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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Today is one of those days where I despair at PB generally, but the fact that I vehemently disagree with Barty on the Covid thread and agree with him here shows the value of this place. It’s nice to see people are nuanced.
So Keir has "boring" but that isn't a bad thing and they like Penny, hate the others.
So must be Penny vs Starmer if the Tories want to win
I recognise every word in that first sentence but wtf does it mean?
The people would vote Tory if the leader was Penny, over Keir. They think Keir is stale and boring. They hate all the others.
With Johnson gone, issues rather than the Leaders' personalities will become more important. That said, she is head and shoulders ahead as the strongest character available to the Conservatives.
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.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Failures to investigate child abuse cases properly clearly pre-date the grooming gangs. The police have never done their job effectively and have always considered the types of children and young people most likely to be abused - those in care and from dysfunctional families - of not being worth the bother. But if they were looking for excuses in Rochdale and elsewhere, they were handed them on a plate. That is utterly unforgiveable and Labour party councils were complicit. There's just no getting around it.
None of the authorities in Rochdale - police very much included - had any excuse.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
She just doesn’t have “it.” I’ve seen her rise up the ranks and there has always been a buzz about her, but the problem is that presentationally she is shocking and she has not been able to lift it to the next level. Some people have been able to historically. She hasn’t. When you are making Theresa May and Gordon Brown look ten times more charismatic, compelling and engaging than you, you are not doing well enough.
I am surprised to see that peolle think Liz doesn’t have charisma
She certainly does, it’s just that it projects just the slightest tinge of insanity.
Look at that pork speech above, she smiles in all the wrong places.
Truss has been in the Cabinet for nearly a decade now, in various top jobs. Foreign Secretary, Justice Secretary and more.
And yet all her critics have to say she's rubbish is not a swathe of scandals in all those roles, but that she gave one odd speech, nearly a decade ago, while DEFRA secretary.
She's given Conference speeches every year since then, she's held big jobs since then, but nothing to object to other than pork markets and cheese. That is a disgrace.
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.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You've completely lost it mate, COVID is done and we all need to move on. Those last few hold outs can live in fear all masked up to the end of time, the rest of the nation agrees with me, thankfully.
I'm stone cold certain that when the water filtration and sewage systems were put in to prevent water-borne diseases, BR would have been complaining about the cost and claiming that we'd been living with disease forever, and that we couldn't make everyone live forever.
And, from the sound of it, you'd have been right beside him when the latest cholera epidemic died away for a while.
Do me a favour: when the pressure on the health service causes massive delays or missed treatments for you and your loved ones, don't complain about them.
And when the next pandemic occurs (which it will, although I hope and pray it'll be a long time), don't whine when restrictions are needed because we don't have filtration systems.
"Delays or missed treatments" have been ongoing for as long as the NHS has existed. It always will, since demand is infinite. People only stop presenting demand when they die, but you want to prevent death from ever occurring.
Could you please stop talking bollocks with your "you want to prevent death from ever occuring," crap?
The issue is that “I have a good feeling about her” is telling me that the audience is projecting onto a blank slate. That’s both an advantage and disadvantage, but it’s better than “god no Jesus no”.
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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Today is one of those days where I despair at PB generally, but the fact that I vehemently disagree with Barty on the Covid thread and agree with him here shows the value of this place. It’s nice to see people are nuanced.
Au contraire, his post is utter fluff.
Nobody on here is going to argue that child abuse is not a bad thing, not even BartyBobbins who manages to find some quite bizarre ideological positions.
Par scores - Mordaunt basically wins with the members with a Richi Runoff if everything pans out like this
Obviously it won't be as clear cut as this, but surely there's an argument that the votes go from right to left (and vice versa) - so there are nearly twice as many right votes from Badenoch and Bravermann which could mostly go to Truss? (or perhaps Badenoch).
There aren't enough Tugendhat to send both of Sunak and Mordaunt over the line, so it could be very close between the final three.
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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Certainly, the Catholic Church prioritised its reputation over and above child protection.
Of passing interest to the leadership campaign is one of tonight by elections. The patriotic sounding Thetford Boudicca is in Liz Truss' seat SW Norfolk, not far from my stomping grounds.... unfortunately for Liz, Thetford is the most heavily Labour friendly part of her seat and this is a tight marginal Con defence very likely to drop (its been Lab recently). It wont reflect on the seat as a whole but losing it might be used by opponents 'Cons losing ground in her own seat' etc
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.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You've completely lost it mate, COVID is done and we all need to move on. Those last few hold outs can live in fear all masked up to the end of time, the rest of the nation agrees with me, thankfully.
I'm stone cold certain that when the water filtration and sewage systems were put in to prevent water-borne diseases, BR would have been complaining about the cost and claiming that we'd been living with disease forever, and that we couldn't make everyone live forever.
And, from the sound of it, you'd have been right beside him when the latest cholera epidemic died away for a while.
Do me a favour: when the pressure on the health service causes massive delays or missed treatments for you and your loved ones, don't complain about them.
And when the next pandemic occurs (which it will, although I hope and pray it'll be a long time), don't whine when restrictions are needed because we don't have filtration systems.
"Delays or missed treatments" have been ongoing for as long as the NHS has existed. It always will, since demand is infinite. People only stop presenting demand when they die, but you want to prevent death from ever occurring.
Could you please stop talking bollocks with your "you want to prevent death from ever occuring," crap?
Seriously, man.
QTWAIN.
Not until you stop being so hysterical about Covid.
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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Surely all these perpetrators were protected by a belief system.
In one case, the belief system created by the upper echelons of the catholic church, and in another by the upper echelons of a political class who wholly characterised ethnic communities as blameless and vulnerable victims of racism.
The issue is that “I have a good feeling about her” is telling me that the audience is projecting onto a blank slate. That’s both an advantage and disadvantage, but it’s better than “god no Jesus no”.
When you get to the last 2 and the choice is God not him versus a blank slate - a blank slate on which your hopes can be pinned (see Leave for another example) is going to get you more votes than actually having a policy or 3.
Mr. Foremain, I must respectfully disagree with your view on the Rotherham and similar cases.
One major example stands out, from many, as an example why. One girl who was raped was clever enough to retain the clothing, which contained DNA evidence. She handed it over. The police managed to lose it, and nothing happened.
This isn't laziness. And it isn't incompetence (I could buy that for a one-off but in Rotherham alone over a thousand girls and a hundred boys were raped over a period exceeding a decade). This was an approach that it was better to have white working class girls and boys raped by men who were Pakistani/Muslim than to investigate, because being culturally sensitive mattered more than stopping the industrial scale rape of children.
If they had not been working class, and if they had not been white, this would not have been tolerated..
Do you have any evidence for that ? As far as I recall, there were significant numbers of Asian victims.
Conversely there's much evidence of police failure to investigate over the years, irrespective of ethnicity.
You might have a point regarding class (though public school cases over the years suggest it's only half a point).
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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Surely all these perpetrators were protected by a belief system.
In one case, the belief system created by the upper echelons of the catholic church, and in another by the upper echelons of a political class who wholly characterised ethnic communities as blameless and vulnerable victims of racism.
And what do either of those beliefs have to do with people who wanted sexual equality?
So much for "I'm the only candidate who can stop the small boats crossing the channel because I'm the only one who knows we need to leave the ECHR. The British people won't forgive us unless we address this issue."
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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You don't have to be an abuser to be part of the problem. If you deny there is an issue in the first place - even where the evidence is right in front of your eyes - you are a denier. And that is part of the problem.
Try looking at this the other way round rather than throwing these accusations out there against people simply because they take a slightly different view to you.
Do you think that if Nigel accepted every one of your contentions (and I have a lot of sympathy for them in this specific instance) it would make one single iota of difference to the way the police and authorities behaved in the past or the way they will behave in the future? To take it further, do you believe that your postings and those of others like Max on here on this subject will make one single iota of difference in their behaviour going forward? Not least when it seems that even the public enquiries don't seem to have made much of a difference?
If you decide that no, what you are writing and what Nigel might contend will make no difference to the way in which the authorities behaved or will behave in the future then the claim that Nigel - or anyone else on here - is 'part of the problem' is really nothing more than fatuous and rather offensive nonsense.
Actually, what you write is not just bollocks but is also very dangerous.
Let's take the case of the Holocaust. There have been cases of people denying it took place. Under your argument, we shouldn't bother calling people up on the issue and just turn a blind eye because they won't change their behaviour and so what does it matter. But if you tolerate such behaviour, you make it - if not acceptable - then less socially damaging and, over time, it eventually becomes socially acceptable to raise the question (which, funnily enough when it comes to the Holocaust, is what is happening now with certain parts of the hard Left).
You are essentially saying the same thing here. The reason why so many abusers got away with their crimes in the first place was because such behaviour was not seen as wicked enough and therefore it was fine to turn a blind eye. People had suspicions but didn't mention it because they thought "it's not my place to challenge" - or indeed, "what difference would it make?"
People are, by nature, conformist. They want to fit in and not make waves. If the zeitgeist is - encouraged by people like Nigel who won't see the problem - "let's not mention it because we don't want to upset community relations", then that is how people will behave, which is exactly what happened in these places - and which led to many more girls being abused than should have happened.
This. It's actually an excellent case study in why wokeism is dangerous - if you try too hard not to offend anyone, you run the risk of allowing more harm to occur than if you'd just behaved normally about everything in the first place.
Any ideology becomes dangerous when taken to extreme, and "wokeism" (in current usage, at least by the right) is just a convenient word for the left's excesses on this issue.
Christopher Hope📝 @christopherhope · 24m NEW The final two candidates in the Conservative leadership race will not be known until **Wednesday evening** next week, I understand. Members of the 1922 committee have decided to have three ballots on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week after #PMQs. #ToryLeadershipRace
The issue is that “I have a good feeling about her” is telling me that the audience is projecting onto a blank slate. That’s both an advantage and disadvantage, but it’s better than “god no Jesus no”.
When you get to the last 2 and the choice is God not him versus a blank slate - a blank slate on which your hopes can be pinned (see Leave for another example) is going to get you more votes than actually having a policy or 3.
Yeah. Then she needs to face the heat of the electorate and we find out if she’s Iron Lady or Butter Babe.
Woke has lost all meaning, it’s become a generic label for the right to complain about left-wing things they don’t like.
The objection to Woke is that it is NOT diverse. It is oriented around how clever and enlightened People Like Us are, and how stupid and primitive People Not Like Us are.
Such a culture is not intellectually sharp. It is smug and self-centred.
Woke is only diverse in that there are some people who look differently and some people who have sex differently -- but other than they all think the same. It is not a proper accounting of any kind of genuine diversity.
I don't care much what people do in bed (provided it is consensual), but Woke seems to have @Leon 's gleeful obsession with what people are doing in bed.
It is the intellectual homogeneity -– and even more dangerously, the authoritarian social pressure to conform to the homogeneity -- that is worrying.
And, finally Woke seems not to be a catalyst for any real change.
University Vice Chancellors, Start-up CEOs, Chairs of NGOs are no doubt all very Woke -- but they are not reducing their vast salaries. Nor are they devising practical ways in which (say) the Faculty looks like as diverse as Manchester City FC.
The top of my organisation is dominated by Woke. At the bottom, nothing has changed.
People might want to take an interest in the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. It might cure you of the idea it was limited to any location, class or religion
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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Surely all these perpetrators were protected by a belief system.
In one case, the belief system created by the upper echelons of the catholic church, and in another by the upper echelons of a political class who wholly characterised ethnic communities as blameless and vulnerable victims of racism.
And what do either of those beliefs have to do with people who wanted sexual equality?
In the latter case they were the same people...! they didn't want sexual equality, they wanted sexual equality for political active middle class well educated voters like Bev.
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.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You've completely lost it mate, COVID is done and we all need to move on. Those last few hold outs can live in fear all masked up to the end of time, the rest of the nation agrees with me, thankfully.
I'm stone cold certain that when the water filtration and sewage systems were put in to prevent water-borne diseases, BR would have been complaining about the cost and claiming that we'd been living with disease forever, and that we couldn't make everyone live forever.
And, from the sound of it, you'd have been right beside him when the latest cholera epidemic died away for a while.
Do me a favour: when the pressure on the health service causes massive delays or missed treatments for you and your loved ones, don't complain about them.
And when the next pandemic occurs (which it will, although I hope and pray it'll be a long time), don't whine when restrictions are needed because we don't have filtration systems.
"Delays or missed treatments" have been ongoing for as long as the NHS has existed. It always will, since demand is infinite. People only stop presenting demand when they die, but you want to prevent death from ever occurring.
Could you please stop talking bollocks with your "you want to prevent death from ever occuring," crap?
Seriously, man.
QTWAIN.
Not until you stop being so hysterical about Covid.
Hysterical.
"We do not need any restrictions" is hysterical? "We can keep going like this as long as we resource the health service appropriately" is hysterical? "No need to panic; it's peaking and starting to fall" is hysterical?
Mr. Foremain, I must respectfully disagree with your view on the Rotherham and similar cases.
One major example stands out, from many, as an example why. One girl who was raped was clever enough to retain the clothing, which contained DNA evidence. She handed it over. The police managed to lose it, and nothing happened.
This isn't laziness. And it isn't incompetence (I could buy that for a one-off but in Rotherham alone over a thousand girls and a hundred boys were raped over a period exceeding a decade). This was an approach that it was better to have white working class girls and boys raped by men who were Pakistani/Muslim than to investigate, because being culturally sensitive mattered more than stopping the industrial scale rape of children.
If they had not been working class, and if they had not been white, this would not have been tolerated..
Do you have any evidence for that ? As far as I recall, there were significant numbers of Asian victims.
Conversely there's much evidence of police failure to investigate over the years, irrespective of ethnicity.
You might have a point regarding class (though public school cases over the years suggest it's only half a point).
The Asian victims (at least in Rotherham from memory) were disproportionately Sikhs and targeted for the same reason. There were very few victims from the perpetrators' backgrounds.
Ideally Suella goes out and we can see how the realistically viable candidates fare during a debate.
I have to confess I feel sorry for Liz. I shouldn’t, I know. But she’s spent years planning for this moment; it’s dictated much of her effort at Trade and then at the Foreign Office.
I have zero sympathy for her . Nothing worse than a born again Leaver who now feels the need to overcompensate. Which means another 2 years of EU arguments and divisiveness.
I think this is true. The public will care about cost of living, not more stupid arguments with the EU.
Plus, she can’t front up the role of PM. Would be divisive.
I think TT needs to pull out now otherwise there’s a danger Truss could pick up all Bravermans votes and end up overtaking Mordaunt giving her campaign new momentum .
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.
Well I am hardly part of the problem as I am not an abuser, thanks. I haven't read his report (is that what you do in your spare time?), and I don't doubt that there were many hideous mistakes and it is scandalous. Further investigation needs to be done to look at why there was such a cover up, but I find it unlikely that anyone said "oh, ive got this serial rapist banged to rights but I can't investigate him because he is of Pakistani heritage." Methinks some of this might be selective reading of that report.
I also find myself wondering why ( I don't include you in this) there seem to be some posters on this site gleefully pointing to this on a discussion about so-called "woke". Are they suggesting that police forces should not monitor their actions with respect to race? Is that an objective of the anti-wokesters? Do they consider all police forces to be so progressive that they should not consider diversity and monitor their interaction with ethnic minorities? On the extreme end of the anti-woke obsessives I suggest this is probably the case
You may find it unlikely that concern over racial sensitivities prevented the prosecution of people who ought to have been prosecuted, but that is not the view of those carrying out these investigations. If you think these investigations came to the wrong conclusions, then you need to say why.
I suspect that people who are obsessed by woke (the original discussion point) are using this as a way of saying that any sensitivity towards race by local authorities and police forces is wrong, when in reality it may be less significant than they would like it to be. I am no lefty, but I don't get stirred up by "woke". What is the one thing that the public sector always wail about if they are caught underperforming? "Resources". What I am suggesting is that this matter has been used by the police to cover up their total ineptitude. Rather than police or local authority laziness, they can pretend it was due to lack of resources and "paperwork". Alternatively, perhaps it was a global conspiracy of paedophiles that included Leon Brittan et al. The idea that it was known that there was an abusive paedo ring that was overlooked only because they were Pakistani is ludicrous.
It's not just the police. It's social services and local councillors. It's similar to the way that Islington and Lambeth councillors were prepared to look the other way when children were being abused in their care homes in the eighties. In the case of the latter, allegations of abuse were dismissed as homophobia. What these cases have in common is people who are charged with child safety being prepared to prioritise politics over and above the welfare of vulnerable children.
Just the same as the Catholic Church and other abuses throughout time, yes.
Anyone who puts protecting themselves, or their interest, ahead of protecting the vulnerable is scum.
What its not is a "woke" or "unwoke" issue.
Surely all these perpetrators were protected by a belief system.
In one case, the belief system created by the upper echelons of the catholic church, and in another by the upper echelons of a political class who wholly characterised ethnic communities as blameless and vulnerable victims of racism.
And what do either of those beliefs have to do with people who wanted sexual equality?
In the latter case they were the same people...! they didn't want sexual equality, they wanted sexual equality for political active middle class well educated voters like Bev.
Bollocks were they.
That's like saying 9/11 was a terrorist attack committed by Christians, just because they were religious.
I think TT needs to pull out now otherwise there’s a danger Truss could pick up all Bravermans votes and end up overtaking Mordaunt giving her campaign new momentum .
Truss must be stopped.
Truss Must be Stopped. I’ll get the T-shirts printed.
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.
The police have covered up the authorities complicity in scandals like this forever. Its hardly new or woke or whatever. The starter for 10 was that women would make complaints to the police. Male coppers with stereotyped views of these women dismissed them out of hand. Giving the green light to the various gangs in the various towns to get on with it.
Here is what I think/guess happened. Police officers and local authorities were incompetent. Some police officers blamed their lack of action not on their incompetence (no never!) but on their bureaucracy (it's the paperwork init), and the best bureaucracy of all to blame is their requirement not to be racist. "Oh, can't investigate that mate, he is one o' them dark geezers, better have another cuppa. snigger snigger"
Sorry do you know how widespread this is? do you know how many girls are affected?
The problems have to be far more endemic than isolated cases of incompetence and laziness. There was a prevailing climate of fear. Investigating these crimes was a career decision for a policeman, and not a good one.
That climate was determined by politicians who made a show of giving middle class women and girls in Britain a much better life. Which I do not deny they did.
You are a very sick person who's real motivations are clear for anyone to see.
Notice I have not once mentioned or singled out any community or race in any of my comments. I even credited the muslim man who finally said enough was enough and started these prosecutions when many others wouldn't.
Bev wanted to pretend modern Britain is some kind of emancipated nirvana for women.
I merely pointed out that it isn't, citing an example.
The hostility toward air filtration systems seems - on the face of it - a triumph of libertarian ideology over common sense.
Having said that, it would be good to understand the numbers.
The problem is that so much money is poorly spent in government that there is a high degree of scepticism on new plans
I also suspect that retrofitting worthwhile filtration is not as easy and cheap as people say. But it should certainly be part of the design brief going forward
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.)
What utterly ridiculous numbers.
I think rolling out filtration at a thousand per room would cost many billions, not a billion.
And I doubt that it would achieve 2-3 fewer days off per person, since not only does not every infection lead to people being so sick to take a couple of days off, but the measures won't prevent that many infections anyway. Infections would still happen, but just in different places.
There are 9 million school age children in the UK. If we estimate an average class size of 25 then that would be £360mn just to add filtration to all the classrooms without even considering other rooms, IT rooms, school gyms, corridors or anywhere else. Or anywhere that isn't a school. A billion would not go very far at all.
We could save money by abandoning all water filtration and sewage treatment. Those would obviously be unnecessary - people can take responsibility for their own water, and the illnesses that are conveyed may well be unlikely to cost more than the savings incurred.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You'vecompletely lost it mate, COVID is done and we all need to move on. Those last few hold outs can live in fear all masked up to the end of time, the rest of the nation agrees with me, thankfully.
I'm stone cold certain that when the water filtration and sewage systems were put in toprevent water-borne diseases, BR would have been complaining about the cost and claiming that we'd been living with disease forever, and that we couldn't make everyone live forever.
And, from the sound of it, you'd have been right beside him when the latest cholera epidemic died away for a while.
Do me a favour: when the pressure on the health service causes massive delays or missed treatments for you and your loved ones, don't complain about them.
And when the next pandemic occurs (which it will, although I hope and pray it'll be a long time), don't whine when restrictions are needed because we don't have filtration systems.
"Delays or missed treatments" have been ongoing for as long as the NHS has existed. It always will, since demand is infinite. People only stop presenting demand when they die, but you want to prevent death from ever occurring.
Demand is not infinite. It just exceeds current capacity
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.
Rape hasn't been caused by people calling themselves a man or a woman.
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.
Comments
And yet all her critics have to say she's rubbish is not a swathe of scandals in all those roles, but that she gave one odd speech, nearly a decade ago, while DEFRA secretary.
She's given Conference speeches every year since then, she's held big jobs since then, but nothing to object to other than pork markets and cheese. That is a disgrace.
You may be about to lose control,
And that concerns me 🫢
Seriously, man.
1.84 Penny Mordaunt 54%
4.2 Rishi Sunak 24%
5.4 Liz Truss 19%
23 Kemi Badenoch 4%
60 Tom Tugendhat
140 Suella Braverman
260 Dominic Raab
Another benefit of work from home, I don't have to wear suits, shirts, and ties during the week.
Nobody on here is going to argue that child abuse is not a bad thing, not even BartyBobbins who manages to find some quite bizarre ideological positions.
There aren't enough Tugendhat to send both of Sunak and Mordaunt over the line, so it could be very close between the final three.
SB 27
PM 83
RS 101
LT 64
TT 32
She's clearly the best candidate, the Tories should pick her.
But right she is a total unknown, basically their version of Starmer. They could though do a lot worse.
Not until you stop being so hysterical about Covid.
In one case, the belief system created by the upper echelons of the catholic church, and in another by the upper echelons of a political class who wholly characterised ethnic communities as blameless and vulnerable victims of racism.
Badenoch +9
Braverman -5
Mordaunt +16
Sunak +13
Truss +14
Tugendhat -5 (will he now drop out?)
https://twitter.com/HugoGye/status/1547582451978932225
As far as I recall, there were significant numbers of Asian victims.
Conversely there's much evidence of police failure to investigate over the years, irrespective of ethnicity.
You might have a point regarding class (though public school cases over the years suggest it's only half a point).
Truss +8
Badenoch +6
Mordaunt +4
Sunak +2
Braverman -3
Tugendhat -13
Tugendhat has to jump on that.
Braverman - 27
Mordaunt - 83
Sunak - 101
Truss - 64
Tugendhat - 32
https://twitter.com/breeallegretti/status/1547582085283471360?cxt=HHwWgICj4aDtjvoqAAAA
So much for "I'm the only candidate who can stop the small boats crossing the channel because I'm the only one who knows we need to leave the ECHR. The British people won't forgive us unless we address this issue."
https://twitter.com/SuellaBraverman/status/1547516107518509057
Any ideology becomes dangerous when taken to extreme, and "wokeism" (in current usage, at least by the right) is just a convenient word for the left's excesses on this issue.
Badenoch has another punt at absorbing the Braverman vote?
Rishi - relief to scrape 100 but still struggling.
Liz - LOL
Suella and TT - oh dear.
@christopherhope
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24m
NEW The final two candidates in the Conservative leadership race will not be known until **Wednesday evening** next week, I understand.
Members of the 1922 committee have decided to have three ballots on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday next week after #PMQs. #ToryLeadershipRace
The gap between them expanded it didn't fall.
Truss could overtake Mordaunt though.
Such a culture is not intellectually sharp. It is smug and self-centred.
Woke is only diverse in that there are some people who look differently and some people who have sex differently -- but other than they all think the same. It is not a proper accounting of any kind of genuine diversity.
I don't care much what people do in bed (provided it is consensual), but Woke seems to have @Leon 's gleeful obsession with what people are doing in bed.
It is the intellectual homogeneity -– and even more dangerously, the authoritarian social pressure to conform to the homogeneity -- that is worrying.
And, finally Woke seems not to be a catalyst for any real change.
University Vice Chancellors, Start-up CEOs, Chairs of NGOs are no doubt all very Woke -- but they are not reducing their vast salaries. Nor are they devising practical ways in which (say) the Faculty looks like as diverse as Manchester City FC.
The top of my organisation is dominated by Woke. At the bottom, nothing has changed.
It might cure you of the idea it was limited to any location, class or religion
NEW THREAD
However,
- Tugendhat is dead meat
- no real breakout for Badenoch or Truss
Rishi v Mordaunt, then.
Unless the right can get their shit together.
This thread has been eliminated
I think the problem for Truss is two fold, firstly longer it goes on right votes are going to the top two, and secondly, Truss is plain rubbish.
"We do not need any restrictions" is hysterical?
"We can keep going like this as long as we resource the health service appropriately" is hysterical?
"No need to panic; it's peaking and starting to fall" is hysterical?
Okay.
Emotionally I was hoping for Rishi to stall and some modest momentum behind Tugendhat.
Plus, she can’t front up the role of PM. Would be divisive.
Truss must be stopped.
That's like saying 9/11 was a terrorist attack committed by Christians, just because they were religious.
I also suspect that retrofitting worthwhile filtration is not as easy and cheap as people say. But it should certainly be part of the design brief going forward
Its been caused by criminals committing crime, and people turning a blind eye to criminal behaviour.