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 find the FDP pretty interesting because of how much support they have with the young at least in the 2021 election. It could however be argued that they've moved back to the centre given their willingness to cooperate successfully with the SPD and the Greens and the increase in the minimum wage.
I would say the Lib Dems are most similar to the Dutch D66 which is the 2nd largest party in Rutte's gvt. They also have a lot of similarities with Austrian NEOS.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
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.
I take great pride in the fact that in three years at Cambridge I never set foot in the 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
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.
Forgotten all about the Welsh Pony. Nice pub.
Gone now. Alas. I was recalling here recently its quirk of dispensing milk on draught at the bar for the rowing teams in training, though that was perhaps before your time.
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
This really is danger territory now for Johnson. A net approval rating of -48 from YouGov (down 13 on the month, from what was already his worst score).
For comparison: - YouGov had Corbyn at -50 just before the 2019GE. - They had Theresa May at -49 just before she resigned.
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
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.
I take great pride in the fact that in three years at Cambridge I never set foot in the Union.
I joined by standing order which I cancelled but a rich unsuccessful hack paid the balance so I could vote for him.
Anecdata - surprise visitor so I thought we'd go out to lunch - as a long shot thought I'd try one of Brighton's best steak houses - usually impossible to book on the day - completely open with tables available for every time slot - ditto The Ivy, which also is usually rammed. The lockdown is underway, irrespective of what the government says. When plans changed and I had to cancel, my booking was one of only two.....
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.
Agreed - some very odd clientele. You could get a coffee and go to the library there though which was pretty snug.
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
Christ even eeyore had a more positive outlook....i am sure some just want this thing to never end so their 15 mins of fame continues forever.
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?
I imagine that here’s much pacing back and forth, characteristic clutching of the Worzel Gummidge Barnet and cries of ‘How the fuck am I going to fix this?!’
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.
Perhaps that is why the Labour party has elected the grammar school and private school educated Sir Keir Starmer as their leader as the best chance of winning the next general election and returning to power and not threatening the elite (cue BJO)? Nonetheless, statistically grammar schools still get more of their most academic pupils into Oxbridge and top universities and the professions than comprehensives do.
Germany still has lots of grammar school like gymnasiums and is a very well run and arguably more meritocratic nation than we are. All replacing most of the grammars with comprehensives did was make our elite more private school dominated again
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
- 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.
The only real thing of interest on murder Tuesday is high or lower than last murder Tuesday, which was 150. Cases have been trending upwards since 2nd Nov, and hospitalisations since the end of November, slightly, but boosters have been accelerating too. And to what extent is the growth in hospitalisations people being hospitalised who happen to be covid positive, rather than those being hospitalised with covid? All told, I'm going for lower: 145.
- 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?
Cases by sample date for 20th would reach around 220k if the weekly growth rate nationally is progressing as per London. I think it may be a bit below tbh.
I tried to look at the date of report vs sample date for yesterday's numbers to assess backlog. My impression from looking at numbers from the last few weeks is that the average gap between report and sample was just over 2 days, but obviously that's not a proper baseline. Looking at yesterday's data in terms of what dates were being added to, and allowing for the fact we're coming out of weekend, it didn't seem a slam dunk that there is reporting delay.
I'm reckoning today's by report date will be slightly above 150k with a 2.5 day average reporting lag (i.e. the mean date added will be halfway between 18/12 and 19/12).
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
We're now in a wonderful scenario where the lab work supports the massive South African real world study, but we still have to ignore that and model this as Delta but worse.
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.
Agreed - some very odd clientele. You could get a coffee and go to the library there though which was pretty snug.
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
What a memory! Yeah, rings a bell, but I was not a regular. My weekly shindig was 70s night at the Old Fire Station.
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.
Agreed - some very odd clientele. You could get a coffee and go to the library there though which was pretty snug.
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
What a memory! Yeah, rings a bell, but I was not a regular. My weekly shindig was 70s night at the Old Fire Station.
Ah the OFS - only rivalled by Fifth Avenue behind the Sainsbury’s in the old Westgate centre for sheer scuzziness. Happy days!
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.
Now you have to be a member or guest of a a member, I know as I occasionally go as a guest of my wife who is a member
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.
Agreed - some very odd clientele. You could get a coffee and go to the library there though which was pretty snug.
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
What a memory! Yeah, rings a bell, but I was not a regular. My weekly shindig was 70s night at the Old Fire Station.
Ah the OFS - only rivalled by Fifth Avenue behind the Sainsbury’s in the old Westgate centre for sheer scuzziness. Happy days!
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.
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.
Agreed - some very odd clientele. You could get a coffee and go to the library there though which was pretty snug.
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
What a memory! Yeah, rings a bell, but I was not a regular. My weekly shindig was 70s night at the Old Fire Station.
Ah the OFS - only rivalled by Fifth Avenue behind the Sainsbury’s in the old Westgate centre for sheer scuzziness. Happy days!
Remember helping with a friend's dramatic production at the OFS once. Is the Westgate centre not there any more? There was a plaque on the back wall of (I think) M&S, in a concrete rubble wasteland, to mark the burial place of Roger Bacon.
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
Come on Max. Stop getting so bogged down in what happens in practice, all that matters is what happens in theory.
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.
Which Tory nutter MPs has the Tories expelled? Most recent expellees were centrists I think.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
Absolutely, Delta is gone from SA.
I think some of these Scientists have enjoyed the limelight (and the views of their twitter feed) so much over the last 2 years that they have to keep saying something different to attract attention.
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
Come on Max. Stop getting so bogged down in what happens in practice, all that matters is what happens in theory.
There's no evidence of delta going down yet. The Omicron:Delta ratio is growing fast but that doesn't preclude Delta remaining constant
Anecdata - surprise visitor so I thought we'd go out to lunch - as a long shot thought I'd try one of Brighton's best steak houses - usually impossible to book on the day - completely open with tables available for every time slot - ditto The Ivy, which also is usually rammed. The lockdown is underway, irrespective of what the government says. When plans changed and I had to cancel, my booking was one of only two.....
There are some amazing restaurant and hotel deals at the moment.
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
We're now in a wonderful scenario where the lab work supports the massive South African real world study, but we still have to ignore that and model this as Delta but worse.
No, I think the models will be updated with the most relevent virulence inputs and vaccine efficacy data. The Cabinet rejecting measures yesterday bought us a week to get significantly more accurate inputs than we're being used previously and that may actually be the end of any lockdown chance.
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
Yes I can remember someone in the industry saying this to me a few months into the pandemic. That molecular modelling indicated sarscov2 would eventually either mutate itself into extinction or down a path where it ceased to cause much serious illness. SARS vs the other coronaviruses in general circulation.
I reckon it’s time for Leon to buy his stocks back.
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.
Agreed - some very odd clientele. You could get a coffee and go to the library there though which was pretty snug.
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
What a memory! Yeah, rings a bell, but I was not a regular. My weekly shindig was 70s night at the Old Fire Station.
Ah the OFS - only rivalled by Fifth Avenue behind the Sainsbury’s in the old Westgate centre for sheer scuzziness. Happy days!
Remember helping with a friend's dramatic production at the OFS once. Is the Westgate centre not there any more? There was a plaque on the back wall of (I think) M&S, in a concrete rubble wasteland, to mark the burial place of Roger Bacon.
They were pretty good with the student drama - we did Romeo and Juliet there which was fun. The old Westgate has been replaced with a new and much nicer shopping complex, albeit a bit light on decent shops. Has an excellent roof terrace area with restaurants/bars and views over the city.
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.
Perhaps that is why the Labour party has elected the grammar school and private school educated Sir Keir Starmer as their leader as the best chance of winning the next general election and returning to power and not threatening the elite (cue BJO)? Nonetheless, statistically grammar schools still get more of their most academic pupils into Oxbridge and top universities and the professions than comprehensives do.
Germany still has lots of grammar school like gymnasiums and is a very well run and arguably more meritocratic nation than we are. All replacing most of the grammars with comprehensives did was make our elite more private school dominated again
I don't disagree that grammar schools do/did a better job of penetrating the elite than comprehensives do. But I would rather dismantle the class system than have the government prop it up. The true problem is these elite institutions reproducing themselves in their own image. Grammar schools are bad for social mobility (because richer parents are much better at getting their kids in) and consign the majority of kids to a second rate education. It is also perfectly possible to get a very good education at a comprehensive, as I know from my own experience both as a pupil and a parent. Perhaps as someone who went to private school you're just a bit blinkered about this?
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.
Yep. And this triggers me to mention one of the (many) debits to our private school habit that I often forget to include when I'm on that topic.
The False & Pernicious Yardstick:
Filter off an already advantaged pupil intake, then spend lots more on their education than the rest, then compare their exam results to the rest, then say -
"Look how much better the private sector does! State schools should stop failing, pull their finger out and take a leaf."
This one/two sucker punch is so wrong and it's wrong on every level. Factually, logically, morally, logistically, pragmatically, you name it.
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
Come on Max. Stop getting so bogged down in what happens in practice, all that matters is what happens in theory.
There's no evidence of delta going down yet. The Omicron:Delta ratio is growing fast but that doesn't preclude Delta remaining constant
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
Come on Max. Stop getting so bogged down in what happens in practice, all that matters is what happens in theory.
There's no evidence of delta going down yet. The Omicron:Delta ratio is growing fast but that doesn't preclude Delta remaining constant
There was a chart earlier with a Log scale that showed a pretty significant drop off in daily Delta cases in absolute terms rather than relative terms.
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
We're now in a wonderful scenario where the lab work supports the massive South African real world study, but we still have to ignore that and model this as Delta but worse.
No, I think the models will be updated with the most relevent virulence inputs and vaccine efficacy data. The Cabinet rejecting measures yesterday bought us a week to get significantly more accurate inputs than we're being used previously and that may actually be the end of any lockdown chance.
I think there's very little chance of the SAGE modelling group coming back with a calmer update before the facts on the ground have rendered it entirely moot. Even if they could there is clearly enough resistance in the system to prevent it happening quickly.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
I can't see that that excludes the common sense interpretation that the modellers say "forget about this area of the parameter space, below n extra deaths a day, but we have to look at this area, which we need to discuss in detail".
This really is danger territory now for Johnson. A net approval rating of -48 from YouGov (down 13 on the month, from what was already his worst score).
For comparison: - YouGov had Corbyn at -50 just before the 2019GE. - They had Theresa May at -49 just before she resigned.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
Please focus very carefully on this next sentence. It is impossible for you to assert that two people have not misunderstood each other, without carefully questioning what each of them meant by the terms they used. You have definitely not done this, so you cannot know that they are using the word "scenario" to mean the same thing.
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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
Come on Max. Stop getting so bogged down in what happens in practice, all that matters is what happens in theory.
There's no evidence of delta going down yet. The Omicron:Delta ratio is growing fast but that doesn't preclude Delta remaining constant
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.
Agreed - some very odd clientele. You could get a coffee and go to the library there though which was pretty snug.
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
What a memory! Yeah, rings a bell, but I was not a regular. My weekly shindig was 70s night at the Old Fire Station.
Ah the OFS - only rivalled by Fifth Avenue behind the Sainsbury’s in the old Westgate centre for sheer scuzziness. Happy days!
Remember helping with a friend's dramatic production at the OFS once. Is the Westgate centre not there any more? There was a plaque on the back wall of (I think) M&S, in a concrete rubble wasteland, to mark the burial place of Roger Bacon.
They were pretty good with the student drama - we did Romeo and Juliet there which was fun. The old Westgate has been replaced with a new and much nicer shopping complex, albeit a bit light on decent shops. Has an excellent roof terrace area with restaurants/bars and views over the city.
The most disappointing thing that ever happened to me at University was that the production of 12 Angry Men I was supposed to be in at the OFS got pulled because of a rights problem. The highlight of my Oxford Drama career was playing Prospero in Christ Church Masters Garden in the worst production of the Tempest since it was written.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
He also appears not to understand that "not taking action" is also a decision.
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.
I do have to say comprehensive education is much less class-independent than often claimed, in my experience. I've come across many people who've had good comprehensive educations in rural, suburban or urban middle-class areas. On the other hand, I've also come across quite a few people with such terrible experiences of comprehensive education especially in more deprived areas, as recounted to me, that it's turned them into lifelong conservatives.
Mr. Thompson, I actually caught a little bit of BBC news the other day on TV and I think a chap from Sage (he was certainly defending them) was claiming such reports were inaccurate and that they presented the best to worse case scenarios to Cabinet.
But the point is that the 'best case scenario' is a relative measure. If you have three bad scenarios then the least bad is 'best'. But if the models only look at bad outcomes then middling and good results aren't presented at all, naturally making things look far bleaker (in a three model approach the 'middle' ground scenario is actually incredibly bad, if you were to include the full range).
This is also borne out by the last spike in which real world numbers were far better than the alleged 'best case scenario' (yet we still had some fools calling for more restrictions even then).
Steve Barclay does a pretty good of explaining the situation, to which the next question is yes but what about restrictions...and he explains ago...yes but don't we need more restrictions...explains again....but but Patrick Vallance says you need to go harder and wider with restrictions....
One thing is for certain if the government have called this right in terms of big push on boosters and minimal restrictions they won't get any credit. It will be like Hague decisions over Libya, where he got absolutely slaughtered in the press for weeks, only for it to be found he absolutely made the correct decisions, to which there was total tumbleweed.
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
In theory maybe, young HY. In practice, all they have to do is to swear undying loyalty to the Conservative Party leader, whoever that happens to be. Then they can carry on - as a Conservative - pushing their previously held views.
And you yourself have said, on many occasions that the Conservative Party does not have any fixed principles or policies - they just adapt and say and do whatever is necessary to get themselves elected again. So that would hardly be a problem.
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
We're now in a wonderful scenario where the lab work supports the massive South African real world study, but we still have to ignore that and model this as Delta but worse.
No, I think the models will be updated with the most relevent virulence inputs and vaccine efficacy data. The Cabinet rejecting measures yesterday bought us a week to get significantly more accurate inputs than we're being used previously and that may actually be the end of any lockdown chance.
I think there's very little chance of the SAGE modelling group coming back with a calmer update before the facts on the ground have rendered it entirely moot. Even if they could there is clearly enough resistance in the system to prevent it happening quickly.
I actually think this whole episode will force whoever is setting the modellers parameters to include the very mild Omicron/high vax efficacy input scenario. Ultimately, the politicians around the table will ask for it and if it isn't there then no decision will be made for or against lockdown next week.
As I said earlier, however this has come about, there has been a great deal of learning for both the modellers and the politicians. Where those model outputs were previously regarded as something close to the absolute truth of what will happen we now have a healthy scepticism of them and the modellers will be in a better place to present the full range of outputs from various scenarios.
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.
I do have to say comprehensive education is much less class-independent than often claimed, in my experience. I've come across many people who've had good comprehensive educations in rural, suburban or urban middle-class areas. On the other hand I've also come across quite a few people with such a poor experience of comprehensive education in more deprived areas that it's turned them into lifelong conservatives.
Comprehensives are fine in rural areas or prosperous suburbs or market towns, however comprehensives in deprived parts of the inner cities, seaside towns or ex industrial towns are a different story
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
He also appears not to understand that "not taking action" is also a decision.
Yep, that's the real killer point which renders defence by terminological exactitude look a bit silly.
The idea that a scenario where things are OK gives you no decision to make, when the decision is literally whether to take action OR whether not to take action, is just a dead give away of the mindset under which the models are produced.
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.
I've done a fair bit of scenario modelling (not infectious disease, but some similar considerations). There does tend to be am emphasis on using the most extreme reliable data - or, if you like, worst case - so I can see the logic here of using a conservative estimate for vaccine efficacy, the latest data on spread and assuming baseline severity similar to Delta. In the first instance. Why? Because if that modelling gives yo an answer you can live with then you can be very confident that you're ok. No crisis. No additional restrictions. It serves a purpose, even if the estimates are way worse than reality.
But, if your worst case comes out in crisis territory then you do need to think about how likely that is. What's a better estimate for severity? Is there an update on vaccine efficacy? There are a few reasons why I think we've seen what we've seen, i.e mostly the more alarming projections: 1. Some scientists/advisors take a narrow public health (well, narrower than that - Covid health only) view and really do think we should have ongoing restrictions for the forseeable future. They've talked up the doom scenarios. It is a valid criticism - I have some colleagues with similar views who would have us locked down right now just in case. 2. The press love a bad story. Give them three models and they'll mostly lead on the worst (with some honourable exceptions). 3. There is uncertainty. A degree of scaring of the public to change behaviour might offset some of the worst, if it is bad, without the politicans really having to take the consquences (i.e. no lockdown, no big support package for business etc). It might also buy some time for better data. Scary projections are, to some extent, in the government's interests as they kick the can down the road. 4. Some (much) of the modelling code is crap, in terms of code quality. Tweaking the inputs is not necessarily as clean and easy as it should be (I don't know that in this instance, but I've been in meetings where someone challenges an assumption, there's concensus to try varying it and whoever coded the model goes a bit pale as they know that particular thing is hardcoded in at multiple points). So even if people are asking for different assumptions, it may take some time to run it through and get the range of results. 5. Ministers and some civil servants not on top of the science enough to ask the right questions and challenge the right things.
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
We're now in a wonderful scenario where the lab work supports the massive South African real world study, but we still have to ignore that and model this as Delta but worse.
No, I think the models will be updated with the most relevent virulence inputs and vaccine efficacy data. The Cabinet rejecting measures yesterday bought us a week to get significantly more accurate inputs than we're being used previously and that may actually be the end of any lockdown chance.
I think there's very little chance of the SAGE modelling group coming back with a calmer update before the facts on the ground have rendered it entirely moot. Even if they could there is clearly enough resistance in the system to prevent it happening quickly.
I actually think this whole episode will force whoever is setting the modellers parameters to include the very mild Omicron/high vax efficacy input scenario. Ultimately, the politicians around the table will ask for it and if it isn't there then no decision will be made for or against lockdown next week.
As I said earlier, however this has come about, there has been a great deal of learning for both the modellers and the politicians. Where those model outputs were previously regarded as something close to the absolute truth of what will happen we now have a healthy scepticism of them and the modellers will be in a better place to present the full range of outputs from various scenarios.
By next week the gig is up anyway. If London hospital admissions aren't north of 500 per day on the excluding incidentals figure in the data released this Thursday, then any pretence to honestly believing this could get to half the hospital usage of last year will be gone.
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
We're now in a wonderful scenario where the lab work supports the massive South African real world study, but we still have to ignore that and model this as Delta but worse.
No, I think the models will be updated with the most relevent virulence inputs and vaccine efficacy data. The Cabinet rejecting measures yesterday bought us a week to get significantly more accurate inputs than we're being used previously and that may actually be the end of any lockdown chance.
I think there's very little chance of the SAGE modelling group coming back with a calmer update before the facts on the ground have rendered it entirely moot. Even if they could there is clearly enough resistance in the system to prevent it happening quickly.
I actually think this whole episode will force whoever is setting the modellers parameters to include the very mild Omicron/high vax efficacy input scenario. Ultimately, the politicians around the table will ask for it and if it isn't there then no decision will be made for or against lockdown next week.
As I said earlier, however this has come about, there has been a great deal of learning for both the modellers and the politicians. Where those model outputs were previously regarded as something close to the absolute truth of what will happen we now have a healthy scepticism of them and the modellers will be in a better place to present the full range of outputs from various scenarios.
By next week the gig is up anyway. If London hospital admissions aren't north of 500 per day on the excluding incidentals figure in the data released this Thursday, then any pretence to honestly believing this could get to half the hospital usage of last year will be gone.
And if the stats are high, then the pols have a ready-made solution, like [edit] metaphorically I hasten to add, something out of Frazer's Golden Bough - a winter sacrifice of the King. Or am I too cynical?
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.
That's really interesting, it actually does go back to what quite a few people were saying early on, any variant which had significant immune escape may also be much less good at binding to our cells to cause severe disease.
We're now in a wonderful scenario where the lab work supports the massive South African real world study, but we still have to ignore that and model this as Delta but worse.
No, I think the models will be updated with the most relevent virulence inputs and vaccine efficacy data. The Cabinet rejecting measures yesterday bought us a week to get significantly more accurate inputs than we're being used previously and that may actually be the end of any lockdown chance.
I think there's very little chance of the SAGE modelling group coming back with a calmer update before the facts on the ground have rendered it entirely moot. Even if they could there is clearly enough resistance in the system to prevent it happening quickly.
I actually think this whole episode will force whoever is setting the modellers parameters to include the very mild Omicron/high vax efficacy input scenario. Ultimately, the politicians around the table will ask for it and if it isn't there then no decision will be made for or against lockdown next week.
As I said earlier, however this has come about, there has been a great deal of learning for both the modellers and the politicians. Where those model outputs were previously regarded as something close to the absolute truth of what will happen we now have a healthy scepticism of them and the modellers will be in a better place to present the full range of outputs from various scenarios.
By next week the gig is up anyway. If London hospital admissions aren't north of 500 per day on the excluding incidentals figure in the data released this Thursday, then any pretence to honestly believing this could get to half the hospital usage of last year will be gone.
That’s if the government isn’t bounced into doing “something” before then. We are seeing the all too familiar pattern of media doom ratcheting up… see BBC News current choice of headline.
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.
Uncomfortable though I am at being on the same side as Hyufd, your premise is flawed. Comprehensives were designed to give everyone a grammar school style education. Which would not only refute your claims about them being designed to eliminate the social hierarchy but actually invert it - it was to spread it more widely, particularly among those less affluent groups whose children wanted to go to grammars but couldn't.
You might find this article of interest (helpfully it appears to be open access):
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.
I've done a fair bit of scenario modelling (not infectious disease, but some similar considerations). There does tend to be am emphasis on using the most extreme reliable data - or, if you like, worst case - so I can see the logic here of using a conservative estimate for vaccine efficacy, the latest data on spread and assuming baseline severity similar to Delta. In the first instance. Why? Because if that modelling gives yo an answer you can live with then you can be very confident that you're ok. No crisis. No additional restrictions. It serves a purpose, even if the estimates are way worse than reality.
But, if your worst case comes out in crisis territory then you do need to think about how likely that is. What's a better estimate for severity? Is there an update on vaccine efficacy? There are a few reasons why I think we've seen what we've seen, i.e mostly the more alarming projections: 1. Some scientists/advisors take a narrow public health (well, narrower than that - Covid health only) view and really do think we should have ongoing restrictions for the forseeable future. They've talked up the doom scenarios. It is a valid criticism - I have some colleagues with similar views who would have us locked down right now just in case. 2. The press love a bad story. Give them three models and they'll mostly lead on the worst (with some honourable exceptions). 3. There is uncertainty. A degree of scaring of the public to change behaviour might offset some of the worst, if it is bad, without the politicans really having to take the consquences (i.e. no lockdown, no big support package for business etc). It might also buy some time for better data. Scary projections are, to some extent, in the government's interests as they kick the can down the road. 4. Some (much) of the modelling code is crap, in terms of code quality. Tweaking the inputs is not necessarily as clean and easy as it should be (I don't know that in this instance, but I've been in meetings where someone challenges an assumption, there's concensus to try varying it and whoever coded the model goes a bit pale as they know that particular thing is hardcoded in at multiple points). So even if people are asking for different assumptions, it may take some time to run it through and get the range of results. 5. Ministers and some civil servants not on top of the science enough to ask the right questions and challenge the right things.
Point 1 really scares me the most, it's that "lockdown just in case" attitude that is terrifying. Lots of people can't see the costs of lockdown because they don't experience those costs. Especially those in the public sector with very comfortable employment, big houses, guaranteed retirement packages and general middle aged/middle class lifestyles.
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.
I do have to say comprehensive education is much less class-independent than often claimed, in my experience. I've come across many people who've had good comprehensive educations in rural, suburban or urban middle-class areas. On the other hand, I've also come across quite a few people with such terrible experiences of comprehensive education especially in more deprived areas, as recounted to me, that it's turned them into lifelong conservatives.
That's undoubtedly true. I went to one of, possible the highest performing comprehensive in Scotland. My kids attend one in inner London, with a substantial middle class contingent in the intake, and more than half the kids are from ethnic minorities, who tend to do better than the WWC owing to greater ambition. The most pernicious legacy of the British class system has been to persuade many WWC people that education "isn't for them", which creates a vicious cycle of low engagement, low expectations and low outcomes. Overturning that will take many generations I think, and will probably never happen without a revolution of some kind. I am absolutely convinced though that reintroducing grammar schools and secondary moderns - one facet of the social and educational hierarchy that produced this situation - are not the solution.
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.
Uncomfortable though I am at being on the same side as Hyufd, your premise is flawed. Comprehensives were designed to give everyone a grammar school style education. Which would not only refute your claims about them being designed to eliminate the social hierarchy but actually invert it - it was to spread it more widely, particularly among those less affluent groups whose children wanted to go to grammars but couldn't.
You might find this article of interest (helpfully it appears to be open access):
Indeed good comprehensive schools are still selective. Merely they are selective by wealth as witnessed by house prices and rental costs in their cachement area's. Personally if we have selection I would much prefer it to be selection by ability rather than wealth. For reference I went to a comprehensive and it was appalling.
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.
I've done a fair bit of scenario modelling (not infectious disease, but some similar considerations). There does tend to be am emphasis on using the most extreme reliable data - or, if you like, worst case - so I can see the logic here of using a conservative estimate for vaccine efficacy, the latest data on spread and assuming baseline severity similar to Delta. In the first instance. Why? Because if that modelling gives yo an answer you can live with then you can be very confident that you're ok. No crisis. No additional restrictions. It serves a purpose, even if the estimates are way worse than reality.
But, if your worst case comes out in crisis territory then you do need to think about how likely that is. What's a better estimate for severity? Is there an update on vaccine efficacy? There are a few reasons why I think we've seen what we've seen, i.e mostly the more alarming projections: 1. Some scientists/advisors take a narrow public health (well, narrower than that - Covid health only) view and really do think we should have ongoing restrictions for the forseeable future. They've talked up the doom scenarios. It is a valid criticism - I have some colleagues with similar views who would have us locked down right now just in case. 2. The press love a bad story. Give them three models and they'll mostly lead on the worst (with some honourable exceptions). 3. There is uncertainty. A degree of scaring of the public to change behaviour might offset some of the worst, if it is bad, without the politicans really having to take the consquences (i.e. no lockdown, no big support package for business etc). It might also buy some time for better data. Scary projections are, to some extent, in the government's interests as they kick the can down the road. 4. Some (much) of the modelling code is crap, in terms of code quality. Tweaking the inputs is not necessarily as clean and easy as it should be (I don't know that in this instance, but I've been in meetings where someone challenges an assumption, there's concensus to try varying it and whoever coded the model goes a bit pale as they know that particular thing is hardcoded in at multiple points). So even if people are asking for different assumptions, it may take some time to run it through and get the range of results. 5. Ministers and some civil servants not on top of the science enough to ask the right questions and challenge the right things.
Too late to edit, but to add: 6. Scientists don't have a lot of time for very uncertain estimates. So severity - it looks less severe, but by how much is still very much in question, so many scientists wait for better data before updating. Here, it's the wrong thing to do (take instead some plausible values to get an idea) but it's quite hardwired in the psyche. Normally things are not this urgent. It's a failing of a crisis response science and we need to fix this for next time. Get some more engineers involved, maybe.
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.)
Yes. It is in the same broad range of probability as the vaccine evasion/reduced efficacy due to mutation that we see with Omicron. So not something we would expect to see occuring regularly, but certainly something we would expect to see as time passes. Unless we are particularly unlucky we should have better vaccines, better vaccination programmes, better therapeutics, and better surveillance in our arsenal before we face a significantly higher morbidity 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.
Alternative view:
Deepti Gurdasani @dgurdasani1 · 1m It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
That doesn't seem to be happening in practice though, we can see from UK data that delta is being smashed by Omicron eventually to extinction just like SA.
Come on Max. Stop getting so bogged down in what happens in practice, all that matters is what happens in theory.
There's no evidence of delta going down yet. The Omicron:Delta ratio is growing fast but that doesn't preclude Delta remaining constant
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..
I was at Cardiff Uni in the 80s along with WelshOwl late of this parish although our paths rarely crossed. Our sole claim to fame in political stakes I believe was that Neil Kinnock had once been President of the Student's Union. Funnily enough just after he got elected leader of the Labour Party there was a break in at the Union Building and all documents relating to his time as President disappeared.
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.
I've done a fair bit of scenario modelling (not infectious disease, but some similar considerations). There does tend to be am emphasis on using the most extreme reliable data - or, if you like, worst case - so I can see the logic here of using a conservative estimate for vaccine efficacy, the latest data on spread and assuming baseline severity similar to Delta. In the first instance. Why? Because if that modelling gives yo an answer you can live with then you can be very confident that you're ok. No crisis. No additional restrictions. It serves a purpose, even if the estimates are way worse than reality.
But, if your worst case comes out in crisis territory then you do need to think about how likely that is. What's a better estimate for severity? Is there an update on vaccine efficacy? There are a few reasons why I think we've seen what we've seen, i.e mostly the more alarming projections: 1. Some scientists/advisors take a narrow public health (well, narrower than that - Covid health only) view and really do think we should have ongoing restrictions for the forseeable future. They've talked up the doom scenarios. It is a valid criticism - I have some colleagues with similar views who would have us locked down right now just in case. 2. The press love a bad story. Give them three models and they'll mostly lead on the worst (with some honourable exceptions). 3. There is uncertainty. A degree of scaring of the public to change behaviour might offset some of the worst, if it is bad, without the politicans really having to take the consquences (i.e. no lockdown, no big support package for business etc). It might also buy some time for better data. Scary projections are, to some extent, in the government's interests as they kick the can down the road. 4. Some (much) of the modelling code is crap, in terms of code quality. Tweaking the inputs is not necessarily as clean and easy as it should be (I don't know that in this instance, but I've been in meetings where someone challenges an assumption, there's concensus to try varying it and whoever coded the model goes a bit pale as they know that particular thing is hardcoded in at multiple points). So even if people are asking for different assumptions, it may take some time to run it through and get the range of results. 5. Ministers and some civil servants not on top of the science enough to ask the right questions and challenge the right things.
Point 1 really scares me the most, it's that "lockdown just in case" attitude that is terrifying. Lots of people can't see the costs of lockdown because they don't experience those costs. Especially those in the public sector with very comfortable employment, big houses, guaranteed retirement packages and general middle aged/middle class lifestyles.
Yep. So this is anecote, but it's more common among my colleagues than among other people I know. I guess scientific training embeds a kind of caution, wait for the evidence etc. And in the meantime do safety first, even when 'safety first' has big costs. Wait for more data... And, obviously among infectious diseae epidemiologists, a focus on the infectious disease. Probably not enough wider public health people having input (I have colleagues in mental health who are horrified by the last couple of years).
I do also have many colleagues who are hard against lockdown this time in the absence of compelling evidence (which is also my view).
If we had the death penalty as some want, we'd have killed him
Leaving aside your point about capital punishment, it sounds like this scumbag has served the sort of sentence he deserved irrespective of whether he or the paramedic caused her death.
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.
I've done a fair bit of scenario modelling (not infectious disease, but some similar considerations). There does tend to be am emphasis on using the most extreme reliable data - or, if you like, worst case - so I can see the logic here of using a conservative estimate for vaccine efficacy, the latest data on spread and assuming baseline severity similar to Delta. In the first instance. Why? Because if that modelling gives yo an answer you can live with then you can be very confident that you're ok. No crisis. No additional restrictions. It serves a purpose, even if the estimates are way worse than reality.
But, if your worst case comes out in crisis territory then you do need to think about how likely that is. What's a better estimate for severity? Is there an update on vaccine efficacy? There are a few reasons why I think we've seen what we've seen, i.e mostly the more alarming projections: 1. Some scientists/advisors take a narrow public health (well, narrower than that - Covid health only) view and really do think we should have ongoing restrictions for the forseeable future. They've talked up the doom scenarios. It is a valid criticism - I have some colleagues with similar views who would have us locked down right now just in case. 2. The press love a bad story. Give them three models and they'll mostly lead on the worst (with some honourable exceptions). 3. There is uncertainty. A degree of scaring of the public to change behaviour might offset some of the worst, if it is bad, without the politicans really having to take the consquences (i.e. no lockdown, no big support package for business etc). It might also buy some time for better data. Scary projections are, to some extent, in the government's interests as they kick the can down the road. 4. Some (much) of the modelling code is crap, in terms of code quality. Tweaking the inputs is not necessarily as clean and easy as it should be (I don't know that in this instance, but I've been in meetings where someone challenges an assumption, there's concensus to try varying it and whoever coded the model goes a bit pale as they know that particular thing is hardcoded in at multiple points). So even if people are asking for different assumptions, it may take some time to run it through and get the range of results. 5. Ministers and some civil servants not on top of the science enough to ask the right questions and challenge the right things.
Reading between the lines of the output, I think what they've done is as follows:
1) relied on the most credible sources for the best estimate (mean) of the parameters 2) captured the other sources by putting high volatility parameters around the best estimate, to reflect the large secondary uncertainty 3) that resulted in large ranges of possible results for the key metrics, which they have presented 4) everyone is focused heavily on the largest numbers, and failing to understand that they represent the extremes of what could possibly happen, not what is likely to happen 5) because everyone is scared of making mistakes that result in unnecessary deaths, the debate can't get past this point, and policymakers are stuck assuming the worst
1-3 is all perfectly defensible behaviour, and 4-5 is inevitable because of how humans think. The main question left for me is whether modellers cynically did 1-3 because they knew it would result in 4-5, or if it's just bad modelling practice.
Anyway, my wife and I now have two negative test days in a row. We want to go and visit my sister and brother-in-law who have both also just had two negative test days in a row, what's the consensus on that? Should we go or not? Considering they've all just had COVID as well and we'll be going by car.
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.
Uncomfortable though I am at being on the same side as Hyufd, your premise is flawed. Comprehensives were designed to give everyone a grammar school style education. Which would not only refute your claims about them being designed to eliminate the social hierarchy but actually invert it - it was to spread it more widely, particularly among those less affluent groups whose children wanted to go to grammars but couldn't.
You might find this article of interest (helpfully it appears to be open access):
Indeed good comprehensive schools are still selective. Merely they are selective by wealth as witnessed by house prices and rental costs in their cachement area's. Personally if we have selection I would much prefer it to be selection by ability rather than wealth. For reference I went to a comprehensive and it was appalling.
Yep see for example Durham Johnston in Durham although it does get more selective by ability at 16.
My understanding is that warrant or no warrant debt enforcers have no power to break into a house through a locked over an unpaid energy bill, especially not in the absence of the owner, and if they do they are committing the crime of breaking and entering.
So how come these people have not been named and prosecuted? £500 goodwill gesture doesn't begin to address the gravity of what they've done.
And how come the CEO and the payments division are not also in the dock for conspiring to gain unlawful entry and pervert the course of justice?
Because that's what it will take to stop this nonsense.
Edit - I'm sure I've asked this question before, but I've forgotten the answer. At the same time, the mere fact it's still ongoing is pretty outrageous.
Normal people don't have enough access to the law to enforce their rights. In this case the poor woman was being harassed by this company over a debt she didn't owe, and she should have been able to use the courts to force them to desist when contacting them directly failed to have the desired effect.
We need to dramatically widen access to the courts, so that the law can protect ordinary people from abuses of power by large companies and the government.
I had a constituent whose door was broken down without warning by a team of helmeted police with batons. They were trying to arrest a major drug dealer but got the streets mixed up. After 2 MONTHS she came to me to say that she'd not yet had more than a brief apology and a promise to pay for the repairs at some future point. I contacted them and they coughed up within two weeks and gave a proper fulsome apology, but it shouldn't need an MP's intervention.
She wasn't even especially traumatised - she reckoned that "the police sometimes behave like that, what can one do?" It wasn't an especially rough area, just a largely WWC village.
I had a constituent who was an elderly Tory member, whose door was broken down by the Police, called after a Tory canvasser and candidate became worried that he wasn't answering his door. Reason being, it transpired, that he'd gone out shopping.
Anyhow the Tories made themselves scarce, the Police nailed some corrugated metal where the glass in his front door had been, and he was left with no explanation or redress other than a "sorry, our mistake" note from the Police. Until he phoned me a week later, as his local LibDem councillor for help; I managed to get his door mended gratis by the Council (which had been the telephone intermediary between the canvasser, a Tory cabinet member, and the Police) and was the first to explain to him what had happened.
I don't think he voted Tory the next time! Sadly, that election turned out to be his last.
On the other hand: people were concerned for his welfare. The alternative was perhaps just to ignore the fact this elderly man was not answering his door.
Leaving the party-political aspect out of this, perhaps everyone did the correct thing from what they knew, even if it turned out to the wrong thing in reality.
I don't think running off and leaving the Police to sort the situation was the right thing to do, nor keeping clear and not going back to explain or apologise, nor turning it into a joke being spread around the Town Hall? Tory councillors were having a good laugh at this guy's accidental misfortune while he was sitting in his house with a cold draught blowing through his ruined front door.
When the guy found out that it was the Tory candidate who had called the Police, and that they'd simply run off and disappeared, he was appalled. I managed to get his door re-glazed the day after he phoned me; something they could and should have arranged themselves. The council was embarrassed at the whole episode and its role in it, and agreed to pay up straight away.
I'm afraid this sounds more like a biased anti-Tory story than anything else. It'd be good to hear the other side of your anecdote.
If he had been ill, then they did the right thing. The police, council etc generally don't just break down doors for LOLs.
That sounds like a reverse ferret of your earlier attempt at defending what was clearly very bad behaviour.
???
What 'very bad behaviour' ? Calling for assistance when they thought someone who was elderly needed help?
Yes, they were mistaken. But the 'very bad behaviour' would have been walking away and doing nothing.
Lol. They did walk away and do nothing. After the poor guy's front door had been smashed in.
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.
Uncomfortable though I am at being on the same side as Hyufd, your premise is flawed. Comprehensives were designed to give everyone a grammar school style education. Which would not only refute your claims about them being designed to eliminate the social hierarchy but actually invert it - it was to spread it more widely, particularly among those less affluent groups whose children wanted to go to grammars but couldn't.
You might find this article of interest (helpfully it appears to be open access):
Indeed good comprehensive schools are still selective. Merely they are selective by wealth as witnessed by house prices and rental costs in their cachement area's. Personally if we have selection I would much prefer it to be selection by ability rather than wealth. For reference I went to a comprehensive and it was appalling.
In areas where there are grammars (eg Birmingham) the better off send their kids to prep schools so they can pass the 11 plus (I have friends who have done this) or employ private tutors to prep their kids for the test. There may well be some additional house price premium in our area owing to the school being decent (it is decent rather than outstanding) but there is also a huge volume of social housing and those kids also attend. The idea that grammars = selection by ability while comprehensives = selection by post code is overly simplistic, to say the least.
Anyway, my wife and I now have two negative test days in a row. We want to go and visit my sister and brother-in-law who have both also just had two negative test days in a row, what's the consensus on that? Should we go or not? Considering they've all just had COVID as well and we'll be going by car.
While, to be frank, I can't see why there should be an epidemiological problem (how would you infect each other after all) the police probably wouldn't be sympathetic if you had a breakdown, as it's not a Downing Street cheese and wine do.
Frustrating and silly though it is, my advice would be to stay home.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
Please focus very carefully on this next sentence. It is impossible for you to assert that two people have not misunderstood each other, without carefully questioning what each of them meant by the terms they used. You have definitely not done this, so you cannot know that they are using the word "scenario" to mean the same thing.
No but you can then look at the modelling they have actually presented and therefore come to the conclusion that Nelson is correct in his assertion. Moreover, in that exchange Nelson was very careful in his last comment to set out explicitly the conclusion he drew from Medley's replies and Medley did not use that opportunity to correct any perceived misunderstanding.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
Please focus very carefully on this next sentence. It is impossible for you to assert that two people have not misunderstood each other, without carefully questioning what each of them meant by the terms they used. You have definitely not done this, so you cannot know that they are using the word "scenario" to mean the same thing.
Further, I think what's happened is based on a misunderstanding of how the models work in general. Assuming they're stochastic in nature, the inputs are random variables, not simple deterministic values. The outputs therefore reflect all possible future outcomes, including those in which Omicron turns out to be mild. It's therefore meaningless for Nelson to refer to "scenarios" in which Omicron is not as virulent as Delta - Medley knows this, and unfortunately interpreted his question at face value. What Medley is saying is that it's pointless to exclude outcomes in which Omicron turns out to be as severe as Delta, and focus only on the ones in which it's milder. He is a) correct and b) saying the exact opposite to what you think he's saying.
The comparison made to the JPM modelling is extremely unhelpful, because those are not stochastic models - they are deterministic and scenario driven - and hence it is meaningful to model (as a scenario) what specifically happens if Omicron is mild. As previously, the word "scenario" means something very different in the context of a stochastic model, and I believe this is why the misunderstanding has occurred.
I am great thanks CHB, thanks for asking. My brush with Covid very much in the rear view mirror. Hope you are well too - heartened by the sight of the malign spell that Johnson has cast over the electorate breaking at last!
Anyway, my wife and I now have two negative test days in a row. We want to go and visit my sister and brother-in-law who have both also just had two negative test days in a row, what's the consensus on that? Should we go or not? Considering they've all just had COVID as well and we'll be going by car.
Absolutely - why wouldn't you? The only reason you might not go is if you are shielding yourself for something really big - like seeing a dying relative for the last time, or a trip to foreign parts to see some relative you've not seen since pre-pandemic. But a) you all sound as sure as it's possible to be that you won't infect each other and b) seeing your sister is, I would say, pretty important anyway. If seeing your sister isn't judged important enough to risk then we may as well give up now.
Edit - oh, just seen ydoethur's post and surmised you must still be isolating. I see the dilemma. Anyway, you'd get no disapproval from me if you went in those circumstances.
If we had the death penalty as some want, we'd have killed him
There was an MP who complained bitterly about the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six not being executed as it meant there was lots of effort wasted on trying to get them freed.
This was of course before they were found to have been innocent...
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.
Uncomfortable though I am at being on the same side as Hyufd, your premise is flawed. Comprehensives were designed to give everyone a grammar school style education. Which would not only refute your claims about them being designed to eliminate the social hierarchy but actually invert it - it was to spread it more widely, particularly among those less affluent groups whose children wanted to go to grammars but couldn't.
You might find this article of interest (helpfully it appears to be open access):
Indeed good comprehensive schools are still selective. Merely they are selective by wealth as witnessed by house prices and rental costs in their cachement area's. Personally if we have selection I would much prefer it to be selection by ability rather than wealth. For reference I went to a comprehensive and it was appalling.
In areas where there are grammars (eg Birmingham) the better off send their kids to prep schools so they can pass the 11 plus (I have friends who have done this) or employ private tutors to prep their kids for the test. There may well be some additional house price premium in our area owing to the school being decent (it is decent rather than outstanding) but there is also a huge volume of social housing and those kids also attend. The idea that grammars = selection by ability while comprehensives = selection by post code is overly simplistic, to say the least.
The idea that poor kids have equal access to good comprehensives is also simplistic but you fail to address that. My son went to the local grammar, he wasn't sent to prep school nor did he have tutors. If he hadn't gone there he would have had to attend the local comprehensive which is widely regarded as more a recruitment centre for street gangs than an educational establishment
Anyway, my wife and I now have two negative test days in a row. We want to go and visit my sister and brother-in-law who have both also just had two negative test days in a row, what's the consensus on that? Should we go or not? Considering they've all just had COVID as well and we'll be going by car.
While, to be frank, I can't see why there should be an epidemiological problem (how would you infect each other after all) the police probably wouldn't be sympathetic if you had a breakdown, as it's not a Downing Street cheese and wine do.
Frustrating and silly though it is, my advice would be to stay home.
You're probably right, we're just so bored. We were supposed to be doing all kinds of Christmas things this week but now we're locked up until Thursday.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 36m Getting increasingly optimistic from the data. Starting to suspect the peak number of people in hospital might come in under even the most optimistic model scenarios. (By no means certain of that yet, though.)
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
He also appears not to understand that "not taking action" is also a decision.
Yep, that's the real killer point which renders defence by terminological exactitude look a bit silly.
The idea that a scenario where things are OK gives you no decision to make, when the decision is literally whether to take action OR whether not to take action, is just a dead give away of the mindset under which the models are produced.
Oh
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) is not in favour of large-scale Covid-19 lockdowns because of the economic impact and how it affects people's mental health, one of its leaders has said.”
Anyway, my wife and I now have two negative test days in a row. We want to go and visit my sister and brother-in-law who have both also just had two negative test days in a row, what's the consensus on that? Should we go or not? Considering they've all just had COVID as well and we'll be going by car.
While, to be frank, I can't see why there should be an epidemiological problem (how would you infect each other after all) the police probably wouldn't be sympathetic if you had a breakdown, as it's not a Downing Street cheese and wine do.
Frustrating and silly though it is, my advice would be to stay home.
You're probably right, we're just so bored. We were supposed to be doing all kinds of Christmas things this week but now we're locked up until Thursday.
I would say the advice i have given you is wrong from every conceivable point of view, except the minor detail that it happens to be based on the law.
This tells me it is a dumb law, but alas it is still the law.
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.
How on earth can you possibly know that without having seen the model? It's simply ridiculous to believe that a member of SAGE said, on Twitter, that they don't model optimistic scenarios because it doesn't support the narrative. It has to be a misunderstanding, and based on long professional experience, I can see how it probably occurred. Nelson is using "scenario" to mean an output, Medley was (probably) interpreting it within the context of the actual model to mean a version of the model with a particular set of inputs.
No, there's no difference in understanding of scenario. They're explicitly discussing which ones were selected for inclusion after the fact for the evidence.
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
Please focus very carefully on this next sentence. It is impossible for you to assert that two people have not misunderstood each other, without carefully questioning what each of them meant by the terms they used. You have definitely not done this, so you cannot know that they are using the word "scenario" to mean the same thing.
No but you can then look at the modelling they have actually presented and therefore come to the conclusion that Nelson is correct in his assertion. Moreover, in that exchange Nelson was very careful in his last comment to set out explicitly the conclusion he drew from Medley's replies and Medley did not use that opportunity to correct any perceived misunderstanding.
I think at that point Medley realised what had happened, panicked and withdrew until he could figure out what to do. The whole thing is a bit of a mess, and illustrates why you shouldn't do this sort of thing over Twitter.
Edit: even in that last post, Nelson's question makes no syntactical sense, assuming I'm right about how the model works. It's no surprise to me that Medley would have been horrified that what he said could have been misinterpreted in that way - he just didn't think through how Nelson might have been meant "scenario" and that it's different to how he thinks about them.
I think the next tranche of South Africa's excess deaths data is due out today or tomorrow, covering iirc up to 5/12.
Last week's showed a doubling of excess deaths from 1000 to 2000 per week, which sounded concerning atv that stage.
But there was lots of room for doubt in that data:
1. Excess deaths have been running near 1000 per week even in between COVID waves, suggesting some of this excess death is due to wider societal strain rather than pure COVID death count. 2. The baseline lurches down a bit for the week in question - week 48 (again iirc) seems like a low death week over the last 5 years. It means the actual death count only went up by a couple of hundred to turn 1000 xs into 2000 xs. 3. That excess deaths were 20x those reported in hospitals was wildly above previous multipliers.
My best guess is that, of the 2000 excess deaths, perhaps only about 300-500 were excess deaths attributable to Omicron. But this week's figures will be a stern test of that, or a higher, attribution to Omicron.
If we had the death penalty as some want, we'd have killed him
There was an MP who complained bitterly about the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six not being executed as it meant there was lots of effort wasted on trying to get them freed.
This was of course before they were found to have been innocent...
“Gas prices have surged to a fresh record high after Russia halted flows to Europe via a key pipeline.
“The amount of gas entering Germany’s Mallnow compressor station, where the Yamal-Europe pipeline terminates, dropped to zero early on Tuesday and Russian gas began flowing east towards Poland.
“The drop in supplies will force European countries to keep withdrawing supplies from their already depleted stockpiles.
“This is being compounded by freezing temperatures across the continent, which are driving up demand and inflating prices.
“Benchmark European prices jumped as much as 11pc, while the UK equivalent rose 10pc, with both hitting new all-time highs.”
If we had the death penalty as some want, we'd have killed him
There was an MP who complained bitterly about the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six not being executed as it meant there was lots of effort wasted on trying to get them freed.
This was of course before they were found to have been innocent...
Nowadays the Tory Party makes that type of MP the Home Secretary.
Indeed. Very well. It looks like they might have decided they do need me after all and I hear rumours of a contract extension so that has eased my mind in one way although as I said before I had been wistfully considering the opportunity for having to do less work. But being a solidly glass half full sort of chap I am seeing the positives all around.
We are in the midst of my sacred season and the fog and wintery weather of the last week has put me in fine good humour. I have even found time to start writing again. Which is good because I think my publisher has just about given up on me.
Hope you have a stonkingly good Christmas and as always if you just need a chat then drop me a note. Intelligent conversation is always welcome.
I think the next tranche of South Africa's excess deaths data is due out today or tomorrow, covering iirc up to 5/12.
Last week's showed a doubling of excess deaths from 1000 to 2000 per week, which sounded concerning atv that stage.
But there was lots of room for doubt in that data:
1. Excess deaths have been running near 1000 per week even in between COVID waves, suggesting some of this excess death is due to wider societal strain rather than pure COVID death count. 2. The baseline lurches down a bit for the week in question - week 48 (again iirc) seems like a low death week over the last 5 years. It means the actual death count only went up by a couple of hundred to turn 1000 xs into 2000 xs. 3. That excess deaths were 20x those reported in hospitals was wildly above previous multipliers.
My best guess is that, of the 2000 excess deaths, perhaps only about 300-500 were excess deaths attributable to Omicron. But this week's figures will be a stern test of that, or a higher, attribution to Omicron.
Nah, doubling was the 1 before last. Last week had largely flat excess deaths, and less excess death than the national average in the Gauteng epicentre.
Anyway, my wife and I now have two negative test days in a row. We want to go and visit my sister and brother-in-law who have both also just had two negative test days in a row, what's the consensus on that? Should we go or not? Considering they've all just had COVID as well and we'll be going by car.
I would do it. We cannot continue to live in fear of either the virus or the state forever.
But then I suppose it is fairly obvious I would say that
According to my calculations (which are SOMETIMES correct!), the "Progressive Alliance" easily, er, "won" GE 2019!
"What is you on about, Sunil?" I hear you cry!
Well, the Progressive Parties won 52.20% of the popular vote, the Right-wing Reactionaries won only 46.83%, and others and independents won 0.97%.
"Show your workings".
OK:
Labour 32.08 LDs 11.55 SNP 3.88 Greens (all UK sections) 2.70 SF 0.57 PC 0.48 APNI 0.42 SDLP 0.37 Yorks 0.09 (yes, they are down as centre-left) TIGs 0.03 PBP 0.02 Northeast 0.01(yes, they are down as centre-left) Mebyon Kernow 0.01
If we had the death penalty as some want, we'd have killed him
There was an MP who complained bitterly about the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six not being executed as it meant there was lots of effort wasted on trying to get them freed.
This was of course before they were found to have been innocent...
If that MP is still alive, we should execute him
I've tracked down the reference. It wasn't an MP. It was a lot worse. It was Lord Denning, a judge who had thrown out a previous appeal, commenting on the appeal of the Birmingham Six in 1991.
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.
Uncomfortable though I am at being on the same side as Hyufd, your premise is flawed. Comprehensives were designed to give everyone a grammar school style education. Which would not only refute your claims about them being designed to eliminate the social hierarchy but actually invert it - it was to spread it more widely, particularly among those less affluent groups whose children wanted to go to grammars but couldn't.
You might find this article of interest (helpfully it appears to be open access):
Indeed good comprehensive schools are still selective. Merely they are selective by wealth as witnessed by house prices and rental costs in their cachement area's. Personally if we have selection I would much prefer it to be selection by ability rather than wealth. For reference I went to a comprehensive and it was appalling.
In areas where there are grammars (eg Birmingham) the better off send their kids to prep schools so they can pass the 11 plus (I have friends who have done this) or employ private tutors to prep their kids for the test. There may well be some additional house price premium in our area owing to the school being decent (it is decent rather than outstanding) but there is also a huge volume of social housing and those kids also attend. The idea that grammars = selection by ability while comprehensives = selection by post code is overly simplistic, to say the least.
The idea that poor kids have equal access to good comprehensives is also simplistic but you fail to address that. My son went to the local grammar, he wasn't sent to prep school nor did he have tutors. If he hadn't gone there he would have had to attend the local comprehensive which is widely regarded as more a recruitment centre for street gangs than an educational establishment
If you have a local grammar school then you have no local comprehensive schools, they are secondary moderns, and the fact they are terrible is a testament to the effect that the selective system has on the education available for most kids.
Indeed. Very well. It looks like they might have decided they do need me after all and I hear rumours of a contract extension so that has eased my mind in one way although as I said before I had been wistfully considering the opportunity for having to do less work. But being a solidly glass half full sort of chap I am seeing the positives all around.
We are in the midst of my sacred season and the fog and wintery weather of the last week has put me in fine good humour. I have even found time to start writing again. Which is good because I think my publisher has just about given up on me.
Hope you have a stonkingly good Christmas and as always if you just need a chat then drop me a note. Intelligent conversation is always welcome.
You are amongst the kindest of people I have met on this website Richard and you never fail to lift my spirits up high
I hope you and family have a lovely Christmas too and am so glad to hear the contract may be extended. I will cross my fingers for you.
However strange this may sound, I do now consider you a friend.
Comments
I would say the Lib Dems are most similar to the Dutch D66 which is the 2nd largest party in Rutte's gvt. They also have a lot of similarities with Austrian NEOS.
Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
·
1m
It means that the two variants may be able to co-circulate for longer periods than otherwise, and those infected with one may be susceptible to the other over time.
For comparison:
- YouGov had Corbyn at -50 just before the 2019GE.
- They had Theresa May at -49 just before she resigned.
https://twitter.com/DavidHerdson/status/1473255430759628804
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1473248047035473922
Good place to pre-load before a night out though. Didn’t the union card also get you in to the Purple Turtle?
This is pleasing to me.
Germany still has lots of grammar school like gymnasiums and is a very well run and arguably more meritocratic nation than we are. All replacing most of the grammars with comprehensives did was make our elite more private school dominated again
Cases have been trending upwards since 2nd Nov, and hospitalisations since the end of November, slightly, but boosters have been accelerating too. And to what extent is the growth in hospitalisations people being hospitalised who happen to be covid positive, rather than those being hospitalised with covid? All told, I'm going for lower: 145.
https://twitter.com/skepticalzebra/status/1473231422525743104?s=20
I tried to look at the date of report vs sample date for yesterday's numbers to assess backlog. My impression from looking at numbers from the last few weeks is that the average gap between report and sample was just over 2 days, but obviously that's not a proper baseline. Looking at yesterday's data in terms of what dates were being added to, and allowing for the fact we're coming out of weekend, it didn't seem a slam dunk that there is reporting delay.
I'm reckoning today's by report date will be slightly above 150k with a 2.5 day average reporting lag (i.e. the mean date added will be halfway between 18/12 and 19/12).
Medley is determining that scenarios that don't show crisis "doesn't inform anything" so shouldn't be shown to the decision makers, but that's wrong. Decision makers do need to know the full range of scenarios, not just those that Medley determines "inform" what needs to be informed.
I think some of these Scientists have enjoyed the limelight (and the views of their twitter feed) so much over the last 2 years that they have to keep saying something different to attract attention.
I reckon it’s time for Leon to buy his stocks back.
Grammar schools are bad for social mobility (because richer parents are much better at getting their kids in) and consign the majority of kids to a second rate education. It is also perfectly possible to get a very good education at a comprehensive, as I know from my own experience both as a pupil and a parent. Perhaps as someone who went to private school you're just a bit blinkered about this?
The False & Pernicious Yardstick:
Filter off an already advantaged pupil intake, then spend lots more on their education than the rest, then compare their exam results to the rest, then say -
"Look how much better the private sector does! State schools should stop failing, pull their finger out and take a leaf."
This one/two sucker punch is so wrong and it's wrong on every level. Factually, logically, morally, logistically, pragmatically, you name it.
And Boris may get a bounce if the next couple of weeks go OK. At least until the NI rise comes in.
So there's some hope yet.
But the point is that the 'best case scenario' is a relative measure. If you have three bad scenarios then the least bad is 'best'. But if the models only look at bad outcomes then middling and good results aren't presented at all, naturally making things look far bleaker (in a three model approach the 'middle' ground scenario is actually incredibly bad, if you were to include the full range).
This is also borne out by the last spike in which real world numbers were far better than the alleged 'best case scenario' (yet we still had some fools calling for more restrictions even then).
MP says government is looking closely at hospital data
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mARMPe5qTPQ
Steve Barclay does a pretty good of explaining the situation, to which the next question is yes but what about restrictions...and he explains ago...yes but don't we need more restrictions...explains again....but but Patrick Vallance says you need to go harder and wider with restrictions....
One thing is for certain if the government have called this right in terms of big push on boosters and minimal restrictions they won't get any credit. It will be like Hague decisions over Libya, where he got absolutely slaughtered in the press for weeks, only for it to be found he absolutely made the correct decisions, to which there was total tumbleweed.
And you yourself have said, on many occasions that the Conservative Party does not have any fixed principles or policies - they just adapt and say and do whatever is necessary to get themselves elected again. So that would hardly be a problem.
As I said earlier, however this has come about, there has been a great deal of learning for both the modellers and the politicians. Where those model outputs were previously regarded as something close to the absolute truth of what will happen we now have a healthy scepticism of them and the modellers will be in a better place to present the full range of outputs from various scenarios.
The idea that a scenario where things are OK gives you no decision to make, when the decision is literally whether to take action OR whether not to take action, is just a dead give away of the mindset under which the models are produced.
But, if your worst case comes out in crisis territory then you do need to think about how likely that is. What's a better estimate for severity? Is there an update on vaccine efficacy? There are a few reasons why I think we've seen what we've seen, i.e mostly the more alarming projections:
1. Some scientists/advisors take a narrow public health (well, narrower than that - Covid health only) view and really do think we should have ongoing restrictions for the forseeable future. They've talked up the doom scenarios. It is a valid criticism - I have some colleagues with similar views who would have us locked down right now just in case.
2. The press love a bad story. Give them three models and they'll mostly lead on the worst (with some honourable exceptions).
3. There is uncertainty. A degree of scaring of the public to change behaviour might offset some of the worst, if it is bad, without the politicans really having to take the consquences (i.e. no lockdown, no big support package for business etc). It might also buy some time for better data. Scary projections are, to some extent, in the government's interests as they kick the can down the road.
4. Some (much) of the modelling code is crap, in terms of code quality. Tweaking the inputs is not necessarily as clean and easy as it should be (I don't know that in this instance, but I've been in meetings where someone challenges an assumption, there's concensus to try varying it and whoever coded the model goes a bit pale as they know that particular thing is hardcoded in at multiple points). So even if people are asking for different assumptions, it may take some time to run it through and get the range of results.
5. Ministers and some civil servants not on top of the science enough to ask the right questions and challenge the right things.
You might find this article of interest (helpfully it appears to be open access):
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transactions-of-the-royal-historical-society/article/educating-the-nation-i-schools/97AC79E50E5DBE700683BC3B700E1CFD
The most pernicious legacy of the British class system has been to persuade many WWC people that education "isn't for them", which creates a vicious cycle of low engagement, low expectations and low outcomes. Overturning that will take many generations I think, and will probably never happen without a revolution of some kind. I am absolutely convinced though that reintroducing grammar schools and secondary moderns - one facet of the social and educational hierarchy that produced this situation - are not the solution.
6. Scientists don't have a lot of time for very uncertain estimates. So severity - it looks less severe, but by how much is still very much in question, so many scientists wait for better data before updating. Here, it's the wrong thing to do (take instead some plausible values to get an idea) but it's quite hardwired in the psyche. Normally things are not this urgent. It's a failing of a crisis response science and we need to fix this for next time. Get some more engineers involved, maybe.
If we had the death penalty as some want, we'd have killed him
This is England.
I do also have many colleagues who are hard against lockdown this time in the absence of compelling evidence (which is also my view).
1) relied on the most credible sources for the best estimate (mean) of the parameters
2) captured the other sources by putting high volatility parameters around the best estimate, to reflect the large secondary uncertainty
3) that resulted in large ranges of possible results for the key metrics, which they have presented
4) everyone is focused heavily on the largest numbers, and failing to understand that they represent the extremes of what could possibly happen, not what is likely to happen
5) because everyone is scared of making mistakes that result in unnecessary deaths, the debate can't get past this point, and policymakers are stuck assuming the worst
1-3 is all perfectly defensible behaviour, and 4-5 is inevitable because of how humans think. The main question left for me is whether modellers cynically did 1-3 because they knew it would result in 4-5, or if it's just bad modelling practice.
There may well be some additional house price premium in our area owing to the school being decent (it is decent rather than outstanding) but there is also a huge volume of social housing and those kids also attend. The idea that grammars = selection by ability while comprehensives = selection by post code is overly simplistic, to say the least.
Frustrating and silly though it is, my advice would be to stay home.
The comparison made to the JPM modelling is extremely unhelpful, because those are not stochastic models - they are deterministic and scenario driven - and hence it is meaningful to model (as a scenario) what specifically happens if Omicron is mild. As previously, the word "scenario" means something very different in the context of a stochastic model, and I believe this is why the misunderstanding has occurred.
The only reason you might not go is if you are shielding yourself for something really big - like seeing a dying relative for the last time, or a trip to foreign parts to see some relative you've not seen since pre-pandemic.
But a) you all sound as sure as it's possible to be that you won't infect each other and b) seeing your sister is, I would say, pretty important anyway. If seeing your sister isn't judged important enough to risk then we may as well give up now.
Edit - oh, just seen ydoethur's post and surmised you must still be isolating. I see the dilemma. Anyway, you'd get no disapproval from me if you went in those circumstances.
This was of course before they were found to have been innocent...
Andrew Lilico
@andrew_lilico
·
36m
Getting increasingly optimistic from the data. Starting to suspect the peak number of people in hospital might come in under even the most optimistic model scenarios. (By no means certain of that yet, though.)
“The World Health Organisation (WHO) is not in favour of large-scale Covid-19 lockdowns because of the economic impact and how it affects people's mental health, one of its leaders has said.”
https://twitter.com/euanrellie/status/1473265232495710208?s=21
This tells me it is a dumb law, but alas it is still the law.
Edit: even in that last post, Nelson's question makes no syntactical sense, assuming I'm right about how the model works. It's no surprise to me that Medley would have been horrified that what he said could have been misinterpreted in that way - he just didn't think through how Nelson might have been meant "scenario" and that it's different to how he thinks about them.
Last week's showed a doubling of excess deaths from 1000 to 2000 per week, which sounded concerning atv that stage.
But there was lots of room for doubt in that data:
1. Excess deaths have been running near 1000 per week even in between COVID waves, suggesting some of this excess death is due to wider societal strain rather than pure COVID death count.
2. The baseline lurches down a bit for the week in question - week 48 (again iirc) seems like a low death week over the last 5 years. It means the actual death count only went up by a couple of hundred to turn 1000 xs into 2000 xs.
3. That excess deaths were 20x those reported in hospitals was wildly above previous multipliers.
My best guess is that, of the 2000 excess deaths, perhaps only about 300-500 were excess deaths attributable to Omicron. But this week's figures will be a stern test of that, or a higher, attribution to Omicron.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/12/21/ftse-100-markets-live-news-pound-share-price-latest/
“Gas prices have surged to a fresh record high after Russia halted flows to Europe via a key pipeline.
“The amount of gas entering Germany’s Mallnow compressor station, where the Yamal-Europe pipeline terminates, dropped to zero early on Tuesday and Russian gas began flowing east towards Poland.
“The drop in supplies will force European countries to keep withdrawing supplies from their already depleted stockpiles.
“This is being compounded by freezing temperatures across the continent, which are driving up demand and inflating prices.
“Benchmark European prices jumped as much as 11pc, while the UK equivalent rose 10pc, with both hitting new all-time highs.”
We are in the midst of my sacred season and the fog and wintery weather of the last week has put me in fine good humour. I have even found time to start writing again. Which is good because I think my publisher has just about given up on me.
Hope you have a stonkingly good Christmas and as always if you just need a chat then drop me a note. Intelligent conversation is always welcome.
But then I suppose it is fairly obvious I would say that
"What is you on about, Sunil?" I hear you cry!
Well, the Progressive Parties won 52.20% of the popular vote, the Right-wing Reactionaries won only 46.83%, and others and independents won 0.97%.
"Show your workings".
OK:
Labour 32.08
LDs 11.55
SNP 3.88
Greens (all UK sections) 2.70
SF 0.57
PC 0.48
APNI 0.42
SDLP 0.37
Yorks 0.09 (yes, they are down as centre-left)
TIGs 0.03
PBP 0.02
Northeast 0.01(yes, they are down as centre-left)
Mebyon Kernow 0.01
TOTAL 52.20%
Conservative 43.63
Brexit 2.01
DUP 0.76
UUP 0.29
UKIP 0.07
Aontu 0.03 (Republicans, but socially conservative)
CPA 0.02
EDP 0.01
Libertarian 0.01
TOTAL 46.83%
OTHERS 0.97%
I hope you and family have a lovely Christmas too and am so glad to hear the contract may be extended. I will cross my fingers for you.
However strange this may sound, I do now consider you a friend.