The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
So apparently this Tory government are no worse than far right Nazis who could get elected under PR.
It does make me chuckle when you see self identified “liberals” say things like that.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
The current Tory government is quite a moderate one.
Not like the famous Godwin or Netanyahu or worse elected under PR.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
John Major didn't go to university, didn't do any A Levels, and got just 3 O Levels. An amazing achievement to be PM for 7 years despite those limitations.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
Yes, that is a bit unfair, you must admit. If they want to get elected under the present system, they have to join the Conservative Party.
If you had been a member of the BNP or For Britain, Britain First or another far right party you would be prevented from standing as a Conservative candidate for local council let alone for Parliament
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
John Major didn't go to university, didn't do any A Levels, and got just 3 O Levels. An amazing achievement to be PM for 7 years despite those limitations.
London’s streets deserted: restaurants and pubs empty. The gulf between the people, mindful of the danger of Omicron, and our real governors - Graham Brady and the 1922 committee garnering letters for the next Tory regicide - could not be wider or deeper. https://twitter.com/williamnhutton/status/1473079464045297668
London isn't deserted because people are scared of the personal risk of omicron. London is deserted because they are scared they know that omicron is extremely infectious and they are scared that it might cause them to miss Xmas.
Who knows - maybe just a few of them are concerned about the effect on other people rather than just self, self, self?
But I must confess every time I read the comments here, I veer back towards thinking people are concerned only about self, self, self.
Funny that. Every time the rest of us read one of your comments, @Chris , we veer back towards thinking you’re only interested in showing your intellectual and moral superiority over every other individual here.
Funny that, every time I read a bit of personal abuse in response to one of my posts, it reinforces my impression is that the person concerned is too stupid to think of a counter-argument.
Or possibly they just think you are far too stupid to be worth arguing with. That seems about right to me
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
Isn't that perhaps the, admittedly uncomfortable, price to pay, the risk we take, to get rid of the current system where the majority of people consistently get a government that doesn't represent their views? Where, say for example, a weakened PM kowtows to the extremist wing of his party, which doesn't come anywhere near to reflecting the views of a big majority of the population, during a national emergency? Say like, oooh I don't know, a global pandemic?
Or perhaps avoid a situation in future where an extremist wing can bring about a hugely damaging referendum that the majority of people don't want, and can only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country?
Or to dodge the bullet of a party that blatantly governs in the interests only of its voters (which I appreciate you are totally comfortable with) who tend to be elderly, backward looking, rose-tinted spectacle wearing nostalgists increasingly divorced from the modern world, who are happy to see taxes levied on a shrinking working population to pay for their care?
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
At least an Oxford graduate should know that either does not mean "one of four"
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
Didn't answer my question. You answered a question I didn't ask.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
Isn't that perhaps the, admittedly uncomfortable, price to pay, the risk we take, to get rid of the current system where the majority of people consistently get a government that doesn't represent their views? Where, say for example, a weakened PM kowtows to the extremist wing of his party, which doesn't come anywhere near to reflecting the views of a big majority of the population, during a national emergency? Say like, oooh I don't know, a global pandemic?
Or perhaps avoid a situation in future where an extremist wing can bring about a hugely damaging referendum that the majority of people don't want, and can only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country?
Or to dodge the bullet of a party that blatantly governs in the interests only of its voters (which I appreciate you are totally comfortable with) who tend to be elderly, backward looking, rose-tinted spectacle wearing nostalgists increasingly divorced from the modern world, who are happy to see taxes levied on a shrinking working population to pay for their care?
If the majority of people didn't want the referendum can you explain why it was probably the biggest exercise in democracy in british history....all those people voting because they never wanted a voice?
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
So apparently this Tory government are no worse than far right Nazis who could get elected under PR.
It does make me chuckle when you see self identified “liberals” say things like that.
It makes me sad that certain Tory supporters can't see some of the right wing nutters masquerading in their own parties either. Labour was just the same. A PR system would be more honest in that any extremist weirdos from either end can be recognised as such and then totally ignored when the government is formed (like AFD and Linke in Germany now)
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
Isn't that perhaps the, admittedly uncomfortable, price to pay, the risk we take, to get rid of the current system where the majority of people consistently get a government that doesn't represent their views? Where, say for example, a weakened PM kowtows to the extremist wing of his party, which doesn't come anywhere near to reflecting the views of a big majority of the population, during a national emergency? Say like, oooh I don't know, a global pandemic?
Or perhaps avoid a situation in future where an extremist wing can bring about a hugely damaging referendum that the majority of people don't want, and can only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country?
Or to dodge the bullet of a party that blatantly governs in the interests only of its voters (which I appreciate you are totally comfortable with) who tend to be elderly, backward looking, rose-tinted spectacle wearing nostalgists increasingly divorced from the modern world, who are happy to see taxes levied on a shrinking working population to pay for their care?
If the majority of people didn't want the referendum can you explain why it was probably the biggest exercise in democracy in british history....all those people voting because they never wanted a voice?
'only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country'
WTF! The Prime Minister has missed the last *three* COBRA meetings.
What the hell does that fat, lazy oaf do all day? Is he shagging more burds behind his wife’s back?
How many cobra meetings are there each year? More than you might think.
And the Pm doesn’t need to attend them all
Don't forget he missed all those crucial pre-Lockdown One meetings in Feb/March 2020.
It's not his forte and he'd only get in the way. Horses for courses, they say, which is right, and when the course is boosterism in a beanie with a wink and a joke and a poke, the horse is Boris Johnson. He romps home by 10 lengths. Conversely when the course is public health emergency or plan for the economy or forging a working relationship with the EU, or any of that boring governmental stuff, it doesn't suit, he can't act on the track, he's a danger to others, in fact, so needs to be kept in the stable. This is what I hope and trust is happening.
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
If we cost the economy billions by govenement advice for mitigating the effects of a zombie apocalypse then many would call that ridiculous. We have just cost the economy billions by government advising about an event that may well not happen. That is the point. It seems now the event is unlikely to happen. Locking down the economy just in case....just no
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
Manchester Uni has had the PMs of Iraq, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, and Barbados; the Presidents of Trinidad and Tobago, Iceland, Tanzania, and Somaliland, plus the first President of Israel; and you had a man who was definitely once a future leader - Chuka Umunna..
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
They made not be "idiots", but ..
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool" (RPF)
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
Isn't that perhaps the, admittedly uncomfortable, price to pay, the risk we take, to get rid of the current system where the majority of people consistently get a government that doesn't represent their views? Where, say for example, a weakened PM kowtows to the extremist wing of his party, which doesn't come anywhere near to reflecting the views of a big majority of the population, during a national emergency? Say like, oooh I don't know, a global pandemic?
Or perhaps avoid a situation in future where an extremist wing can bring about a hugely damaging referendum that the majority of people don't want, and can only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country?
Or to dodge the bullet of a party that blatantly governs in the interests only of its voters (which I appreciate you are totally comfortable with) who tend to be elderly, backward looking, rose-tinted spectacle wearing nostalgists increasingly divorced from the modern world, who are happy to see taxes levied on a shrinking working population to pay for their care?
If the majority of people didn't want the referendum can you explain why it was probably the biggest exercise in democracy in british history....all those people voting because they never wanted a voice?
'only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country'
52% voted to Leave the EU, a higher voteshare than any UK party has got since universal suffrage
WTF! The Prime Minister has missed the last *three* COBRA meetings.
What the hell does that fat, lazy oaf do all day? Is he shagging more burds behind his wife’s back?
How many cobra meetings are there each year? More than you might think.
And the Pm doesn’t need to attend them all
Don't forget he missed all those crucial pre-Lockdown One meetings in Feb/March 2020.
It's not his forte and he'd only get in the way. Horses for courses, they say, which is right, and when the course is boosterism in a beanie with a wink and a joke and a poke, the horse is Boris Johnson. He romps home by 10 lengths. Conversely when the course is public health emergency or plan for the economy or forging a working relationship with the EU, or any of that boring governmental stuff, it doesn't suit, he can't act on the track, he's a danger to others, in fact, so needs to be kept in the stable. This is what I hope and trust is happening.
That'd be a tulchan PM - or, in less Scottish and more modern terms, a Potemkin PM.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Iain Martin @iainmartin1 · 36m A week ago today the extraordinary number given to the health secretary by UKHSA - 200k infections in one day - drove a lot of scary stories + Labour demands for restrictions. Has been quietly withdrawn. Happens, but still, shouldn't it give the restrictions enthusiasts pause?
If there are 90,000 positive tests in one day, then 200,000 infections, including asymptomatic untested, seems reasonable.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
A surprising number of early twentieth century PMs did not go to University -- Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Winston Churchill, Ramsey Macdonald.
The Great Cult of Oxford seems to begin with Eden and Wilson. There have been 10 Oxford PMs since Eden.
As British society became more equal (allegedly), so Oxford University has maintained a remorseless grip on the PM-ship.
And it is getting worse. Since 1997, only 3 years have been non-Oxford (Gordon Brown).
And after Boris, it will presumably be either Starmer, Truss, Hunt or Sunak (all Oxford).
There is just no end of Oxford mediocrities wanting to be PM.
At least an Oxford graduate should know that either does not mean "one of four"
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
Do those batteries need to be protected from frost? I'm thinking in terms of an outhouse in a not particularly warm corner of Scotland.
Yes. Extremes of temperature are bad for batteries.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
But people did get annoyed at the Lib Dems, and they've been suffering the electoral consequences for more than a decade afterwards. The same happens in, for example, Ireland.
When the Tories junk manifesto commitments, or behave like a bunch of scoundrels, FPTP means you are pretty trapped into voting for them if you are opposed to the Labour end of the dichotomy.
FPTP means that most of the time people vote against things, motivated by fear and anger. With PR people are encouraged to vote for things, motivated by hope and optimism.
The Nazis won their first seats in the Reichstag in the 1920s via PR. 12 seats on just 2.6% of the vote in 1928. Not much hope and optimism there
Once again you've deliberately missed the point.
No, that is a point that has to be considered under PR. It will likely elect far right MPs at some point who would never have got elected under FPTP. You may not like that point but you cannot dismiss it.
Even the BNP in 2009 elected some MEPs under PR but we have never had a BNP MP under FPTP
Isn't that perhaps the, admittedly uncomfortable, price to pay, the risk we take, to get rid of the current system where the majority of people consistently get a government that doesn't represent their views? Where, say for example, a weakened PM kowtows to the extremist wing of his party, which doesn't come anywhere near to reflecting the views of a big majority of the population, during a national emergency? Say like, oooh I don't know, a global pandemic?
Or perhaps avoid a situation in future where an extremist wing can bring about a hugely damaging referendum that the majority of people don't want, and can only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country?
Or to dodge the bullet of a party that blatantly governs in the interests only of its voters (which I appreciate you are totally comfortable with) who tend to be elderly, backward looking, rose-tinted spectacle wearing nostalgists increasingly divorced from the modern world, who are happy to see taxes levied on a shrinking working population to pay for their care?
If the majority of people didn't want the referendum can you explain why it was probably the biggest exercise in democracy in british history....all those people voting because they never wanted a voice?
'only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country'
I wasn't commenting on either campaign....was refuting your assertion no one wanted the referendum....a lot of people who never vote came out of the woodwork and voted on that issue. That says to me that absolutely people wanted the referendum else like the police commisioner ones hardly anyone would have bothered
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
It would have been useful for them to model these parameters though, the government would be much better informed about how to move ahead with Omicron right now. Again, I'm not blaming the modellers, more the unknown party who set their parameters and precluded the mild Omicron input scenario. I'm sure if they had been asked to do that they would have and the ministers would have been able to make an informed decision on that too now that Omicron is looking more and more like a paper tiger.
It did achieve one thing though, Richard, it's made the politicians much more sceptical towards data modelling, which is a good thing. It felt like before this fiasco the politicians treated modelled outputs as "the truth" of what will happen when we know that not to be the case. Now that they are treating the modelled data as they should, an interesting and possibly insightful exercise of prediction, the decision making process might actually start working properly rather than the standard cycle of media leaks of terrifying numbers by Gove, pressure on politicians, cabinet meeting, cabinet bounced into lockdown.
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
You have given very good reasons why it hasn't happened yet. It is sad however that, as you point out, it is driven by self interest rather than being the right thing to do. Even to the extent that opponents of PR also accuse the LDs of wanting it so they can get into power. I have to say I have never met a liberal who believes that and in fact I first got involved for that reason. I thought the system needed changing and not that I wanted power therefore the system needed changing. And as a liberal, l rather than a centrist, I expect I will still be out of power afterwards, as I believe liberals, in the true sense of the word, probably only attract 5% of the population.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
Didn't answer my question. You answered a question I didn't ask.
It was interconnected. When we had more grammar schools we had more top state schools that produced pupils who could challenge Etonians and other public schools and more got top jobs in politics after Oxford including PM
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
Whilst SNP is dominant in Scotland, there is no way Labour will achieve a majority in their own right. I agree that it is not in the interests of the left of the labour party to enter a progressive coalition. That's because they are an all or nothing section of the party. That's why they rather had tory victories in some seats in December 2019, rather than lib Dems. To me, the left of labour is as detestable as the right wing of the Tories. (IDS, Bridgen, Baker, Francois, Dorries to name but a few).
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
So apparently this Tory government are no worse than far right Nazis who could get elected under PR.
It does make me chuckle when you see self identified “liberals” say things like that.
It makes me sad that certain Tory supporters can't see some of the right wing nutters masquerading in their own parties either. Labour was just the same. A PR system would be more honest in that any extremist weirdos from either end can be recognised as such and then totally ignored when the government is formed (like AFD and Linke in Germany now)
The Conservative Party expels nutters and has a zero tolerance policy for racists.
The Labour Party embraces it's dark side.
The other problem is due to the misnomer of calling racists "far right" (there's nothing left or right about racism) the left acts like racism isn't their problem. If you define racists as right, then anyone on the left can't be racist by definition.
It's complete bollocks but too many people actually believe that.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
Do those batteries need to be protected from frost? I'm thinking in terms of an outhouse in a not particularly warm corner of Scotland.
Yes. Extremes of temperature are bad for batteries.
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
Well, yes, sage aren't idiots. And nor are civil servants. Even the arts graduates. But why do they appear to consistently overlook any evidence that might not fit with the outcome of 'this will be a catastrophe'? Graham Medley appeared to say that they have been asked to look at the worst case, because that is what they need to know to make a decision. Fine. But decision makers also need to know how likely the worst case is. And they also need to know what the measures which will avert the worst case will cost.
Pretty much any case you are attempting to make - in any walk of life - is weighing up the costs and the benefits. Only one half of this analysis appears to be being done.
And pretty much any modelling you do - even if you are modelling the worst case - needs to pass some sort of smell test. Is it plausible that we will have a death rate 40 times greater than we saw in South Africa? Is it plausible that we will see millions of infections per day?
At best, something is going very wrong with the analysis-and-decision-making process.
Coal currently generating double the power wind is, and we've turned on every back-up gas turbine which is normally paid to sit unused. Another win for renewables.
Far better to have these power stations used for one week in the year than every week. Go renewables!
Just don't pretend they're cheaper when people show figures for wind power which ignore the 1 for 1 back up capacity required to make it functional.
It's not always going to require that backup when we have a large excess that can be stored. And as rcs1000 has said, the fossil fuel plants are generally cheap to build and expensive to fuel, so having them as mostly idle backup isn't as expensive as you might think.
When I own my home again one of my priorities will be installing a battery with capacity for a week's use, so that I'll be protected from the grid failures caused by Storm Arwen, and it would also mean I could take advantage of a variable tariff to charge the battery when wind electricity was plentiful and cheap, and use my battery when grid electricity was expensive when the wind wasn't blowing.
Technology is leaving fossil fuels behind.
The idea the excess can be stored is a total pipe dream. The largest battery storage plan in the world could power the UK for 130 seconds.
An entirely typical winter high pressure front leading to cold days and low wind can last 2-3 weeks.
It's a lovely idea, but the technology does not exist and will not for quite a while.
We are getting there and we don't have enough wind capacity connected to the grid to make it an issue today. As we addmore wind capacity we will get to a point where more excess is available and storage makes more sense. It will happen incrementally, and as with all technological change the speed of the transition will suddenly increase pace and surprise people.
Is there a chance of a mutation from Omicron that keeps its extreme transmissibility, but also becomes a whole bunch more fatal? (Humour me, I know nothing about these things.)
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
It's not a conspiracy theory. The SAGE guy confirmed to Nelson that positive scenarios that used valid data inputs were deliberately excluded from the reporting because what they were saying didn't suit the agenda. Only negative scenarios were getting reported.
Not reporting scenarios because the inputs aren't relevant is reasonable. If you have no reason to believe those inputs, then you wouldn't have done the analysis.
But if you get a reasonable set of inputs, that then presents a reasonable scenario, that should be included within the science for consideration. Not to the exclusion of all other scenarios, but it should be there.
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
You have given very good reasons why it hasn't happened yet. It is sad however that, as you point out, it is driven by self interest rather than being the right thing to do. Even to the extent that opponents of PR also accuse the LDs of wanting it so they can get into power. I have to say I have never met a liberal who believes that and in fact I first got involved for that reason. I thought the system needed changing and not that I wanted power therefore the system needed changing. And as a liberal, l rather than a centrist, I expect I will still be out of power afterwards, as I believe liberals, in the true sense of the word, probably only attract 5% of the population.
My main point is that LibDems who vote Labour in marginals are (counter-intuitively) actively preventing PR from happening.
To get PR, one of the main parties (eg most likely Labour, though it could be the Tories in different circs) has to lose faith that it can win again under FPTP.
For that, LibDems in marginals have to NOT vote Labour.
C.f. Brexit. It happened because enough Tory voters were willing NOT to vote Tory, but UKIP.
The Tory party was facing an extinction-level event.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
So apparently this Tory government are no worse than far right Nazis who could get elected under PR.
It does make me chuckle when you see self identified “liberals” say things like that.
It makes me sad that certain Tory supporters can't see some of the right wing nutters masquerading in their own parties either. Labour was just the same. A PR system would be more honest in that any extremist weirdos from either end can be recognised as such and then totally ignored when the government is formed (like AFD and Linke in Germany now)
The Conservative Party expels nutters and has a zero tolerance policy for racists.
The Labour Party embraces it's dark side.
The other problem is due to the misnomer of calling racists "far right" (there's nothing left or right about racism) the left acts like racism isn't their problem. If you define racists as right, then anyone on the left can't be racist by definition.
It's complete bollocks but too many people actually believe that.
And no PR proponent ever addresses the elephant in the room. PR elections mean that the governing coalition manifesto is decided after people have cast votes not before. I voted tory in 2010. I would not have cast my vote tory or lib dem on the coalition manifesto I would have spoilt my paper yet my vote was counted towards their mandate even they I despised everything they did virtually
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
I thought that my school's sole contribution to the world of politics was Adam Werrity but I now see that it also educated a sitting Dundee MP, the leader of the Scottish Lib Dems and a number of former MPs. Other alumni include KT Tunstall and the first black rugby union player in the world.
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
The data from SA has been screaming that Omicron is much milder than Delta for 3 weeks, all the Doctors from SA have also been saying that. What is happening now in the UK is mirroring what happened in SA.
Even on this site people were prepared to believe the ludicrous modelling than real world data from SA with the reason that Omicron may effect South Afircans in a different way than it would people from the UK.
Why real world data was and to an extent is still being ignored is beyond me. Even now some "experts" will only concede that Omicron is not more severe than Delta.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
I'm astonished that anyone is arguing PR legitimises fringe views when FPTP has given us the current government, in thrall to the ERG and a Tory Party membership that is far to the right of the 43% (just 29% of the registered electorate) that voted Conservative.
So apparently this Tory government are no worse than far right Nazis who could get elected under PR.
It does make me chuckle when you see self identified “liberals” say things like that.
It makes me sad that certain Tory supporters can't see some of the right wing nutters masquerading in their own parties either. Labour was just the same. A PR system would be more honest in that any extremist weirdos from either end can be recognised as such and then totally ignored when the government is formed (like AFD and Linke in Germany now)
The Conservative Party expels nutters and has a zero tolerance policy for racists.
The Labour Party embraces it's dark side.
The other problem is due to the misnomer of calling racists "far right" (there's nothing left or right about racism) the left acts like racism isn't their problem. If you define racists as right, then anyone on the left can't be racist by definition.
It's complete bollocks but too many people actually believe that.
And no PR proponent ever addresses the elephant in the room. PR elections mean that the governing coalition manifesto is decided after people have cast votes not before. I voted tory in 2010. I would not have cast my vote tory or lib dem on the coalition manifesto I would have spoilt my paper yet my vote was counted towards their mandate even they I despised everything they did virtually
But at least it is decided by parties that a majority of people have voted for
And no PR proponent ever addresses the elephant in the room. PR elections mean that the governing coalition manifesto is decided after people have cast votes not before.
Yes, the government has to act on the basis of compromise between positions, rather than a winner-takes-all approach that sees a programme endorsed by 35% of the popular vote run rampant.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
Didn't answer my question. You answered a question I didn't ask.
It was interconnected. When we had more grammar schools we had more top state schools that produced pupils who could challenge Etonians and other public schools and more got top jobs in politics after Oxford including PM
I'm not going down the Grammar school argument again, but now we don't have many Grammar schools but Comprehensives do you really think all those successful Grammar school pupils who are now coming out of Comprehensives can't do the same thing? Do you actually think the Comprehensives have destroyed those pupil and they have all disappeared?
And go on, have a go at answering my 2 questions. It wasn't meant to be connected. You referred to best schools and I assume as we were talking about Eton I was intrigued as to why you thought their pupils were more successful, as they clearly on a whole are. Is it because they went to Eton or because they are brighter? And did they go to Eton because they were brighter or because their parents were rich?
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
You have given very good reasons why it hasn't happened yet. It is sad however that, as you point out, it is driven by self interest rather than being the right thing to do. Even to the extent that opponents of PR also accuse the LDs of wanting it so they can get into power. I have to say I have never met a liberal who believes that and in fact I first got involved for that reason. I thought the system needed changing and not that I wanted power therefore the system needed changing. And as a liberal, l rather than a centrist, I expect I will still be out of power afterwards, as I believe liberals, in the true sense of the word, probably only attract 5% of the population.
Or like the FDP in Germany, who are genuine true liberals, liberals could often be kingmakers under PR. As the FDP were for the CDU/CSU in 2009 and for the SDP and Greens now under Germany's PR system
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
Whilst SNP is dominant in Scotland, there is no way Labour will achieve a majority in their own right. I agree that it is not in the interests of the left of the labour party to enter a progressive coalition. That's because they are an all or nothing section of the party. That's why they rather had tory victories in some seats in December 2019, rather than lib Dems. To me, the left of labour is as detestable as the right wing of the Tories. (IDS, Bridgen, Baker, Francois, Dorries to name but a few).
To be honest, the optimum scenario for Labour is about 300 seats at the next election, with the LDs on about 30 seats or so and then it will be easier to gain 20 seats or so from the SNP to help get a majority at the subsequent election once labour is in power.
I agree that I can't see how abolition of FPTP ever comes about at Westminster for the same reasons it hasn't happened in Canada. FPTP will also work against the Tories again when they lose power as they will lose a lot of seats to the lib dems in the south east that they held even in 1997.
Is there a chance of a mutation from Omicron that keeps its extreme transmissibility, but also becomes a whole bunch more fatal? (Humour me, I know nothing about these things.)
A chance? Surely. But there is also a chance of an alien invasion wiping us all out before Xmas too.....
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
Didn't answer my question. You answered a question I didn't ask.
It was interconnected. When we had more grammar schools we had more top state schools that produced pupils who could challenge Etonians and other public schools and more got top jobs in politics after Oxford including PM
I'm not going down the Grammar school argument again, but now we don't have many Grammar schools but Comprehensives do you really think all those successful Grammar school pupils who are now coming out of Comprehensives can't do the same thing? Do you actually think the Comprehensives have destroyed those pupil and they have all disappeared?
And go on, have a go at answering my 2 questions. It wasn't meant to be connected. You referred to best schools and I assume as we were talking about Eton I was intrigued as to why you thought their pupils were more successful, as they clearly on a whole are. Is it because they went to Eton or because they are brighter? And did they go to Eton because they were brighter or because their parents were rich?
No, no, we are supposed to have someone to grovel and cringe to.
If a single party government breaks a manifesto promise you can legitimately be annoyed or even angered, especially if that's why you voted for them. If you vote Lib Dem because you love their education policy and that gets jettisoned in coalition talks then they've banked your vote and abandoned the policy that earned it, and you can't even be legitimately annoyed because coalitions turn manifestos from (hopefully) serious promises made to the electorate into a pick and mix menu for political negotiators after all the votes have been cast and the political class is deciding who gets to be in charge.
On the other hand, most issues that come up in the day-to-day of government are not ones that manifestoes make any specific commitments on (I bet none of the 2019 ones had any detail about how the parties would balance public health against individual liberties in a pandemic, for instance...) So the voter has to choose a party based largely on whether they feel that party's general instincts and preferences are what they want future unknown decisions to be made by. Manifesto commitments provide signposts and examples of those instincts, but not much more. Looked at from this viewpoint, coalition negotiations are not greatly different -- I vote Lib Dem because I agree with their overall political viewpoint and compass, and trust that this means that in a coalition negotiation they prioritise the items that I would (more or less), just as I trust that if a Lib Dem is a minister they make the day to day political choices that I would, based on the political and policy principles we share.
If you thought the arrogance, incompetence, selfishness, laziness and entitlement of the Prime Minister was only a Westminster Bubble story, then here is the definitive proof that you are 100% wrong. You don’t get better cut-through than this nowadays:
Daily Mail (yes, Daily Mail) headline:
- “He's lost the room! Darts fans sing 'Stand up if you hate Boris' in unison at the World Championships while football fans chant expletives about him as the fallout from the No10 Christmas party rows continues”
His only way out now retaining a modicum of dignity is the Long Covid explanation. Up with your hands Boris and admit the decades of overeating, over drinking and promiscuity had left you woefully ill-prepared for a nasty viral infection. You are not well and you need to focus on your many, many children, and your own health. About 25% of the population will feel sorry for you and wish you well. The other 75% will shout Fuck Off and Good Riddance. The Conservative parliamentary group is in the latter category.
It’s fun to laugh at everyone singing songs about the prime minister - but under almost any other PM, and certainly under a PM from any other party, there wouldn’t be a crowd of 3,000 people at the darts.
1) I’m not laughing.
2) It’s not fun.
3) “3,000 people at the darts” actually gets to the very heart of the problem(s)
At what point Sandpit have you had enough? You’re a good Tory. You are within Johnson’s “constituency” (as in his support base rather than geographically). You share his ideology. You are one of his “season ticket holders”, as @dixiedean put it upthread. So, at what point do you simply have to call it a day for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, aka Binky the Clown?
I’ve never been a fan of Boris Johnson, but he was a necessary part of getting something that looked like Brexit through.
Happy to see him replaced in the new year - unless he can quickly steady the ship with a new Cummings, there will be a rout in the local elections which will likely be the trigger.
I do laugh at all the people shouting about the PM at an event, unaware of the irony that if the other lot were in charge it would be being held behind closed doors.
Cummings never steadied any ship. All his qualities were essentially destructive.
The issue is, that Cummings’ departure has left a massive hole where there needs to be someone actually running the show in No.10.
The problem, as discussed a couple of days ago, is that no-one who’s going to be any good wants the job - because of the wife. How do you solve a problem like Carrie?
The wife, the chief of staff, the press spokesperson and the mayoral candidate. Only one person to blame as the others are all overrated in importance. He rode a wave of populism with a wholly unsustainable coalition on a cause he never really believed in. The damage he will have done to the Tories in ridding it of its one nation wing will take at least a decade to unravel by which time a more sophisticated metropolitan and fairly angry electorate will have facilitated some changes to stop that happening again.
The One Nation boys and girls aren’t coming back. Once PR is introduced there will be two centre-right parties and a far-right party split from what was once the Tory Party:
a) the sane ones b) the mad ones c) the frothing mad ones
Feel free to allocate prominent members of the PB herd to the appropriate sect. I’ll start with Richard Nabavi in Sect A. (Nice article yesterday Richard!)
If we had PR Labour would also split, with Corbynites starting a new far left party and maybe a new Blairite party too. A few Tories might join RefUK, I doubt a new far right party would be formed however although it is possible the likes of For Britain or Britain First could win a seat or two under PR
I expect we would see a new centerist bloc of the right of labour, the left of the Tories and the Lib dems.
Wouldn't be terrible.
They would each be separate parties but could come together to form centrist government coalitions, a bit like has been seen in Germany.
However at the same time more extremist parties on left and right could win seats in Parliament under PR they would not win under FPTP.
As nations with PR like Germany, Sweden, Israel, Ireland, Italy, Spain and New Zealand have also discovered PR shifts the formation of a government to post election coalition negotiations, parties hardly ever winning an outright majority at the election itself
That in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. Prevents, or at least discourages (Berlusconi says Hi), megalomaniac leaders.
Netanyahu also says hi.
I'm not seeing any substantiation to your theory.
Not to go all Godwin on your asses, but Hitler also says hi.
I would happily defend the proposition that PR legitimises and magnifies fringe views to a level that is both unhealthy and unnecessary. In addition to all the other things it's bad at.
Hmm, we'rte in a website where we have seen the eloquent advocation of ignoring a majority of voters and never even trying to get them to vote Tory because the Tories can always be reelected under FPTP with a targeted minority of mostly elderly houseowners.
But the same thing happens under PR. You invariably end up with a coalition formed of a single main party (who would have ignored considerably more voters than the Tories typically do), plus a collection of minor parties, many of whose voters would have done so on the basis of policies that had to be dropped during the coalition talks, because they were incompatible with the senior coalition partner's policy platform.
The most likely way round that is to have two broad coalitions pre-agreed before the election to guarantee that one of them must get a majority, but even that falls down as soon as a third grouping comes along that neither side will talk to, and neither left nor right gets a majority on their own accord. This is what happened in Sweden, and the parties were left scrabbling around to find a new coalition after the election. Which is exactly what FPTP is designed to avoid.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
I thought that my school's sole contribution to the world of politics was Adam Werrity but I now see that it also educated a sitting Dundee MP, the leader of the Scottish Lib Dems and a number of former MPs. Other alumni include KT Tunstall and the first black rugby union player in the world.
My old school can boast 2 former MPs, Les Huckfield and Nigel Jones. Both before my time there.
Dispatchable power generation: fossil with carbon capture - Yes
WFH - Yes
Choose your own pizza topping - Yes
Extinction of humankind - Yes
Sandy, you always come across as so pleasant and reasonable until we get to the bit about you wanting to wipe out the entire human race. It jars slightly.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events or drink in its bar - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
What you say was true several weeks ago when Javid first made the announcement. But actually we had positive data coming out of Gauteng extraordinarily quickly which got better with each day that it was consolidated. This was then topped up with HK Uni’s ex vivo study and there have since been others.
BoJo claims they are reviewing the data hour by hour. Bollocks to that. It’s been obvious what way the wind is blowing on this for quite a while if you looked objectively at the information set available. Certainly earlier than yesterday lunchtime when Downing St was briefing about the recall of Parliament.
Dispatchable power generation: fossil with carbon capture - Yes
WFH - Yes
Choose your own pizza topping - Yes
Extinction of humankind - Yes
Sandy, you always come across as so pleasant and reasonable until we get to the bit about you wanting to wipe out the entire human race. It jars slightly.
He's a sapient chimpanzee, albeit of a different species than H. sapiens. It's the obvious explanation.
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
It will happen only if there is enough external pressure to force it to happen. As you say, the current system works too well for the duopoly for them to want to get rid of it.
Logically this makes it even more important to argue about it, to convince other voters that the current system favours the party leaderships, while a different voting system would give more power to the voters.
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
It's not a conspiracy theory. The SAGE guy confirmed to Nelson that positive scenarios that used valid data inputs were deliberately excluded from the reporting because what they were saying didn't suit the agenda. Only negative scenarios were getting reported.
Not reporting scenarios because the inputs aren't relevant is reasonable. If you have no reason to believe those inputs, then you wouldn't have done the analysis.
But if you get a reasonable set of inputs, that then presents a reasonable scenario, that should be included within the science for consideration. Not to the exclusion of all other scenarios, but it should be there.
As per my comments yesterday, "the SAGE guy" misunderstood the syntax of Nelson's question on Twitter, and confirmed nothing of the sort. You (and Nelson) are misunderstanding the use of the term "scenario" in the context of a stochastic model.
Dispatchable power generation: fossil with carbon capture - Yes
WFH - Yes
Choose your own pizza topping - Yes
Extinction of humankind - Yes
Sandy, you always come across as so pleasant and reasonable until we get to the bit about you wanting to wipe out the entire human race. It jars slightly.
What jars from me is wiping out the human race while supporting Work From Home.
Don't those two seem somewhat contradictory? The support of WFH to save lives rather brings into question his willingness to see losses inflicted upon the human race
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
Didn't answer my question. You answered a question I didn't ask.
It was interconnected. When we had more grammar schools we had more top state schools that produced pupils who could challenge Etonians and other public schools and more got top jobs in politics after Oxford including PM
I'm not going down the Grammar school argument again, but now we don't have many Grammar schools but Comprehensives do you really think all those successful Grammar school pupils who are now coming out of Comprehensives can't do the same thing? Do you actually think the Comprehensives have destroyed those pupil and they have all disappeared?
And go on, have a go at answering my 2 questions. It wasn't meant to be connected. You referred to best schools and I assume as we were talking about Eton I was intrigued as to why you thought their pupils were more successful, as they clearly on a whole are. Is it because they went to Eton or because they are brighter? And did they go to Eton because they were brighter or because their parents were rich?
There is no doubt that while we have had a few comprehensive educated party leaders eg Hague and Ed Milliband, they seem less effective at producing PMs given both lost general elections to the public school educated Blair and Cameron. By contrast grammar school educated party leaders were better able to defeat public school opponents eg when grammar school educated Wilson beat the old Etonian Home in 1964 or grammar school educated Thatcher beat the public school educated Foot in 1983.
Eton is highly selective now and you have to pass an entrance exam, having rich parents alone is not enough. The rich but less bright go to schools like Stowe.
Stowe has not yet produced a PM though it is good at producing actors like David Niven or Henry Cavill
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
I don't think there is one, and I don't support PR.
A change worth considering is to revisit the alternative vote. It can be done by allowing people to list candidates, but that is cumbersome.
The better way may be to keep the present system except that in a constituency where no candidate gets 50% of the votes +1 there is a run off between the top two candidates a week later, so that it can reasonably be said that in every seat the winner has 50% support from those who vote.
This has the obvious immediate effect, but a more subtle long term effect in that everyone over time comes to realise that you can vote with a free mind first time but will have the opportunity to vote for at least one, and perhaps two, centrist candidates the following week.
IMHO it would gradually become PR by another route.
Yes, we have been here before, and yes there is lots wrong with it.
And no PR proponent ever addresses the elephant in the room. PR elections mean that the governing coalition manifesto is decided after people have cast votes not before.
Yes, the government has to act on the basis of compromise between positions, rather than a winner-takes-all approach that sees a programme endorsed by 35% of the popular vote run rampant.
This is a feature, not a bug.
Call me odd but I sort of want to know what I am voting for before I cast a vote. Not some vague hope that the party I vote for will do something sensible.
I would support PR only if people that dont like the proposed manifesto of the coalition can withdraw their vote after the manifesto was known. To give an example in 2015 the only reason I would have voted cameron and his party would have been to get the referendum. I fully believe he expected another coalition between tories and lib dems and the first thing thrown out would have been the referendum. So I would have voted tory for one reason which is now null and void. Yet he still gets to count my vote when in fact I thought apart from that one policy I wouldn't piss on him or his party if they were burning in the street.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
Also, it's not the actual University student union as such - as you know full well, but a mistake people often make. But a private society/trust hangover from the C19.
On the criticism (much of it ill-informed) of the Sage figures and models: I think many people are forgetting the time factor. Even just a few days ago we knew a lot less about how the Omicron waves in various places are unfolding, and on the severity of it, than we do now. Criticising them for being 'wrong' (i.e. for modelling based on very uncertain assumptions) then, on the basis of extra information we have now, is silly.
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
It's not a conspiracy theory. The SAGE guy confirmed to Nelson that positive scenarios that used valid data inputs were deliberately excluded from the reporting because what they were saying didn't suit the agenda. Only negative scenarios were getting reported.
Not reporting scenarios because the inputs aren't relevant is reasonable. If you have no reason to believe those inputs, then you wouldn't have done the analysis.
But if you get a reasonable set of inputs, that then presents a reasonable scenario, that should be included within the science for consideration. Not to the exclusion of all other scenarios, but it should be there.
As per my comments yesterday, "the SAGE guy" misunderstood the syntax of Nelson's question on Twitter, and confirmed nothing of the sort. You (and Nelson) are misunderstanding the use of the term "scenario" in the context of a stochastic model.
No we're not. I understand full well the use of the term scenario, and so does Nelson.
The question isn't about which scenarios were ran, but why scenarios with certain outputs that didn't suit the agenda of locking down weren't included within "the science".
The whole range of scenarios should be included, not just the doomcasting ones.
Is there a chance of a mutation from Omicron that keeps its extreme transmissibility, but also becomes a whole bunch more fatal? (Humour me, I know nothing about these things.)
Anything is possible, I guess -- we could get mutations to increased lethality starting from any variant. But AIUI omicron's increased transmissibility and reduced lethality derive from the same physical cause: it infects the upper respiratory tract more (nose, throat) so viral particles are expelled more easily to infect others, but it's the lower respiratory tract infections (lungs) that cause the worst outcomes. I'm not a doctor or even somebody paying attention to the literature, but maybe that means Omicron is a little further away in mutation space from some of the real nightmare possibilities, not closer?
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events or drink in its bar - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
The main perk was the cheap pints, surely. The govt can’t even manage that…
Eloquent from Hague. The chances of Johnson going next year are imo slimmer than most seem to think. I'm long of him for an enormousish sum at an average 1.9 to still be PM at the next Tory Party Conf. Apart from the money it's a bet I'd like to lose but I don't think it will.
My view - and I know no more than you do! - is that the party has decided it is best off shot of him and is now just considering the timing. It's a balance of getting him to own any difficult moments coming up (winter covid / local elections) and moving before he taints the party any more than he has to. There is an obvious fallacy in this argument in that 'the party' isn't one brain but many, with many views, but don't look too hard and I think the point still stands.
Yes, there are wildly different Tory factions who'd like him out. Remainers. May people. Antilockdowners. Those who just want to end the joke. This weakens him, he's certainly no King now, but it doesn't end him because those people will never agree on who next. You won't want to bring him down unless you're confident of getting a replacement to your taste and see little risk of getting someone even less to your taste than him
So imo it boils down to the polls. If they stay toxic for the party and they furthermore indicate that A.N. Other would do much better, and A.N. Other is alive and in parliament and willing to go for it, then it could be go go go on a summer leadership contest. I'd be delighted to see it too but with my betting hat on - which it has to be when I'm doing betting - I have to look at odds cf probabilities and on that score almost even money on him NOT being replaced by the time of the next Tory conference looks good to me. It's looks very good.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
Didn't answer my question. You answered a question I didn't ask.
It was interconnected. When we had more grammar schools we had more top state schools that produced pupils who could challenge Etonians and other public schools and more got top jobs in politics after Oxford including PM
I'm not going down the Grammar school argument again, but now we don't have many Grammar schools but Comprehensives do you really think all those successful Grammar school pupils who are now coming out of Comprehensives can't do the same thing? Do you actually think the Comprehensives have destroyed those pupil and they have all disappeared?
And go on, have a go at answering my 2 questions. It wasn't meant to be connected. You referred to best schools and I assume as we were talking about Eton I was intrigued as to why you thought their pupils were more successful, as they clearly on a whole are. Is it because they went to Eton or because they are brighter? And did they go to Eton because they were brighter or because their parents were rich?
There is no doubt that while we have had a few comprehensive educated party leaders eg Hague and Ed Milliband, they seem less effective at producing PMs given both lost general elections to the public school educated Blair and Cameron. By contrast grammar school educated party leaders were better able to defeat public school opponents eg when grammar school educated Wilson beat the old Etonian Home in 1964 or grammar school educated Thatcher beat the public school educated Foot in 1983.
Eton is highly selective now and you have to pass an entrance exam, having rich parents alone is not enough. The rich but less bright go to schools like Stowe.
Stowe has not yet produced a PM though it is good at producing actors like David Niven or Henry Cavill
My grandad was at Stowe with David Niven. He became a gents outfitter.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events or drink in its bar - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
First, you do have to be a member of the Union or invited by a mere to attend Uniob events.
Second the Cabinet is not run like the Union, parliament might be but no surprise given the Union was modelled on parliament not the other way round
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events or drink in its bar - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
The main perk was the cheap pints, surely. The govt can’t even manage that…
Yeah but they were badly kept and it could be one of the saddest places imaginable. 25-30 year olds who never made it hanging around long after graduation.
In many ways this report demonstrates my view from 3 weeks ago that in fact Omicron is a good thing. It will drive out Delta which is far far nastier and will give large swathes of the population herd immunity.
In my view the end of the pandemic is in sight. The only way Omicron could mutate into something that could take over from it would be for that mutation to be more transmissable. I don't think that is likely.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
Also, it's not the actual University student union as such - as you know full well, but a mistake people often make. But a private society/trust hangover from the C19.
They should at least rename it “The Oxford Union Debating Society” to distinguish it from OUSU.
- Which accelerant will @Leon use to set himself on fire and run round screaming. - Which biscuits do we serve? - Using @HYUFD Covenanter tank engine to make the tea was a bust - should we upgrade him to something that includes a Boiling Vessel?
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events or drink in its bar - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
The main perk was the cheap pints, surely. The govt can’t even manage that…
Yeah but they were badly kept and it could be one of the saddest places imaginable. 25-30 year olds who never made it hanging around long after graduation.
Never went there on my frequent visits -shame in hindsight as I'd now have liked to see the Pre-Raphaelite murals. Much preferred scrumpy ex wood at the Welsh Pony round the corner.
- Which accelerant will @Leon use to set himself on fire and run round screaming. - Which biscuits do we serve? - Using @HYUFD Covenanter tank engine to make the tea was a bust - should we upgrade him to something that includes a Boiling Vessel?
No, something open like a Carden-Loyd where a solid fuel cooker can be used in the back without risk of suffocatgion.
- Which accelerant will @Leon use to set himself on fire and run round screaming. - Which biscuits do we serve? - Using @HYUFD Covenanter tank engine to make the tea was a bust - should we upgrade him to something that includes a Boiling Vessel?
Since it's Christmas can't we have Mince Pies for this week's panic?
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
Also, it's not the actual University student union as such - as you know full well, but a mistake people often make. But a private society/trust hangover from the C19.
They should at least rename it “The Oxford Union Debating Society” to distinguish it from OUSU.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events or drink in its bar - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
First, you do have to be a member of the Union or invited by a mere to attend Uniob events.
Second the Cabinet is not run like the Union, parliament might be but no surprise given the Union was modelled on parliament not the other way round
“Invited by a mere”?
I was there in the mid Nineties, not that long after the current govt shambles left, and anyone could just turn up and pay on the door, which was left open normally. The Union was where they had poster sales at the start of term FFS. It was hardly exclusive.
- Which accelerant will @Leon use to set himself on fire and run round screaming. - Which biscuits do we serve? - Using @HYUFD Covenanter tank engine to make the tea was a bust - should we upgrade him to something that includes a Boiling Vessel?
Murder Tuesday is very 2020. Wild Wednesday is where it is at now.
By Reporting Day Tuesday is normally lower than Monday these days (just checked since September only 3 Tuesdays have been higher than the proceeding Monday).
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
Does that not tell us something about inequalities still if such a thing is not considered a mind boggling coincidence rather than a potential norm even if not a regularly recurring norm. For example nobody from my school has ever been an MP to my knowledge let alone PM (although we do have a Nobel winner). I don't think there has ever been a PM from Manchester Uni (could be wrong?) from where I graduated even though it is one of the oldest and biggest Universities and with an excellent reputation. Yet Oxford? Eton? I wonder why?
Also the fact that you mention it results in generals and religious leaders rather than lieutenants and vicars says it all.
Just out of interest HYUFD do you come from a privileged background and if not why are you in awe of such people?
How many candidates from Manchester University have even stood for PM or party leader? It is no surprise the best universities in the land produce the most PMs as do the best schools, though we have had an Edinburgh graduate PM in Brown more recently than a Cambridge graduate, the last was Baldwin and from 1964-1997 all our PMs went to state schools, mostly grammars.
Personally I went to private school, Warwick and Aber, my wife though has a postgrad from Oxford but did her undergrad at Durham
Do you think Eton has the best pupils or pupils with the richest parents? Do you think Eton pupils succeed over other schools' pupils because the Eton ex-pupils are brighter or because they went to Eton?
There was not a single Etonian PM from 1964 to 2010 when we had more grammar school educated PMs (albeit Blair went to Fettes, the Scottish Eton)
Didn't answer my question. You answered a question I didn't ask.
It was interconnected. When we had more grammar schools we had more top state schools that produced pupils who could challenge Etonians and other public schools and more got top jobs in politics after Oxford including PM
I'm not going down the Grammar school argument again, but now we don't have many Grammar schools but Comprehensives do you really think all those successful Grammar school pupils who are now coming out of Comprehensives can't do the same thing? Do you actually think the Comprehensives have destroyed those pupil and they have all disappeared?
And go on, have a go at answering my 2 questions. It wasn't meant to be connected. You referred to best schools and I assume as we were talking about Eton I was intrigued as to why you thought their pupils were more successful, as they clearly on a whole are. Is it because they went to Eton or because they are brighter? And did they go to Eton because they were brighter or because their parents were rich?
There is no doubt that while we have had a few comprehensive educated party leaders eg Hague and Ed Milliband, they seem less effective at producing PMs given both lost general elections to the public school educated Blair and Cameron. By contrast grammar school educated party leaders were better able to defeat public school opponents eg when grammar school educated Wilson beat the old Etonian Home in 1964 or grammar school educated Thatcher beat the public school educated Foot in 1983.
Eton is highly selective now and you have to pass an entrance exam, having rich parents alone is not enough. The rich but less bright go to schools like Stowe.
Stowe has not yet produced a PM though it is good at producing actors like David Niven or Henry Cavill
Grammar schools consciously aped the structures and values of private schools, with the aim of producing pupils who were close enough in accent, opinions and social class that they could slot into leadership positions alongside the privately educated, without challenging the prevailing social hierarchy. By contrast, comprehensive schools were created on the heretical notion that the social hierarchy itself was fundamentally rotten. Unfortunately, the hierarchy has persisted, locking out comprehensive school kids from the positions they are qualified for by dint of their intelligence and education. Until the British escape the mental slavery that the class system has trapped them in, comprehensive schools will continue to "fail" in the terms set by the elite, even as most of them continue to do an excellent job in educating their pupils. And Britain will stay an unhappy, frustrated country that can't understand why it keeps failing to achieve its huge potential.
The thing I hate about this country is that’s it’s run in exactly the same way as the Oxford Union. Forget Eton, or even Oxford University as a whole, abolish the Oxford Union and the improvement would be marked.
Boris is actually only the first Oxford Union president to be PM since Ted Heath. Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union when at Oxford. Hague managed to achieve the double of a first at Oxford and president of the Union but that did not help him win in 2001, Blair trounced him, so not sure that is true.
In any case the Oxford Union is not just politics, it attracts speakers from a broad range of fields including scientists, historians, actors, musicians, generals, religious leaders, journalists, entrepreneurs and business leaders etc
I’m a member of the Oxford Union you idiot. I know what it does.
Your point is still not relevant given only 2 Oxford Union Presidents have become PM since WW2, Heath and Boris and plenty of Oxford educated PMs like Wilson, Blair and Cameron were not even members of the Oxford Union
The government is still run like the Union. You don’t have to (or didn’t anyway) have be a member of the Union to go to its events or drink in its bar - a fact that made me bitterly regret wasting money on joining. Its influence is everywhere. Remove the institution, remove the influence.
The main perk was the cheap pints, surely. The govt can’t even manage that…
Yeah but they were badly kept and it could be one of the saddest places imaginable. 25-30 year olds who never made it hanging around long after graduation.
Never went there on my frequent visits -shame in hindsight as I'd now have liked to see the Pre-Raphaelite murals. Much preferred scrumpy ex wood at the Welsh Pony round the corner.
"Vaccination status: those who have received three doses of a vaccine and test positive for COVID-19 are more likely to be infected with infections compatible with the Omicron variant compared with those who are unvaccinated, though individuals who had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine continued to be less likely to test positive for COVID-19, regardless of variant. It is too early to draw conclusions from our data on the effectiveness of vaccines against the Omicron variant."
In many ways this report demonstrates my view from 3 weeks ago that in fact Omicron is a good thing. It will drive out Delta which is far far nastier and will give large swathes of the population herd immunity.
In my view the end of the pandemic is in sight. The only way Omicron could mutate into something that could take over from it would be for that mutation to be more transmissable. I don't think that is likely.
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 57m Replying to @BallouxFrancois Basically, this is the 'very lucky scenario' I mused about in this thread I wrote last month ...
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https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1473240781314002948
Basically Omicron isn't that bad
Not like the famous Godwin or Netanyahu or worse elected under PR.
Third dose mRNA vaccination rescued neutralisation in the short term, though waning is expected to occur over time.
We will need continual Coronavirus vaccines for the long haul - which means the Government needs to find money.
Or perhaps avoid a situation in future where an extremist wing can bring about a hugely damaging referendum that the majority of people don't want, and can only narrowly getting over the line by promising unicorns for everyone and obfuscating on the truly radical, electorally poisonous, changes they really seek to impose on the country?
Or to dodge the bullet of a party that blatantly governs in the interests only of its voters (which I appreciate you are totally comfortable with) who tend to be elderly, backward looking, rose-tinted spectacle wearing nostalgists increasingly divorced from the modern world, who are happy to see taxes levied on a shrinking working population to pay for their care?
It's looking, as at today, as though (for reasons which still aren't fully understood), Omicron is less of a problem than appeared to be likely when the only real information we had was its super-fast spread in the early stages. That's good news, at least for countries like the UK which are well-advanced in delivering booster jabs, but it doesn't mean the Sage boffins were idiots, let alone that that had a malign agenda and were plotting to get us locked down just for fun. That's a conspiracy theory as bonkers as some of the anti-vax garbage.
But Omicron is going to be a free booster for millions maybe tens of millions.
I'd be fascinated to hear -- from any proponent of PR -- a credible way in which this is implemented in the UK.
The argument seems to be that a Progressive Coalition will want to do this.
It won't. There is absolutely no reason for the Labour Party to do this. It is actively against their interests.
LibDems in marginals (like OGH) already regularly vote Labour to usher in the Progressive Coalition.
Fine. Labour will obv want to keep it that way.
PR is like BREXIT. It will only happen when one of the parties is dragged, kicking and screaming, and forced to implement it.
And that probably requires the threat of a near-extinction event for one of the two main parties.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool" (RPF)
The main losers from PR would be the Tories, Labour and the SNP, so none of the main parties are likely to push it
It did achieve one thing though, Richard, it's made the politicians much more sceptical towards data modelling, which is a good thing. It felt like before this fiasco the politicians treated modelled outputs as "the truth" of what will happen when we know that not to be the case. Now that they are treating the modelled data as they should, an interesting and possibly insightful exercise of prediction, the decision making process might actually start working properly rather than the standard cycle of media leaks of terrifying numbers by Gove, pressure on politicians, cabinet meeting, cabinet bounced into lockdown.
The Labour Party embraces it's dark side.
The other problem is due to the misnomer of calling racists "far right" (there's nothing left or right about racism) the left acts like racism isn't their problem. If you define racists as right, then anyone on the left can't be racist by definition.
It's complete bollocks but too many people actually believe that.
But why do they appear to consistently overlook any evidence that might not fit with the outcome of 'this will be a catastrophe'? Graham Medley appeared to say that they have been asked to look at the worst case, because that is what they need to know to make a decision. Fine. But decision makers also need to know how likely the worst case is. And they also need to know what the measures which will avert the worst case will cost.
Pretty much any case you are attempting to make - in any walk of life - is weighing up the costs and the benefits. Only one half of this analysis appears to be being done.
And pretty much any modelling you do - even if you are modelling the worst case - needs to pass some sort of smell test. Is it plausible that we will have a death rate 40 times greater than we saw in South Africa? Is it plausible that we will see millions of infections per day?
At best, something is going very wrong with the analysis-and-decision-making process.
Not reporting scenarios because the inputs aren't relevant is reasonable. If you have no reason to believe those inputs, then you wouldn't have done the analysis.
But if you get a reasonable set of inputs, that then presents a reasonable scenario, that should be included within the science for consideration. Not to the exclusion of all other scenarios, but it should be there.
To get PR, one of the main parties (eg most likely Labour, though it could be the Tories in different circs) has to lose faith that it can win again under FPTP.
For that, LibDems in marginals have to NOT vote Labour.
C.f. Brexit. It happened because enough Tory voters were willing NOT to vote Tory, but UKIP.
The Tory party was facing an extinction-level event.
(It so happens I support PR).
Even on this site people were prepared to believe the ludicrous modelling than real world data from SA with the reason that Omicron may effect South Afircans in a different way than it would people from the UK.
Why real world data was and to an extent is still being ignored is beyond me. Even now some "experts" will only concede that Omicron is not more severe than Delta.
This is a feature, not a bug.
And go on, have a go at answering my 2 questions. It wasn't meant to be connected. You referred to best schools and I assume as we were talking about Eton I was intrigued as to why you thought their pupils were more successful, as they clearly on a whole are. Is it because they went to Eton or because they are brighter? And did they go to Eton because they were brighter or because their parents were rich?
Better than any poll....??
I agree that I can't see how abolition of FPTP ever comes about at Westminster for the same reasons it hasn't happened in Canada. FPTP will also work against the Tories again when they lose power as they will lose a lot of seats to the lib dems in the south east that they held even in 1997.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/21/fans-chant-stand-up-if-you-hate-boris-at-packed-darts-championship
The most likely way round that is to have two broad coalitions pre-agreed before the election to guarantee that one of them must get a majority, but even that falls down as soon as a third grouping comes along that neither side will talk to, and neither left nor right gets a majority on their own accord. This is what happened in Sweden, and the parties were left scrabbling around to find a new coalition after the election. Which is exactly what FPTP is designed to avoid.
Dispatchable power generation: fossil with carbon capture - Yes
WFH - Yes
Choose your own pizza topping - Yes
Extinction of humankind - Yes
BoJo claims they are reviewing the data hour by hour. Bollocks to that. It’s been obvious what way the wind is blowing on this for quite a while if you looked objectively at the information set available. Certainly earlier than yesterday lunchtime when Downing St was briefing about the recall of Parliament.
Logically this makes it even more important to argue about it, to convince other voters that the current system favours the party leaderships, while a different voting system would give more power to the voters.
Don't those two seem somewhat contradictory? The support of WFH to save lives rather brings into question his willingness to see losses inflicted upon the human race
Well: 23% (-6)
Badly: 71% (+7)
Via @YouGov, 20 Dec.
Changes w/ 22 Nov.
He’s done It! More unpopular than Corbyn
Eton is highly selective now and you have to pass an entrance exam, having rich parents alone is not enough. The rich but less bright go to schools like Stowe.
Stowe has not yet produced a PM though it is good at producing actors like David Niven or Henry Cavill
A change worth considering is to revisit the alternative vote. It can be done by allowing people to list candidates, but that is cumbersome.
The better way may be to keep the present system except that in a constituency where no candidate gets 50% of the votes +1 there is a run off between the top two candidates a week later, so that it can reasonably be said that in every seat the winner has 50% support from those who vote.
This has the obvious immediate effect, but a more subtle long term effect in that everyone over time comes to realise that you can vote with a free mind first time but will have the opportunity to vote for at least one, and perhaps two, centrist candidates the following week.
IMHO it would gradually become PR by another route.
Yes, we have been here before, and yes there is lots wrong with it.
I would support PR only if people that dont like the proposed manifesto of the coalition can withdraw their vote after the manifesto was known. To give an example in 2015 the only reason I would have voted cameron and his party would have been to get the referendum. I fully believe he expected another coalition between tories and lib dems and the first thing thrown out would have been the referendum. So I would have voted tory for one reason which is now null and void. Yet he still gets to count my vote when in fact I thought apart from that one policy I wouldn't piss on him or his party if they were burning in the street.
The question isn't about which scenarios were ran, but why scenarios with certain outputs that didn't suit the agenda of locking down weren't included within "the science".
The whole range of scenarios should be included, not just the doomcasting ones.
So imo it boils down to the polls. If they stay toxic for the party and they furthermore indicate that A.N. Other would do much better, and A.N. Other is alive and in parliament and willing to go for it, then it could be go go go on a summer leadership contest. I'd be delighted to see it too but with my betting hat on - which it has to be when I'm doing betting - I have to look at odds cf probabilities and on that score almost even money on him NOT being replaced by the time of the next Tory conference looks good to me. It's looks very good.
Second the Cabinet is not run like the Union, parliament might be but no surprise given the Union was modelled on parliament not the other way round
https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/1473240781314002948
In many ways this report demonstrates my view from 3 weeks ago that in fact Omicron is a good thing. It will drive out Delta which is far far nastier and will give large swathes of the population herd immunity.
In my view the end of the pandemic is in sight. The only way Omicron could mutate into something that could take over from it would be for that mutation to be more transmissable. I don't think that is likely.
- Which accelerant will @Leon use to set himself on fire and run round screaming.
- Which biscuits do we serve?
- Using @HYUFD Covenanter tank engine to make the tea was a bust - should we upgrade him to something that includes a Boiling Vessel?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/news/statementsandletters/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveyearlyanalysisofcharacteristicsassociatedwiththeomicronvariantamongcovid19infectionsuk20december2021
I was there in the mid Nineties, not that long after the current govt shambles left, and anyone could just turn up and pay on the door, which was left open normally. The Union was where they had poster sales at the start of term FFS. It was hardly exclusive.
By Reporting Day Tuesday is normally lower than Monday these days (just checked since September only 3 Tuesdays have been higher than the proceeding Monday).
Until the British escape the mental slavery that the class system has trapped them in, comprehensive schools will continue to "fail" in the terms set by the elite, even as most of them continue to do an excellent job in educating their pupils. And Britain will stay an unhappy, frustrated country that can't understand why it keeps failing to achieve its huge potential.
ONS
@BallouxFrancois
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@BallouxFrancois
Basically, this is the 'very lucky scenario' I mused about in this thread I wrote last month ...