVID, it's coming for all of us and sadly for some older and more vulnerable people it is going to kill them, even with vaccines just as the flu does.
Lockdown needs a bit of clarification too, there is a world of difference between "Plan B" and a Wuhan 2020 style lockdown.
The NHS needs to drop all the distancing that is constraining capacity, get back to normal, and treat people as well as they can.
We need to reject any impositions on our life. If it needs to be the time for civil disorder to restore our civil liberties then that's what we need to do.
Who would have signed up to the EU vaccine procurement scheme, and kept us locked down over summer so that we would be heading into winter with little in the way of natural immunity. Not to mention the lost life opportunities. And who would have enthusiastically signed us up to a CCP-style police state months ago.
We might not evade that last one even still. But it is madness to think that Starmer would have prevented us getting there.
A lot of the time when a seat does change hands it has been because of "demographic change" - so different voters living there, which means that people's personal experience of being able to create change is even lower than looking at the seats would suggest.
If they lead us step by step into some kind of lockdown that just delays the inevitable and prolongs the pandemic then they lose even that. (Not that my vote was ever up for grabs, so I am therefore of course irrelevant from a HYUFD perspective).
Statement.
He confirms he did not attend the party
We just need to vaccinate vaccinate vaccinate. That always was, and continues to be, the way out.