Seems Twitter is down, suboptimal timing for anyone wanting to keep up with any rumours.
Putin probably pissed that all the top trendings are his ammo and fuel dump firework displays....
How much longer does this softening up of Russian logistics go on for I wonder, before we see the real counter thrust?
There is talk that this is just Russia organising for the next phase.
But at this rate, the Russians reorganising means getting the message to the front lines that their tanks are going to pop out, have the commander loudly shout "BANG!" - and retreat to their dugouts again.....
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Funny thing is that I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is in Singapore.
He said things have calmed down (after forced vaccinations). He said that cases were rising but everyone was more relaxed because as we were two and a half years on "of course" the government had added extra hospital capacity.
Have we?
No. Sadly.
It seems such a no-brainer. As does adding improved filtration (as did improving water filtration and standards when we had issues with water-borne diseases).
My point is, as it has been: this thing is endemic and we're going to have to learn to live with it.
The key point here is that "learning to live with covid" does not mean ignoring it! For example:
1) disease surveillance to detect new varieties and updated vaccines accordingly. 2) an end to presenteeism and workers turning up with infections. Mask wearing with upper respiratory symptoms. Working from home when symptomatic when possible. 3) attention to ventilation, air filtration and overcrowding in small spaces. 4) increased hospital and healthcare capacity 5) better control of cross infection in hospital, including isolation and reverse-isolation (ie protecting immunosuppressed patients) 6) better sickpay arrangements etc 7) research into long covid and the best forms of rehabilitation and recovery from it.
None of these are threats to civil liberties or come close to renewed lockdown, just sensible measures to adapt to covid.
Not sure about the “ clean start “ TT slogan . A fresh start seems better . I hope he does at least get to the tv debate but I think he’ll be out in the next round .
Especially when all you can see is "Tom - A Tart".
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
They played a bit of Truss on the radio earlier. Hard to imagine she would move a single undecided into column with that and possibly shed some elsewhere.
Meanwhile Tommy Tug has reportedly had a good day. It would be something wouldn’t it if Truss finishes below not only Kemi but also TT later. Not beyond the realms of possibility.
Just caught up with Truss and Tommy Tugs' launches/ relaunches. Truss was unbelievably vacuous and Tugs and charisma? He makes Starmer appear like Liberace.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
I would not necessarily disagree with you on that though I do fear that it is possible we are regarding history from a high water mark and that things could easily slip back.
But I think what bothers myself and others now is that some of what we are seeing self-described as 'woke' is no longer following that trajectory. In fact it is a concept that is being used for exactly the opposite purpose - to promote intolerance and suppress difference. I am not convinced that women are well served by the current direction of the trans debate and nor do I believe that promoting the concept that people should be protected from hearing things they don't like or which might upset them is a useful direction for either the individual or society as a whole to travel.
Yes, we can never know if we at a high-water mark, hence we must guard against illiberal actions of all types (including the 'up their own arse extremists' who claim to be 'woke').
There would of course have been people 50 years ago saying things like 'taking away the liberty to refuse to let your B&B to homosexuals is going too far'.
And similar.
You can't be sure that people in 50 years' time won't think that people 100 years ago did go too far.
I am sure though.
Separate question: When was 'far enough' for you, or do we still have further to go?
Being sure about what people will think in 50 years' time can only be the result of self-delusion.
I don't believe you can measure social progress on a linear scale.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
And that will be the exception and not the norm. My kids school that hasn't happened, and I doubt its happened in many places.
Were the Covid absences because people were too sick to work because of Covid, or because they had Covid and didn't come into work despite being healthy? If the latter, then it doesn't take any investment to prevent that, just go to work unless you're actually sick.
Either way, if people wish to make this investment from pre-existing budgets, that should be their choice. If they wish to let a teacher go and use the money to pay for filtration instead, that should be their choice. Their budget, their choice how to use it. No extra money though.
Budgets are not fixed, eternal things sent by God. Given there’s a once-in-a-generation issue (insert SNP joke here) with a pandemic, it hardly seems odd to consider how the budget might need to change.
And given that there is a tremendous budget deficit and a Cost of Living crisis, it hardly seems odd that trivial irrelevancies like filtration against an endemic virus are not a priority.
Budget deficits are a concern. I wish we had a political party in power that took them more seriously, but instead we have a set of leadership candidates who believe in the magic money tree.
But Governments do many things. The cost of living crisis should be the priority, but you still need to do something about everything that isn’t a priority as well.
My take, for what it's worth, is that it looks to be two of Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, and Kemi Badenoch to be put to the members.
And there could be attempted silly buggers by any candidate with the most MPs behind them (realistically Sunak, but may be one of the others depending on how things unfold over the next few rounds) to try to "select" the opponent. Which could blow up as ironically as it did with Portillo in 2001.
Mordaunt appears to be in pole position with the members, but taking pole doesn't guarantee a win. A bad first lap, or a blown engine (such as Andrea Leadsom in 2016) could see it all change. The danger with someone who's little known is that they can damage the image projected upon them.
I also think that the field looks poor. I would say this, I suppose, but they all strike me as lightweights or near-unknowns who have never been properly tested, and they're about to become Prime Minister during huge turmoil (cost of living crisis, post-covid with an endemic disease, Ukraine, Brexit still a running sore).
Whilst I get that Mordaunt and Badenoch are gambles, I reckon one of them will win - and will end up heavily disappointing. (How Badenoch could not disappoint at least some of those who back her when that ranges from Neil O'Brien to Toby Young looks impossible).
Which means there could be another leadership contest before the next election.
I've had a few £ on Rishi not making the final two; since another disappointing vote this evening and those odds should come in considerably.
Given the clouds on every horizon, it is almost baked in that whoever is elected won't be able to deliver on the hopes and expectations they were forced to raise in order to win the job.
Being disappointing merely in performance terms won't lead to another leadership election, since against Starmer it simply levels the playing field. And the Tories don't have any obvious alternative successors lurking outside this field, at least so long as they stay in government.
A pedant writes: today's vote is earlier than yesterdays:-
Nah - I’m calling fake pedant; no true pedant would have left the apostrophe out like that.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Not sure what this has got to do with woke, but ok.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Funny thing is that I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is in Singapore.
He said things have calmed down (after forced vaccinations). He said that cases were rising but everyone was more relaxed because as we were two and a half years on "of course" the government had added extra hospital capacity.
Have we?
No. Sadly.
It seems such a no-brainer. As does adding improved filtration (as did improving water filtration and standards when we had issues with water-borne diseases).
My point is, as it has been: this thing is endemic and we're going to have to learn to live with it.
I totally agree with your final line. That was my own point too.
It is endemic, we need to live with it. If you want to cut something else to pay for filtration, I'm all ears, but if you don't, then its not a priority.
That’s true but a facile argument
Andy is saying “filtration is important”
You say “tell me what you’re going to cut”
The simple answer is somewhere within the NHS or government resources there is the money to pay for it. It’s not up to us, posting on a website, to figure out every jot of government spending
The fundamental point is we have run public services at the lowest possible cost, but we have not built enough resilience into the system.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
It’s going to dawn on people in the coming months isn’t it, that Russian gas isn’t coming back into the mix in the same way ever again. Conversely world markets are still getting Russian oil with unconstrained volumes. Where would we be without that??
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Bullshit.
Refusing to look the other way is what led to marital rape becoming a crime.
Looking the other way at abuse of young women goes against Bev's emancipation and should never have happened. Sexual equality was in part about ending the culture of looking the other way, not creating it.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
As for the woke agenda like all societal change there will be overshoot. All the persons with wombs etc might be the norm in 50 years or might be seen as just an overshoot of the change in people's attitudes to gender.
Good point. I would add that under the general terms of Woke and PC or progressive there are a number of distinct viewpoints/cultural trends which are not necessarily logically linked. Indeed they may conflict and be philosophically contradictory. I'm pretty confident that critical race theory and much gender theory will simply fade away or be rejected as incoherent nonsense.
A good example is decolonisation of the curriculum. I recently read a paper from a UK University on how this should be applied for one of the natural sciences. About a third was good sense about increasing cultural awareness and unconscious biases. About a third was incoherent BS that wanted to treat viewpoints about reality from different cultures outside the Western science cannon as equally valid - in other word an abandonment of the scientific method. The final part was a call to embed certain current theories and ideological views (environmentalism, certain ideas of social justice) as dogma and not subject to critical thinking - again unscientific.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
Perhaps we need to have a national public inquiry to find out the truth about who looked the other way and why.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
I think @MISTY's point is around the blind eye part. The Telford enquiry - as did many of the others - stated that social services and the Police did not want to investigate too closely because of the racial 'sensitivities i.e. it was mainly Pakistani / Bangladeshi heritage men who were raping the girls. Because of that sensitivity, there were far more victims than there should have been.
Look how many wanted to deny the original Rotherham stories because Nick Griffin mentioned them. Were those deniers right or wrong?
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Its always permanent.
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
Once again, for the apparently hard of hearing: this isn’t about cheating death. This is about taking simple, relatively cheap actions to mitigate a permanent (for the forseable future) reduction in UK GDP, due to the load of continuous waves of Covid infections.
I actually agree with you that we can’t save the very old & sad as it is, covid is going to reduce their life expectancy & apart from vaccination there’s not much we can do about that because they’re probably going to get covid.
But I disagree entirely that that means we should do nothing. Covid is a public health issue - it degrades the entire nation & there are things we could be doing that reduce that impact.
But people just like you in government are bored with Covid & want to “put it behind us”, so we do nothing.
If its cheap, use your existing budget.
If you can't afford it within your budget, then its not cheap.
Either way, it is what it is.
I'm glad people like me, bored of Covid, are in government. Good. We should be doing nothing, Covid is endemic, we need to live with it. Do what you can, with your budget.
Your laissez-faire attitude fails the country, because even cheap, manifestly “profitable” public health measures require co-ordination. Co-ordination that the government could be doing, but cannot be bothered to do.
But you’re bored of Covid & that’s all that matters, right?
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Bullshit.
Refusing to look the other way is what led to marital rape becoming a crime.
Looking the other way at abuse of young women goes against Bev's emancipation and should never have happened. Sexual equality was in part about ending the culture of looking the other way, not creating it.
The same people who 'emancipated' Bev also determined the climate of political correctness that caused the police forces of the day to look the other way.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
Perhaps we need to have a national public inquiry to find out the truth about who looked the other way and why.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
It's actually quite hard to tell what Poland really thinks because the government is in the process of shutting down democracy there. If the government was truly confident that Poles are as conservative as you claim, it would bot be acting to take control of the media, end the independence of the judiciary and generally turning the country into another Hungary.
I can't claim any special knowledge about any of these countries, but my understanding is that in Poland, as in Hungary and Russia; the socially conservative governments do benefit from genuine widespread public support outside of the 'liberal urban elites'; the latter of whom have typically fled to places like the UK.
As someone who campaigned for remain; what became clear to me at the time of Brexit was that if you go and talk to ordinary people, their views were very much at odds with the urban liberal elite who dominate the production of culture. I suspect that, to at least some extent, a similar thing is going on with woke.
I have no idea. I just think that if conservatives were as confident that they speak for a majority as they claim, they would trust people to make up their own minds rather than seeking to take control of the means of spreading information and conducting elections, while leaving the courts to judge what is legal or not.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Certainly inter racial CSE is a relatively new phenomenon in Britain, but there is a long tradition of abuse prior to that, notably in churches, schools, youth groups, children's homes etc.
As @Cyclefree has pointed out many times, the common theme is people in positions in power not addressing inconvenient truths about safeguarding, and being more inclined to institutional protection rather than stamping out abuse.
It’s going to dawn on people in the coming months isn’t it, that Russian gas isn’t coming back into the mix in the same way ever again. Conversely world markets are still getting Russian oil with unconstrained volumes. Where would we be without that??
Needs one of the PB geologists to confirm but I think I read that Russian oil production will dry up (sorry!) soon because they cannot get drilling spares?
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
My "... middle class female 'rights' ..." and "rights" in quotes too??
You tosser. They are rights for every woman and girl from beggars in the streets to the Queen herself. Regardless of who we are we have the right not to be beaten, subjegated, raped or treated as second class.
My take, for what it's worth, is that it looks to be two of Penny Mordaunt, Rishi Sunak, and Kemi Badenoch to be put to the members.
And there could be attempted silly buggers by any candidate with the most MPs behind them (realistically Sunak, but may be one of the others depending on how things unfold over the next few rounds) to try to "select" the opponent. Which could blow up as ironically as it did with Portillo in 2001.
Mordaunt appears to be in pole position with the members, but taking pole doesn't guarantee a win. A bad first lap, or a blown engine (such as Andrea Leadsom in 2016) could see it all change. The danger with someone who's little known is that they can damage the image projected upon them.
I also think that the field looks poor. I would say this, I suppose, but they all strike me as lightweights or near-unknowns who have never been properly tested, and they're about to become Prime Minister during huge turmoil (cost of living crisis, post-covid with an endemic disease, Ukraine, Brexit still a running sore).
Whilst I get that Mordaunt and Badenoch are gambles, I reckon one of them will win - and will end up heavily disappointing. (How Badenoch could not disappoint at least some of those who back her when that ranges from Neil O'Brien to Toby Young looks impossible).
Which means there could be another leadership contest before the next election.
I've had a few £ on Rishi not making the final two; since another disappointing vote this evening and those odds should come in considerably.
Given the clouds on every horizon, it is almost baked in that whoever is elected won't be able to deliver on the hopes and expectations they were forced to raise in order to win the job.
Being disappointing merely in performance terms won't lead to another leadership election, since against Starmer it simply levels the playing field. And the Tories don't have any obvious alternative successors lurking outside this field, at least so long as they stay in government.
A pedant writes: today's vote is earlier than yesterdays:-
Nah - I’m calling fake pedant; no true pedant would have left the apostrophe out like that.
Another pedant writes; todays vote cannot be earlier than yesterday's vote as all of today comes after yesterday.
Arena bomb brother guilty of failing to attend public inquiry
On 28 August 2021 Ismail Abedi was questioned by police under counter terror laws at Manchester Airport while trying to leave the country. He indicated he would come back in September and was released.
He returned to the airport the following day and was able to fly out of the UK and has not returned since.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
Not endemic. Still pandemic. Very much so.
Its a constant presence now, that's endemic, isn't it?
The time that Covid19 was exponentially spreading to naive communities as a pandemic has long since been and gone. Now its simply waxing and waning ever-present in society just as other endemic viruses do.
No. Worldwide outbreaks of new variants, all still spreading. It's not history as a pandemic.
And most importantly the hospitals are still under pressure, as are public services, all part ofd the same pandemic that started. We're nowhere near a steady state.
New variants will spread for the rest of time too. That's entirely normal with endemic viruses, they evolve into new variants, that's why we get a new flu vaccine every year instead of just reusing last year's one again.
This is our steady state.
We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams
Look up the definitions of pandemic and endemic.
Yes, pandemic is when it is spreading (often exponentially) into new areas. Covid19 isn't doing this anymore.
Endemic is when a virus is perpetually in the same area. Covid19 is this.
If you can't cope with the virus being here, its not going to be gone next year or the year after. Its here to stay.
Waves of infection from new variants are as ubiquitous as at any time during the pandemic. It is still pandemic - though fortunately associated with much lower mortality. A new variant of flu this widespread, to take another instance, would also be pandemic. That's unlikely, though, since it's much less infectious.
Ah, back from lunch - thanks for dealing with this in my absence. Absolutely.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
The Truss v Badenough battle will take off after Ravingmad drops out.
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If the tories are looking for a compromise candidate, Tugendhat is starting to look like a better bet than Mordaunt?
Settling for anyone with zero or limited governmental experience in this climate would be the mark of a deeply unserious party. It would invite unparalleled slaughter at the next election.
If you believe Frost, Mordaunt could not even cut it as a junior minister, let alone PM.
Given Frost’s great contribution was the NI Protocol which looks likely to cause a Trade war, Irish reunification or both before resigning in a flounce for reasons that were barely intelligible he is hardly in a position to comment on whether others are up to a job or not.
If Boris really does have ambitions to be waved back into Downing Street by an adoring public, then he needs outriders like Frost to be pointing out how rubbish else is compared to him.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Apply for the Chiltern Hundreds, Boris, as soon as we have two candidates to go to the membership. You'll enjoy life far more, rather than some frankly mad delusion that you aren't done yet. Spoiler - you are.
Why would he give up a few thousand a month for no work required?
Sam Coates reporting that TT could be the one to go out . If so would TT endorse Sunak or Mordaunt . Given his concerns about defence if he does endorse it would surely be for Mordaunt .
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Certainly inter racial CSE is a relatively new phenomenon in Britain, but there is a long tradition of abuse prior to that, notably in churches, schools, youth groups, children's homes etc.
As @Cyclefree has pointed out many times, the common theme is people in positions in power not addressing inconvenient truths about safeguarding, and being more inclined to institutional protection rather than stamping out abuse.
There is surely a distinction, not morally but in terms of causation, between organisations covering up to protect the collective reputation and covering up due to fear of a backlash against an ethnic minority or appearing racist?
i was given exclusive access to a focus group of working class voters conducted by Public First, which described Ms Mordaunt as the strongest candidate in the Tory leadership contest and the frontrunner to see off Labour.
The group, which consisted of five first-time Tory voters from Wolverhampton, gave a damning assessment of the former defence secretary’s closest rivals, branding Rishi Sunak “out of touch” and Liz Truss as “a John Major, grey-type character”.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
I think @MISTY's point is around the blind eye part. The Telford enquiry - as did many of the others - stated that social services and the Police did not want to investigate too closely because of the racial 'sensitivities i.e. it was mainly Pakistani / Bangladeshi heritage men who were raping the girls. Because of that sensitivity, there were far more victims than there should have been.
Look how many wanted to deny the original Rotherham stories because Nick Griffin mentioned them. Were those deniers right or wrong?
Who determined that climate of fear that stopped the police investigating? Who made it a career destroying choice to the extent that it was actually a muslim prosecutor in the end that took up the cause of these girls?
The same politicians excoriating the house of commons for not having enough child care facilities. The same politicians trying to force corporations into male/female quotas.
The Truss v Badenough battle will take off after Ravingmad drops out.
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If the tories are looking for a compromise candidate, Tugendhat is starting to look like a better bet than Mordaunt?
Settling for anyone with zero or limited governmental experience in this climate would be the mark of a deeply unserious party. It would invite unparalleled slaughter at the next election.
If you believe Frost, Mordaunt could not even cut it as a junior minister, let alone PM.
Given Frost’s great contribution was the NI Protocol which looks likely to cause a Trade war, Irish reunification or both before resigning in a flounce for reasons that were barely intelligible he is hardly in a position to comment on whether others are up to a job or not.
If Boris really does have ambitions to be waved back into Downing Street by an adoring public, then he needs outriders like Frost to be pointing out how rubbish else is compared to him.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Apply for the Chiltern Hundreds, Boris, as soon as we have two candidates to go to the membership. You'll enjoy life far more, rather than some frankly mad delusion that you aren't done yet. Spoiler - you are.
Why would he give up a few thousand a month for no work required?
Also why would he give up No 10 when rumour has it he has no immediately available place to move to after he leaves
t is the first time that research has been carried out during the Tory leadership race to see how the leading candidates would compete against Sir Keir in an election.
When the group was shown a video of the Labour leader, two out of the five could not name him but recognised him. When asked to describe him, they said he was “closer to ordinary people” and would “stand up for the working class”, but overall they said he was “a bit bland”.
Two of the five said they were likely to vote Labour at the next election and the rest Tory, but when the question was put to them with different Tory candidates as leader, the mood shifted.
After seeing a clip of Mr Sunak’s leadership campaign launch, every member of the group could name him, but despite the instant recognition they were hostile towards the former Chancellor.
One member of the group, a mother of two who works for NatWest, said: “I don’t have any faith in him whatsoever.”
Others were quick to highlight his wealth, describing him as “out of touch”, “too slick” and, simply, “minted”, although there was praise of his business acumen.
When asked who they would vote for between Mr Sunak and Sir Keir for prime minister, three of the group said they would rather the Labour leader in power, and just one would vote for the Tory frontrunner.
But the opinions shifted when they were confronted with a video of Ms Mordaunt. While just one of the group could name the new favourite in the leadership race, when they heard her speak they warmed to her more than Mr Sunak.
“When she’s speaking it sounds like it’s coming from the heart a bit more, especially compared with Rishi. He sounds a bit too slick, and Starmer sounds too robotic,” one of the group, a quality engineer for a manufacturer, said.
Compared with Ms Truss, the group were unanimous that Ms Mordaunt had “more going for her”. “She has more energy about her,” said one member, a cleaner and carer. “Liz Truss just seems a bit cold.”
When asked who they would vote for between Ms Mordaunt and Sir Keir, three of the group said they would vote for the Conservative, another was undecided and just one would vote Labour.
By far the worst performer in the eyes of the focus group was the Foreign Secretary. After being shown Ms Truss’s campaign video, two could name her and all recognised her, but the consensus of her as a politician was brutal.
“She looks devious,” said the engineer. “She looks untrustworthy, just looks too much like a politician – even more than Rishi.”
Another, who runs his own mobile disco company, said: “She’s a bit like the [John Major] Spitting Image puppet. There’s just so much grey around her characteristics. She comes across like a Theresa May-type character.”
“She wouldn’t be one of my top ones to be voting for after watching that video,” the bank worker said.
Even when told of her pro-Brexit credentials, the group of Leave voters said it made no difference. “I just think Brexit is one big mess,” said a mother of two, who works in a car dealership.
When asked who they would vote for between Ms Truss and Sir Keir, three of the group said they would vote Labour, one would vote Tory and another said they would reluctantly back the Conservatives led by Ms Truss.
Crucially, one of the group who said they would vote Labour, added: “If you put Penny in there, I would have changed my mind completely.”
Another added: “I would give Penny a shot over Truss.”
“We need fresh blood. Let a female have a go and let’s see how she gets on.”
Ed Dorrell, a director at Public First, a centre right political research group, and the moderator of the focus group, said voters are often fond of Sir Keir but “they are not wowed by him”.
“As it stands he is damned by association with all other frontline politicians. This is probably the secret to Mordaunt’s current flurry of popularity. Voters think she isn’t associated with the ruling class in Westminster. Many have never heard of her, but they like the cut of her jib – and they think she might be a breath of fresh air,” Mr Dorrell added.
“Whether that would last if she were to become PM, and she was on the news day-in-day-out, is another thing altogether.”
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Nonsense - it's possible to hate rape and deplore any "insensitivities" (racial or anything else) that led to it not being investigated properly, while simultaneously welcoming modern female emancipation. The two things are quite different, and only seem similar to you because of your apparent general dislike of modern trends.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Its always permanent.
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
Once again, for the apparently hard of hearing: this isn’t about cheating death. This is about taking simple, relatively cheap actions to mitigate a permanent (for the forseable future) reduction in UK GDP, due to the load of continuous waves of Covid infections.
I actually agree with you that we can’t save the very old & sad as it is, covid is going to reduce their life expectancy & apart from vaccination there’s not much we can do about that because they’re probably going to get covid.
But I disagree entirely that that means we should do nothing. Covid is a public health issue - it degrades the entire nation & there are things we could be doing that reduce that impact.
But people just like you in government are bored with Covid & want to “put it behind us”, so we do nothing.
If its cheap, use your existing budget.
If you can't afford it within your budget, then its not cheap.
Either way, it is what it is.
I'm glad people like me, bored of Covid, are in government. Good. We should be doing nothing, Covid is endemic, we need to live with it. Do what you can, with your budget.
Your laissez-faire attitude fails the country, because even cheap, manifestly “profitable” public health measures require co-ordination. Co-ordination that the government could be doing, but cannot be bothered to do.
But you’re bored of Covid & that’s all that matters, right?
Is there much by the way of evidence that NPIs in a population with almost entirely non-naive immune systems gives much in the way of benefit at all? They are not cost free to implement remember, either socially or economically.
The shocking thing is we’ve printed a trillion debt since this started and as far as I can tell, haven’t managed to increase our medical care capacity a jot.
I was shocked to hear a friend the other day, mid 30s, talk about wanting to wear a mask forever to prevent catching any infectious diseases. If we’ve learnt anything from the last two years, surely it’s that there are unforeseen consequences to making such experiments with society’s immune system. I sometimes feel like some people have forgotten how the conquistadors really killed the aztecs.
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Certainly inter racial CSE is a relatively new phenomenon in Britain, but there is a long tradition of abuse prior to that, notably in churches, schools, youth groups, children's homes etc.
As @Cyclefree has pointed out many times, the common theme is people in positions in power not addressing inconvenient truths about safeguarding, and being more inclined to institutional protection rather than stamping out abuse.
A lot of people in power consider sexual assaults (especially of minors,) as peccadillos.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
(rolls eyes) Yes obviously the school doesn’t pay out for parental costs.
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
It does, really. People taking responsibility for themselves works.
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
2-3 days off work, for every worker in the country costs approx 1% of our GDP (assuming GDP is directly proportional to days worked). UK GDP is £2trillion or so, so 1% is ~ £10billion.
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
But when there was a police no go area in Portland, the odd little BLM 'regime' that established itself advised women who had been raped to contact 'rape councillors' or something was my recollection. Sounds awfully like untouchability to me.
i was given exclusive access to a focus group of working class voters conducted by Public First, which described Ms Mordaunt as the strongest candidate in the Tory leadership contest and the frontrunner to see off Labour.
The group, which consisted of five first-time Tory voters from Wolverhampton, gave a damning assessment of the former defence secretary’s closest rivals, branding Rishi Sunak “out of touch” and Liz Truss as “a John Major, grey-type character”.
Looking at Guido, the gap between Truss and Badenoch is around five (I couldn't find the link to his spreadsheet). Given Truss' performance this morning, there is a good chance she falls behind Badenoch.
The interesting bit is that Tuggy is the one rumoured for the chop. That makes the next round very interesting because it suggests Braverman is getting a lot of undercover support.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
My "... middle class female 'rights' ..." and "rights" in quotes too??
You tosser. They are rights for every woman and girl from beggars in the streets to the Queen herself. Regardless of who we are we have the right not to be beaten, subjegated, raped or treated as second class.
You just don't want to face the truth. Tell that to the people that 'emancipated' you. The same people who lent on the police to ensure rapists and traffickers ruled the roost in certain towns.
Same people.
Its been great for you. But it has been hell for some.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Its always permanent.
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
Once again, for the apparently hard of hearing: this isn’t about cheating death. This is about taking simple, relatively cheap actions to mitigate a permanent (for the forseable future) reduction in UK GDP, due to the load of continuous waves of Covid infections.
I actually agree with you that we can’t save the very old & sad as it is, covid is going to reduce their life expectancy & apart from vaccination there’s not much we can do about that because they’re probably going to get covid.
But I disagree entirely that that means we should do nothing. Covid is a public health issue - it degrades the entire nation & there are things we could be doing that reduce that impact.
But people just like you in government are bored with Covid & want to “put it behind us”, so we do nothing.
If its cheap, use your existing budget.
If you can't afford it within your budget, then its not cheap.
Either way, it is what it is.
I'm glad people like me, bored of Covid, are in government. Good. We should be doing nothing, Covid is endemic, we need to live with it. Do what you can, with your budget.
Your laissez-faire attitude fails the country, because even cheap, manifestly “profitable” public health measures require co-ordination. Co-ordination that the government could be doing, but cannot be bothered to do.
But you’re bored of Covid & that’s all that matters, right?
He doesn't like the moral duty of not spreading any disease. He thinks it more important to have the freedom to gfo out and about when he knows he has covid, just as he likes, and to absolute hell with anyone who gets upset because they, their colleagues, and their families, and medical attendants, catch it as a result. Because it's boring to stay at home.
And the next time we get a worse virus, it will be that much worse because of the delay in time wasted arguing past this mentality.
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Maybe we should cut waste and speed up delivery by, er... joining the Single Market?
The video is interesting for what is happening. Russian logistics is rumoured to be pants, with little automated or palletised handling of ammunition. And the video shows a dozen people moving stuff by hand into the back of a creaky old lorry. A dozen for a job that could be done by a couple and a telehandler or other vehicle if the Russians were actually organised.
Now, there is a chance that this is unusual: due to breakdowns of machinery, spillages or broken palettes, there will always be some manual handling going on. But look at those shells on the ground: those are all going to have to be lugged by hand. And hey are on the ground *behind* something that looks suspiciously like a palette. And behind, small boxes that are relatively hard to lift by machine.
This is so incredibly basic it's amazing that they haven't got it right.
LOL. Another day, another big fire where once was a Russian ammo store.
NATO ammunition is all pallets and containers, transferred by all-terrain fork-lifts and moved by all terrain container trucks. The smaller trucks containing the pallets, have cranes for unloading at the weapons, and in some cases (MLRS, for example), the weapons systems themselves have cranes for self-reloading. Almost nothing is done by hand. Because why would you, in 2022?
Little known fact - the reason that the Japanese were spending so much time arming and rearming aircraft at Midway was, in part, down to having only half a dozen torpedo moving carts on each carrier.
The new U.K. carriers, incidentally, have highly automated magazine handling, transport and aircraft arming systems.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Italian market is particularly volatile today because the Jenga pieces of coalition government are once again being pulled out, and the whole thing could collapse to GE and an interrim PM within the next 12 hours.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Maybe we should cut waste and speed up delivery by, er... joining the Single Market?
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
My "... middle class female 'rights' ..." and "rights" in quotes too??
You tosser. They are rights for every woman and girl from beggars in the streets to the Queen herself. Regardless of who we are we have the right not to be beaten, subjegated, raped or treated as second class.
You just don't want to face the truth. Tell that to the people that 'emancipated' you. The same people who lent on the police to ensure rapists and traffickers ruled the roost in certain towns.
Same people.
Its been great for you. But it has been hell for some.
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Not going to happen in the UK. Raising efficiency requires investment first (IT doesn't come cheap) and that investment just isn't available in Public sector budgets.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Nonsense - it's possible to hate rape and deplore any "insensitivities" (racial or anything else) that led to it not being investigated properly, while simultaneously welcoming modern female emancipation. The two things are quite different, and only seem similar to you because of your apparent general dislike of modern trends.
Labour created the untouchable communities system. Labour created the climate of fear that rendered any criticism of some parts of our society a crime.
You just don't like a mirror being held up to the implications of your actions.
Seems Twitter is down, suboptimal timing for anyone wanting to keep up with any rumours.
Putin probably pissed that all the top trendings are his ammo and fuel dump firework displays....
How much longer does this softening up of Russian logistics go on for I wonder, before we see the real counter thrust?
There is talk that this is just Russia organising for the next phase.
But at this rate, the Russians reorganising means getting the message to the front lines that their tanks are going to pop out, have the commander loudly shout "BANG!" - and retreat to their dugouts again.....
Reportedly they still have spare T-90s to equip new volunteer battalions with, so there's a lot of fighting left to get through. The Ukrainians need more training and armoured vehicles to hold on for longer until the Russians are exhausted.
Hints that the Ukrainians have proved themselves competent enough with the HIMARS to be given the 300km range ATACMS, which will enable the Ukrainians to hit Russian airbases, which should prevent some of the missile attacks on civilian targets.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Italian market is particularly volatile today because the Jenga pieces of coalition government are once again being pulled out, and the whole thing could collapse to GE and an interrim PM within the next 12 hours.
Share index down about 4% at current.
No doubt, it seems Draghi may fall yet this is just a continuation of the trend since the end of COVID and the looming end of the ECB bond buying programme. The ECB says it will ensure spreads are kept down yet hasn't outlined how it will achieve that in a tight monetary environment and the markets are calling their bluff.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Nonsense - it's possible to hate rape and deplore any "insensitivities" (racial or anything else) that led to it not being investigated properly, while simultaneously welcoming modern female emancipation. The two things are quite different, and only seem similar to you because of your apparent general dislike of modern trends.
Labour created the untouchable communities system. Labour created the climate of fear that rendered any criticism of some parts of our society a crime.
You just don't like a mirror being held up to the implications of your actions.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
My "... middle class female 'rights' ..." and "rights" in quotes too??
You tosser. They are rights for every woman and girl from beggars in the streets to the Queen herself. Regardless of who we are we have the right not to be beaten, subjegated, raped or treated as second class.
You just don't want to face the truth. Tell that to the people that 'emancipated' you. The same people who lent on the police to ensure rapists and traffickers ruled the roost in certain towns.
Same people.
Its been great for you. But it has been hell for some.
Bluntly, the child trafficing / rape in the UK is an awful, horrible thing & the fact that it happened (& is presumably still happening, somewhere right now) is a moral stain on this country.
But the idea that the 70s/80s were some garden of eden for young women before all this wokeness came along and ruined everything is ludicrous. The number of historical scandals that have come to light suggests that exploitation of children & young people was absolutely rampant. There’s been a never ending series of awful revelations about children’s homes in the 70s, with people scarred for life from the abuse they received & that’s just the stuff we know about.
It seems impossible to say whether one period was worse than the other, but the idea that the 70s were halcyon days for womanhood is madness.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Very few people you would consider “woke” would consider anyone committing sexual crimes against women (or anyone for that matter) untouchable but feel free to keep blaming “woke” rather than say an incompetent or underfunded police force or social care system.
On the extreme end of the anti-woke folk you will find those that point to this appalling episode (and similar) almost gleefully and how it is reported that it may have been overlooked due to sensitivities around race. One has to assume that as I am sure such people are not racists, it is because they wish to make a case to suggest that police forces should not, in any circumstances be mindful of racial prejudice when investigating crimes. Because of course, there have been no incidents of racist police. Ever.
There have been too many of these cases not to conclude that there are people in authority who consider that sexual abuse of children is a lesser evil than generating ill feeling towards particular ethnic groups.
Total nonsense. This is the problem with those on the extreme ends of debate, you are so determined to find conspiracy rather than realise it is more likely dull old cock up
I suggest you read Professor Alexis Jay's report. There was absolutely a wilful coverup of child abuse by Pakistani men in Rotherham and we've seen the same in other towns in the UK, now including telford. You, Nige, are part of the problem if you deny this is true.
I feel like the markets are currently testing the ability of the ECB to keep bond spreads down, currently Italian yields are up 21bp while German bonds are up just 6pb, increasing the spread by 15bp and the level was already deemed uncomfortable for the ECB.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
Maybe we should cut waste and speed up delivery by, er... joining the Single Market?
Joining a sinking ship still means we sink.
Your neoliberal ideas failed in the past and they'd fail again. Hopefully nobody will be stupid enough to try to put them into effect.
"Cut waste", "make the government far more efficient" - vacuous slogans with no plan. "Speed up delivery" - you reject the most obvious way to do that.
Get thee back to gambling with other people's money, or whatever it is you do.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Rape has not been caused by emancipation or "woke" of the 70s and 80s.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
My "... middle class female 'rights' ..." and "rights" in quotes too??
You tosser. They are rights for every woman and girl from beggars in the streets to the Queen herself. Regardless of who we are we have the right not to be beaten, subjegated, raped or treated as second class.
You just don't want to face the truth. Tell that to the people that 'emancipated' you. The same people who lent on the police to ensure rapists and traffickers ruled the roost in certain towns.
Same people.
Its been great for you. But it has been hell for some.
If you are allowed, you really need to get off your laptop on your guardian's kitchen table and go out for some fresh air for a few hours. You really are writing unacceptable bollocks.
Suggestion Sukak might have lent votes to Braverman so he doesn’t face TT in the debates - Sky.
I can’t see it myself given his wobbly first round performance.
They are getting their excuse in for why Sunak isn't going to hit the expected minimum figure of 100+ votes (after all he should be picking up 50% of the 43 votes from yesterday not less than 12 of them).
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
In the last two decades at least 100,000 young white women, many under the age of consent, were trafficked, kidnapped and raped in the industrial towns of England. Leon reckons it could be up to a million, but he is prone to exaggeration.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Huh? You're blaming the Pakistani-heritage rape gangs on "woke"?
I think he's blaming the Police failure to investigate it on 'woke'. It's been mentioned in multiple public inquiries that local social services and Police were worried about racial 'sensitivities' and so didn't investigate cases as thoroughly as they should for fear of being seen as racist. That's not even addressing the evidence that came out that suggested these men saw white girls as 'trash', which is pretty racist in itself.
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
Suggestion Sukak might have lent votes to Braverman so he doesn’t face TT in the debates - Sky.
I can’t see it myself given his wobbly first round performance.
They are getting their excuse in for why Sunak isn't going to hit the expected minimum figure of 100+ votes (after all he should be picking up 50% of the 43 votes from yesterday not less than 12 of them).
Comments
But at this rate, the Russians reorganising means getting the message to the front lines that their tanks are going to pop out, have the commander loudly shout "BANG!" - and retreat to their dugouts again.....
What number should I.. that is... will I...er...oh...
1) disease surveillance to detect new varieties and updated vaccines accordingly.
2) an end to presenteeism and workers turning up with infections. Mask wearing with upper respiratory symptoms. Working from home when symptomatic when possible.
3) attention to ventilation, air filtration and overcrowding in small spaces.
4) increased hospital and healthcare capacity
5) better control of cross infection in hospital, including isolation and reverse-isolation (ie protecting immunosuppressed patients)
6) better sickpay arrangements etc
7) research into long covid and the best forms of rehabilitation and recovery from it.
None of these are threats to civil liberties or come close to renewed lockdown, just sensible measures to adapt to covid.
I wonder how those figures compare with the number of young white women experiencing the same ordeal in what you consider to be the days of bondage, the 1970s and 1980s.
Woke has led to emancipation for you, maybe. It has turned into a living hell for some of your sisters, however.
I hope you are happy with this settlement.
Just caught up with Truss and Tommy Tugs' launches/ relaunches. Truss was unbelievably vacuous and Tugs and charisma? He makes Starmer appear like Liberace.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
I don't believe you can measure social progress on a linear scale.
But Governments do many things. The cost of living crisis should be the priority, but you still need to do something about everything that isn’t a priority as well.
Let's just say if you pop into numbers 788-790, questions might be asked...
LT 4th?
No 3rd round needed?
But the country as a whole does & state school budgets come out of government expenditure.
Which is why BR’s “you should do it if it’s economic” doesn’t work for public health - public health issues are only effectively solved when you intervene across the economy, not piecemeal according to personal whim.
Libertarianism & public health don’t make for good bedfellows & never will.
They are listening.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Storm
Covid AGAIN – really??
Should I have a quick Tug?
Matthew Goodwin is such an odd chap
People looking the other way is caused by the same value system that 'emancipated' Beibheirli matey.
The same people that championed Beibheirli's middle class female 'rights' also rendered certain communities in our country untouchable.
The notion that the modern settlement is some kind of female emancipation nirvana is patently untrue. Better for many. Worse for some.
Andy is saying “filtration is important”
You say “tell me what you’re going to cut”
The simple answer is somewhere within the NHS or government resources there is the money to pay for it. It’s not up to us, posting on a website, to figure out every jot of government spending
The fundamental point is we have run public services at the lowest possible cost, but we have not built enough resilience into the system.
Resilience is expensive. But important
If you pick up a virus you might feel like crap for a couple of days, then you almost certainly get back to normal afterwards. That does not justify a "public health" emergency or actions now.
Vaccines were "public health" and that's been done. Spending billions now on filtration out of budgets that don't exist is a waste of money, if its economic then use budgets that do exist, but we have bigger fish to fry than filtration for any new billions available to spend.
Refusing to look the other way is what led to marital rape becoming a crime.
Looking the other way at abuse of young women goes against Bev's emancipation and should never have happened. Sexual equality was in part about ending the culture of looking the other way, not creating it.
A good example is decolonisation of the curriculum. I recently read a paper from a UK University on how this should be applied for one of the natural sciences. About a third was good sense about increasing cultural awareness and unconscious biases. About a third was incoherent BS that wanted to treat viewpoints about reality from different cultures outside the Western science cannon as equally valid - in other word an abandonment of the scientific method. The final part was a call to embed certain current theories and ideological views (environmentalism, certain ideas of social justice) as dogma and not subject to critical thinking - again unscientific.
Look how many wanted to deny the original Rotherham stories because Nick Griffin mentioned them. Were those deniers right or wrong?
But you’re bored of Covid & that’s all that matters, right?
We might call it the Stella Creasey tendency...
As @Cyclefree has pointed out many times, the common theme is people in positions in power not addressing inconvenient truths about safeguarding, and being more inclined to institutional protection rather than stamping out abuse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves#Estimated_reserves_by_country
Needs one of the PB geologists to confirm but I think I read that Russian oil production will dry up (sorry!) soon because they cannot get drilling spares?
You tosser. They are rights for every woman and girl from beggars in the streets to the Queen herself. Regardless of who we are we have the right not to be beaten, subjegated, raped or treated as second class.
i was given exclusive access to a focus group of working class voters conducted by Public First, which described Ms Mordaunt as the strongest candidate in the Tory leadership contest and the frontrunner to see off Labour.
The group, which consisted of five first-time Tory voters from Wolverhampton, gave a damning assessment of the former defence secretary’s closest rivals, branding Rishi Sunak “out of touch” and Liz Truss as “a John Major, grey-type character”.
The same politicians excoriating the house of commons for not having enough child care facilities. The same politicians trying to force corporations into male/female quotas.
When the group was shown a video of the Labour leader, two out of the five could not name him but recognised him. When asked to describe him, they said he was “closer to ordinary people” and would “stand up for the working class”, but overall they said he was “a bit bland”.
Two of the five said they were likely to vote Labour at the next election and the rest Tory, but when the question was put to them with different Tory candidates as leader, the mood shifted.
After seeing a clip of Mr Sunak’s leadership campaign launch, every member of the group could name him, but despite the instant recognition they were hostile towards the former Chancellor.
One member of the group, a mother of two who works for NatWest, said: “I don’t have any faith in him whatsoever.”
Others were quick to highlight his wealth, describing him as “out of touch”, “too slick” and, simply, “minted”, although there was praise of his business acumen.
When asked who they would vote for between Mr Sunak and Sir Keir for prime minister, three of the group said they would rather the Labour leader in power, and just one would vote for the Tory frontrunner.
“When she’s speaking it sounds like it’s coming from the heart a bit more, especially compared with Rishi. He sounds a bit too slick, and Starmer sounds too robotic,” one of the group, a quality engineer for a manufacturer, said.
Compared with Ms Truss, the group were unanimous that Ms Mordaunt had “more going for her”. “She has more energy about her,” said one member, a cleaner and carer. “Liz Truss just seems a bit cold.”
When asked who they would vote for between Ms Mordaunt and Sir Keir, three of the group said they would vote for the Conservative, another was undecided and just one would vote Labour.
By far the worst performer in the eyes of the focus group was the Foreign Secretary. After being shown Ms Truss’s campaign video, two could name her and all recognised her, but the consensus of her as a politician was brutal.
“She looks devious,” said the engineer. “She looks untrustworthy, just looks too much like a politician – even more than Rishi.”
Another, who runs his own mobile disco company, said: “She’s a bit like the [John Major] Spitting Image puppet. There’s just so much grey around her characteristics. She comes across like a Theresa May-type character.”
“She wouldn’t be one of my top ones to be voting for after watching that video,” the bank worker said.
Even when told of her pro-Brexit credentials, the group of Leave voters said it made no difference. “I just think Brexit is one big mess,” said a mother of two, who works in a car dealership.
When asked who they would vote for between Ms Truss and Sir Keir, three of the group said they would vote Labour, one would vote Tory and another said they would reluctantly back the Conservatives led by Ms Truss.
Crucially, one of the group who said they would vote Labour, added: “If you put Penny in there, I would have changed my mind completely.”
Another added: “I would give Penny a shot over Truss.”
“We need fresh blood. Let a female have a go and let’s see how she gets on.”
Ed Dorrell, a director at Public First, a centre right political research group, and the moderator of the focus group, said voters are often fond of Sir Keir but “they are not wowed by him”.
“As it stands he is damned by association with all other frontline politicians. This is probably the secret to Mordaunt’s current flurry of popularity. Voters think she isn’t associated with the ruling class in Westminster. Many have never heard of her, but they like the cut of her jib – and they think she might be a breath of fresh air,” Mr Dorrell added.
“Whether that would last if she were to become PM, and she was on the news day-in-day-out, is another thing altogether.”
The shocking thing is we’ve printed a trillion debt since this started and as far as I can tell, haven’t managed to increase our medical care capacity a jot.
I was shocked to hear a friend the other day, mid 30s, talk about wanting to wear a mask forever to prevent catching any infectious diseases. If we’ve learnt anything from the last two years, surely it’s that there are unforeseen consequences to making such experiments with society’s immune system. I sometimes feel like some people have forgotten how the conquistadors really killed the aztecs.
It feels like while this is brewing in the UK and there is political turmoil all across Europe people are taking their eye off the ball wrt the economies of Europe. Whoever wins needs to have a laser like focus on the economy, cutting waste, speeding up delivery and making the government far more efficient so we can deliver more services per capita at the same or less spent per capita and then allow for the tax burden to fall naturally and for private growth to outstrip state growth. This is also true all across Europe.
So must be Penny vs Starmer if the Tories want to win
Sounds like £1billion / year to get £10billion in output back is a bargain to me - if we can stop 1 covid infection / year per working person we come out ahead 10x over.
(I have no idea if a filtration / ventilation program would actually cost a £billion, I‘m just taking BR’s figure & running with it.)
The interesting bit is that Tuggy is the one rumoured for the chop. That makes the next round very interesting because it suggests Braverman is getting a lot of undercover support.
Same people.
Its been great for you. But it has been hell for some.
And the next time we get a worse virus, it will be that much worse because of the delay in time wasted arguing past this mentality.
The new U.K. carriers, incidentally, have highly automated magazine handling, transport and aircraft arming systems.
Share index down about 4% at current.
Evidence?
I can’t see it myself given his wobbly first round performance.
You just don't like a mirror being held up to the implications of your actions.
Hints that the Ukrainians have proved themselves competent enough with the HIMARS to be given the 300km range ATACMS, which will enable the Ukrainians to hit Russian airbases, which should prevent some of the missile attacks on civilian targets.
But the idea that the 70s/80s were some garden of eden for young women before all this wokeness came along and ruined everything is ludicrous. The number of historical scandals that have come to light suggests that exploitation of children & young people was absolutely rampant. There’s been a never ending series of awful revelations about children’s homes in the 70s, with people scarred for life from the abuse they received & that’s just the stuff we know about.
It seems impossible to say whether one period was worse than the other, but the idea that the 70s were halcyon days for womanhood is madness.
"Cut waste", "make the government far more efficient" - vacuous slogans with no plan. "Speed up delivery" - you reject the most obvious way to do that.
Get thee back to gambling with other people's money, or whatever it is you do.
I find it rather refreshing that there are no artificial limitations on someone’s ability to succeed
What is interesting in this whole debate is that it's showing quite a few on the left are finding it hard to understand that race did play a part in the Police's / social services' actions, even when it has been confirmed by multiple inquiries. If you believe the inquiries are flawed and wrong, then fair enough but these are not Nick Griffin types saying race played a factor, it's official inquiries set up to investigate what happened.
Not a bad idea in theory from Liz.
But why don't we implement no planning regs for mobile phone companies so they can build phone masts more easily?
We probably will rejoin at some point but not for many years.