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ECHR withdrawal in 2022? – politicalbetting.com
ECHR withdrawal in 2022? – politicalbetting.com
After the events of the last week it seemed inevitable that there would be a market on Le Royaume-Uni withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights and Smarkets have obliged. Sagacious observers like David Herdson have noted the Tory Party’s response to the recent ruling by the ECHR shows the Tory party have gone quite mad.
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Next issue would be what is next? The Slavery Convention? The Refugee Convention? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Not only is it morally the right thing to do, it would be politically savvy - it will enrage the Remoaner Left, and they will expend all their energy pointlessly railing against it
Yes, the ECtHR can be annoying at times, yes there is an argument that they have extended HR law far beyond what the Convention originally intended, yes the decision on the Rwanda flight was, well, a bit weird, but jeez. If we replace it with a new Convention with different wording we will then spend another decade trying to work out the finer details that has been largely ironed out on the current Convention.
Sure.
This is why Brexit
Also, for those low-watt slow learners who think the European Court of Human Rights has “nothing to do with the EU” here’s the courtroom:
How fucking stupid do you have to be, to believe that
On topic: I bloody well hope not, but Johnson will do anything to distract or save his skin.
From previous thread:
An October General Election?
Hard to know. I doubt it, but then I know several things:
1. Johnson wants to stay as Prime Minister longer than Cameron managed (so six years and two months).
2. He can't get to that length without winning another General Election (July 2019 to September 2025 is the six years and two months).
3. So he needs to fight and win another General Election between now and January 2025.
4. He hates losing, and I can't imagine he'll allow himself to be defeated in a General Election as his exit, so in my mind his plan is to fight and win one more GE, then retire after September 2025.
He'd then be able to retire, rub his term length in the face of Cameron along with TWO GE wins (with a majority in each) something not achieved by any Conservative leader since Thatcher.
The state of the whole country, any constituent part of it [1], his political party, his wife and family and pretty much anything else besides himself are irrelevent to this all.
So when does his best chance of winning a GE come? This October? Possibly? May 2023? May 2024? October 2024 or the last possible day of late January 2025?
[1] Although I think he'd be miffed to lose Scotland. He'd think Cameron would gloat (whether he would or not) that 'at least he didn't lose Scotland', so I think he'll try and avoid that if he can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Europe
Looking at that photo, would you like to persuade the average voter that the ECHR has “nothing to do with the EU”?
Taking the pensions issue first, I've actually quite a lot of sympathy with the argument that the triple lock was introduced to help boost incomes, especially for poorer pensioners, that had come to lag some distance behind wages and which were leaving a lot of oldies in poverty as a consequence. The real problem isn't that pensions were boosted (albeit that I would agree that the triple lock cannot and should not be sustained forever,) it's that earned incomes and their buying power have been suppressed for such a long time - this is a product of the pernicious effects of house price inflation and low wage settlements.
These are both things that the Government clearly wishes to continue: house price inflation benefits homeowners (especially well-to-do, mortgage free pensioners) and landlords, whereas large wage demands leave it with a lot of extra money to find. The crap pay rise issue has certainly been all over the news in recent months: both the Governor of the BoE and Johnson have been all over the airwaves spouting bullshit about wage-price spirals.
The problem with stating that we are going through an inflationary peak and workers should just put up with it for a year or two is two-fold: firstly, who knows how long this is going to drag on for and how bad it will get (personally I suspect it won't last all that long, but none of us can be sure of this, certainly not hard pressed workers on low or moderate incomes.) And secondly, this comes at the end of a decade-and-a-half of most people being told that they should put up with crap wage increases already. Hence, to repeat, the fact that real terms earned incomes are lower now than in 2008.
The tight labour market will probably help in the long run, but workers cannot afford forever to be waiting for jam tomorrow, which is what stingy businesses and certainly the Government keep telling them. Employees across the public sector are near revolt over this, ditto in private enterprises where workers have been astute enough to remain unionized in substantial numbers. There will be ructions - and rightly so.
It’s strange how the right wing who hero worship Churchill are now desperate to trash something he was instrumental in creating.
My god how did we manage for 1300 years before “Europe”?
Make up your minds.
Anecdotally know shedloads with Covid right now.
What happened to the booster programme? I thought we were meant to get it after 6 months? Or aren't we?
It’s like arguing with a bewildered pit pony
Is that the right answer?
Anyway, I believe that the elderly and vulnerable groups are going to be called back again in the Autumn, but they're not going to bother with the rest of us. Especially after all the non-knackered young and middle aged people who can be persuaded have had the full course of vaccines, I imagine that they're considered to be just too unlikely to get seriously ill for it to be worth the time and expense of running a whole population programme.
Though FWIW, if Covid boosters go on sale in pharmacies in the same fashion as flu jabs this Autumn, I'm buying one.
A famous nudist beach, as it turned out
Must say that news completely passed me by.
The embarrassment was excruciating. I negotiated it by pretending “not to notice” and fiercely and continuously watching a fascinating seagull through my binos as I walked extremely quickly to a less nude bit
The following advice should be considered as interim and for the purposes of operational planning for autumn 2022.
The JCVI’s current view is that in autumn 2022, a COVID-19 vaccine should be offered to:
+ residents in a care home for older adults and staff working in care homes for older adults
+ frontline health and social care workers
+ all those 65 years of age and over
+ adults aged 16 to 64 years in a clinical risk group
Vaccination of other groups of people remains under consideration within JCVI’s ongoing review.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/jcvi-interim-statement-on-covid-19-autumn-2022-vaccination-programme/joint-committee-on-vaccination-and-immunisation-jcvi-interim-statement-on-the-covid-19-vaccination-programme-for-autumn-2022
It’s sunny and clear yet we’re by a lake and we’re at 2000 metres altitude so the air is cold and the water is murderously cold
And everyone is getting determinedly drunk. I love Armenia
Go back N years, and your average Conservative member was a decent chap/chapess who wasn't keen on taxes but was more than happy to contribute to the local orphanage's Flag Day. A typical municipal socialist didn't want world revolution, but was keen that the town lido was properly looked after.
Now, both parties have been left to the nutters. And that's down to those of us who couldn't be bothered to stop them taking over. The remarkable thing is how quickly and how far Labour came back from their brink.
There's a longer answer about discontent widespread in the country, and the inability of politicians on the centre or left to provide answers. But I don't have the ability to do it justice.
Suffice it to say that if you don't provide good answers to difficult questions people will turn to bad answers.
It's an injunction with about two weeks to run until the case gets a full hearing before a UK court.
Leon's just being his usual provocative self.
I think next time I will visit Galicia.
Those actively involved in politics are a minority, but many more people will step up if something catches our eye, be it a planning application in our own street or an online petition we can sign about some national issue or other. Deep down, we hang onto the belief that our view might change things in the political arena, and that decisions are mostly made objectively and fairly.
In Italy, people really don’t bother; there is almost total disengagement with politics both national and local; most try to get on with their lives minimising any interaction they might have with local politics and any arm of the government - to such an extent that you wonder how those actually involved in politics renew their numbers (except, in Italy, you know the answer - from the families and connections of those already involved).
Whenever I despair of our politics I get solace from the Italian experience - their voters are desperate to elect anyone who appears opposed to the semi-corruption they are forced to endure - Berlusconi, Cinque Stelle - yet nothing really changes and the gravy train continues to flow and the wheel continues to spin. You can almost forgive them for creating fascism in the 20s, if by accident.
I've mentioned before a relative. PhD. Started his own business, from sole trader up to the point he has enough time to do other things now. Coached at national level in the sport he was into. Organised various charitable endeavours - planning, getting funding, planning permissions etc etc.
In times past, he would have been dragged onto the local council. At least.
Hasn't got the slightest interest in the Farcebook/Twatter version of politics.
A shootout took place on the Azerbaijani-Armenian border near Vardenis. According to preliminary data, an Armenian soldier was killed.
The dysfunction of this pack of charlatans grows by the day.
The second round is today. The broad left candidate, Gustavo Petro, got 40% in the first round , with the second placed pseudo independent, Rodolfo Hernández, standing as an anti-corruption candidate, 12 points behind at 28%. The dismal candidate of the governing right wing kleptocratic party scored just 24%.
The 77 year old misogynist businessman made his fortune constructing unsafe houses sold on usurious finance terms to poor people. He is astonishingly ignorant, and although he has been compared to Donald Trump, though he makes the latter look like a genius. Hernandez famously claimed to be a follower of Adolf Hitler, apparently confusing him with the similarly named Albert Einstein, and had never heard of Vichada, one of the 32 Colombian departments (like US states). And you could not make this up: this saintly anti-corruption candidate has dozens of legal cases running against him for embezzlement and breaches of employment laws, involving his construction business and family members whilst he was mayor of Bucaramanga, and the one of them is due to be heard on 21st July.
Anyway despite all this the governing party has thrown all its efforts to switch its support to Hernandez to prevent Colombia’s first left-wing president. So much so that the national registrar (i.e. electoral commission), in a superb display of impartisanship, has publicly told Petro that he has to respect the result of the election.
SMarkets has Hernández around 65% chance to win, to Petro’s 35%. Which is unfortunate, because if ever a country is crying out for a dose of socialism and decent government, it is Colombia.
I very much hope the market is wrong and have bet accordingly.
EDIT: Oh, and the best bird name of all time is the rough-faced shag.....
They can't even steal money well....
But Europe is also in denial. There just won't be enough gas this winter. It needs to reduce demand for gas, by rationing if needed, and switch back to coal, at least temporarily.
But we aren't trustworthy.
Membership of the ECHR offers no guarantee against a future tyrannical UK government whatsoever, for the simple reason that it would be very easy for said government to just take us out the ECHR if they wanted.
But it sounds like our loss, TBF.
I don't think this is a new problem and I don't think the absence of good people in local politics it is entirely to do with twitter etc. I think it is because local government is not particularly appealing, it has been set up in such a way that you are just the fall guy for central government policies. Smart people can see that and just avoid it. The most impressive community activists I have come across have decided to work outside of the Council and have probably achieved more that way.
But it is certainly the case that there are some very able ones able to achieve a lot and drive things, inasmuch as one can within local goverment anyway, and many others who just go along with things.
It is still very apparent that parties really don't tell prospective candidates much about what the role entails, and not merely the ones who they expect to be paper candidates only. You can tell the ones who are shocked at the limitations of the whole affair.
I was speaking to someone just last Friday who was telling me that a fair few of the new Labour councillors in Wandsworth, who she knows - newly Labour controlled - were told they wouldn’t get elected and currently have next to no idea what their new job will involve.
There's plenty of the older type of member left, and in local government you can still see it a lot, as the ones who act like national politicians and activists on twitter stand out like sore thumbs. It can be faintly embarrassing.
So what is the point in you then?
Has anyone seen the film Men starring Rory Kinnear? It looks interesting, to put it mildly. (Having seen the trailer, not the film).
I know people who held senior positions who admitted they got started as a paper candidate, outright told they had no chance of being elected.
Well, yes, they could. Indeed, bringing the Convention home was exactly the point of the Human Rights Act, an Act which the Tories opposed at the time and which they have repeatedly said they want to abolish or water down. So colour me sceptical about this claim that this is all about wanting to give British judges the power.
Bollocks it is. This is just the first step in eliminating or watering down those rights, first from some groups or only some rights, step by step until eventually the executive will be able to do whatever it wants without any restraint or control or scrutiny by anyone.
Then there is the second group who claim that Britain has had all these rights for 1300 years and so doesn't need the Convention. Which would be lovely if true.
But it isn't: for pretty much all that time most people in Britain did not have any or all of these rights. The right to vote, to free expression, to hold property, not to be discriminated against and so on were denied to the vast majority of the population for most of that time. It is hard to avoid the impression sometimes that a significant set of Tory voters would quite like to go back to those times when they did not have to worry about women or ethnic minorities or other minorities or the poor demanding to be treated equally and as human beings worthy of respect and dignity. If a majority vote to be nasty and horrible to people and deprive them of their rights, that's all right because democracy. It's as if they've not noticed the 20th century and what happened in Europe during it.
So some questions:-
1. If a government passed a law expelling all British Jews from the country, is that ok because it is as a result of democratic vote?
2. If not, why not?
3. If British courts stopped it because of the prohibition against it in the ECHR, would that be ok?
4. And if the British government then passed a law disapplying the Convention and any other laws protecting Jews so that the expulsion goes ahead, is that OK?
5. If not, why not?
You can substitute your own minority or group of choice for Jews in these examples.
Nevertheless, the benefits of such a move are not particularly apparent, being principally theoretical. Are the problems of the ECHR really so fundamental that it is worth the hassle and aggravations leaving it would cause? Or is it merely that governments do not like court rulings they disagree with sometimes?