Interesting discussion on PT on eternal life - v apt for a Sunday. My sense fwiw is many good solid ordinary decent people don't assess the merits of the idea in rational fashion. They instinctively think "great, means I live forever, rocking good news, bring it on" - but what it actually means is everyone lives forever, so you're still nothing special. You're as utterly insignificant as you were before eternal life came in. That kills the idea stone dead philosophically. And then even forgetting about the flawed philosophy there's a massive problem in practice in that "everyone" includes people you can't bear, they live forever too. Imagine Jacob Rees Mogg superciliating away on your tv screen day after day after day with not only no end in sight but no end even theoretically possible. No. Not for me.
Given lots and lots of people lead shitty lives , the last thing they would want is to live forever.
Haven't you seen Highlander?
They had great lives , but nowadays I am sure you would find shedloads that would not want to live forever. Not all live happy lives , I would settle for 120 as long as I had my marbles and could wipe my own butt.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just an expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
I’ve actually met a few advocates. They believe, quite sincerely, that they will be time shifting themselves to a point where medicine will be able to revive them.
A funny moment in the Star Trek episode where they revive people from such a cryonics system. The doctor doesn’t even realise these people are dead and fixes them as part of defrosting them. The comedy comes when the Captain of the ship tells them that cryonics was a fraud…
As far as I can tell, all current cryonics stuff does far too much damage to make resurrection possible without magic level tech.
As to eternal life. There won’t be one pill for that. It will creep up on us. Vast sums are being expended on research into controlling muscle growth, bone density etc. Much is for the fitness industry - get a six pack with little or no effort etc. But applied to the problems of aging.. Cancer will be squeezed into a smaller and smaller percentage of deaths. Brain degeneration is another big one - again fixes may be found.
We are not going to wake up one morning, living for ever with no aging. But if we progressively remove the causes of degeneration and death…
On topic, I'm a Biden-sceptic. His poll ratings are anemic, and Democrats over-performed in the mid-terms despite rather than because of him. He remains a capable politician, but his age often shows, particularly in the rigors of a campaign.
My fear is less of Trump (although it remains the case he could win if he stands - he's flawed but not, sadly, quite unelectable). It's more that De Santis - a more credible but nonetheless rather extreme figure - would be GOP candidate and prevail against a clearly elderly Biden simply because it's easier to convey energy and drive if you're not 82.
Biden said he wanted to be a bridge to the future - but he should think about which future he wants to be a bridge to.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just an expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
I’ve actually met a few advocates. They believe, quite sincerely, that they will be time shifting themselves to a point where medicine will be able to revive them.
A funny moment in the Star Trek episode where they revive people from such a cryonics system. The doctor doesn’t even realise these people are dead and fixes them as part of defrosting them. The comedy comes when the Captain of the ship tells them that cryonics was a fraud…
As far as I can tell, all current cryonics stuff does far too much damage to make resurrection possible without magic level tech.
As to eternal life. There won’t be one pill for that. It will creep up on us. Vast sums are being expended on research into controlling muscle growth, bone density etc. Much is for the fitness industry - get a six pack with little or no effort etc. But applied to the problems of aging.. Cancer will be squeezed into a smaller and smaller percentage of deaths. Brain degeneration is another big one - again fixes may be found.
We are not going to wake up one morning, living for ever with no aging. But if we progressively remove the causes of degeneration and death…
Human cells divide as we age, and (as I understand it) the telomeres at the end of our chromosome, which are like the plastic bits on shoelaces, get shorter and shorter. When the telomeres (sp?) have all gone, we cease to work. The only place this doesn’t happen is the sex organs apparently, otherwise we would give birth to babies the same age as ourselves. These cells re-lengthen the telomeres. Scientists are working on substances that do the same thing.
Joe Biden might be the value bet for both nomination and re-election. He is the incumbent, so the rigours of a nomination campaign are nothing if there is no challenger.
He is the value bet, even if he's bullshitting.
The question is: who's the reserve?
It won't be Michelle Obama.
Harris
If Biden doesn't run it will be a big scrap. And there's no good reason to think Harris would be the favourite.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just an expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
I’ve actually met a few advocates. They believe, quite sincerely, that they will be time shifting themselves to a point where medicine will be able to revive them.
A funny moment in the Star Trek episode where they revive people from such a cryonics system. The doctor doesn’t even realise these people are dead and fixes them as part of defrosting them. The comedy comes when the Captain of the ship tells them that cryonics was a fraud…
As far as I can tell, all current cryonics stuff does far too much damage to make resurrection possible without magic level tech.
As to eternal life. There won’t be one pill for that. It will creep up on us. Vast sums are being expended on research into controlling muscle growth, bone density etc. Much is for the fitness industry - get a six pack with little or no effort etc. But applied to the problems of aging.. Cancer will be squeezed into a smaller and smaller percentage of deaths. Brain degeneration is another big one - again fixes may be found.
We are not going to wake up one morning, living for ever with no aging. But if we progressively remove the causes of degeneration and death…
Human cells divide as we age, and (as I understand it) the telomeres at the end of our chromosome, which are like the plastic bits on shoelaces, get shorter and shorter. When the telomeres (sp?) have all gone, we cease to work. The only place this doesn’t happen is the sex organs apparently, otherwise we would give birth to babies the same age as ourselves. These cells re-lengthen the telomeres. Scientists are working on substances that do the same thing.
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
Steve Barclay seems to have been cleaning up his act recently, so keep an eye on him.
No-one here apart from me probably listens to R4, but this morning David Goodhart, who coined the "somewheres" and "anywheres" dichotomy, had the Point of View slot after the Sunday service. He points out that there's really hardly anything between the main parties in terms of policies. Brexit has made us more democratic and we have achieved a better balance between anywheres and somewheres. The dominant anywhere establishment on the right and the left had built an economy around their interests. He reckons that the anywhere agenda remains the default but has been diluted since Brexit. Despite all he thinks that our politics is now better balanced, even though it is stuck in the morass and we need more vision from our politicians. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001f5kt
I've told the story before of a Chinese seminar where I was asked whether most people in Britain actually feel they are being given a meaningful choice. For many it's more like choosing football teams to back - they have a preference but it's not based on any detailed policy differences.
The trouble is that, as we saw with Truss and (narrowly) Corbyn, people don't like radical alternatives. They're more comfortable with tootling along with something roughly like the present, only better managed and with more help for people like themselves. Generally that instinct is right - history is littered with disasters of people seizing radical alternatives. But occasionally the consensus will simply be wrong and we'll be stuck in a rut for too long.
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
The Force was too strong
Javid was too dangerous to some ambitions to not be nobbled and banished to backbench wilderness. Last thing the turkey PM's wanted in the cabinet was talent.
I accept that it makes us poorer, that it weakens our standing on the international stage, that it restricts my freedoms as a citizen and increases my costs as a consumer.
All of those things were known before the referendum, which is why I don't vote for it.
Brexiteers seem to think "accept Brexit" means deny the reality of how shit it is.
Dunt’s correct - it’s the speed that everything is shifting, momentum is gathering. It’s like the public have given Brexit a chance, on the whole they respected the referendum vote, for all its flaws, but now they’re saying ‘actually, Brexit was a mistake’. Labour need to be brave now.
No-one here apart from me probably listens to R4, but this morning David Goodhart, who coined the "somewheres" and "anywheres" dichotomy, had the Point of View slot after the Sunday service. He points out that there's really hardly anything between the main parties in terms of policies. Brexit has made us more democratic and we have achieved a better balance between anywheres and somewheres. The dominant anywhere establishment on the right and the left had built an economy around their interests. He reckons that the anywhere agenda remains the default but has been diluted since Brexit. Despite all he thinks that our politics is now better balanced, even though it is stuck in the morass and we need more vision from our politicians. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001f5kt
I've told the story before of a Chinese seminar where I was asked whether most people in Britain actually feel they are being given a meaningful choice. For many it's more like choosing football teams to back - they have a preference but it's not based on any detailed policy differences.
The trouble is that, as we saw with Truss and (narrowly) Corbyn, people don't like radical alternatives. They're more comfortable with tootling along with something roughly like the present, only better managed and with more help for people like themselves. Generally that instinct is right - history is littered with disasters of people seizing radical alternatives. But occasionally the consensus will simply be wrong and we'll be stuck in a rut for too long.
The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils Himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
No-one here apart from me probably listens to R4, but this morning David Goodhart, who coined the "somewheres" and "anywheres" dichotomy, had the Point of View slot after the Sunday service. He points out that there's really hardly anything between the main parties in terms of policies. Brexit has made us more democratic and we have achieved a better balance between anywheres and somewheres. The dominant anywhere establishment on the right and the left had built an economy around their interests. He reckons that the anywhere agenda remains the default but has been diluted since Brexit. Despite all he thinks that our politics is now better balanced, even though it is stuck in the morass and we need more vision from our politicians. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001f5kt
I've told the story before of a Chinese seminar where I was asked whether most people in Britain actually feel they are being given a meaningful choice. For many it's more like choosing football teams to back - they have a preference but it's not based on any detailed policy differences.
The trouble is that, as we saw with Truss and (narrowly) Corbyn, people don't like radical alternatives. They're more comfortable with tootling along with something roughly like the present, only better managed and with more help for people like themselves. Generally that instinct is right - history is littered with disasters of people seizing radical alternatives. But occasionally the consensus will simply be wrong and we'll be stuck in a rut for too long.
First "irresistibility points" opened in liberated Kherson - warming centers where locals can charge their phones and use the internet, have hot meals and drinks
I must say I'm not a fan of Goodhart and what I think are his false dichotomies. According to him anyone who does not harbour solely national feelings, favours the politics of "anywhere". Like many I suspect, I don't fit it into any categories of supporting an entirely multicultural or monocultural society, and I find his "anywhere" to be just a convenient straw man for the right.
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
He says the NHS is under huge pressure because of the pandemic. Which is true up to a point, There are other reasons why it's in a bad way (particularly in England but other nations have issues as well), which are due to the way his government has been managed and continues to manage the NHS and other public services. Of course he doesn't mention those. Our European peers don't have the same problem with their health systems. But he did go on again in the papers about abolishing "NHS pen pushers" as a solution to the problems. This is a sign of an unserious health minister.
Key point is. There are many differing views as to what your average Leave voting punter expected the economic future to look like after Brexit. Almost none of them were remotely like this. That stands whether it is because of Brexit or not. We've Brexited. And we're worse off.
Matt Hancock is now third favourite to win I'm A Celebrity but also third favourite to be next out. 10/1 is available either way.
Hancock should have the whip restored sharpish, if Number 10 is, as seems to be the case, running scared of by-elections because otherwise Hancock is incentivised to jump before he is pushed.
Key point is. There are many differing views as to what your average Leave voting punter expected the economic future to look like after Brexit. Almost none of them were remotely like this. That stands whether it is because of Brexit or not. We've Brexited. And we're worse off.
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
He says the NHS is under huge pressure because of the pandemic. Which is true up to a point, There are other reasons why it's in a bad way (particularly in England but other nations have issues as well), which are due to the way his government has been managed and continues to manage the NHS and other public services. Of course he doesn't mention those. Our European peers don't have the same problem with their health systems. But he did go on again in the papers about abolishing "NHS pen pushers" as a solution to the problems. This is a sign of an unserious health minister.
It is a little harsh to blame the Westminster government for the shrivelled husk that is the NHS in Wales. Or the mess in Scotland, for that matter.
Blame them for the mess in England, by all means, but surely we have more brains and/or integrity on this board than Sturgeon or Drakeford?
I accept that it makes us poorer, that it weakens our standing on the international stage, that it restricts my freedoms as a citizen and increases my costs as a consumer.
All of those things were known before the referendum, which is why I don't vote for it.
Brexiteers seem to think "accept Brexit" means deny the reality of how shit it is.
I am a [insert political party that just lost the election here] supporter but I accept the victory of [insert political party that just won the election here].
Doesn't mean the person who supported the losing party should give up and become a member of the winning party.
As many on here seem to think applies with Brexit.
We no more have to continue to accept Brexit as we had to accept Richard Cromwell, James II, Edward VIII or Liz Truss. It is part of our glorious history to get rid of something once we accept it's shit.
Interesting discussion on PT on eternal life - v apt for a Sunday. My sense fwiw is many good solid ordinary decent people don't assess the merits of the idea in rational fashion. They instinctively think "great, means I live forever, rocking good news, bring it on" - but what it actually means is everyone lives forever, so you're still nothing special. You're as utterly insignificant as you were before eternal life came in. That kills the idea stone dead philosophically. And then even forgetting about the flawed philosophy there's a massive problem in practice in that "everyone" includes people you can't bear, they live forever too. Imagine Jacob Rees Mogg superciliating away on your tv screen day after day after day with not only no end in sight but no end even theoretically possible. No. Not for me.
Society advances one death at a time. A society without death would eventually become one without birth and renewal. It would be unimaginably awful.
Matt Hancock is now third favourite to win I'm A Celebrity but also third favourite to be next out. 10/1 is available either way.
Hancock should have the whip restored sharpish, if Number 10 is, as seems to be the case, running scared of by-elections because otherwise Hancock is incentivised to jump before he is pushed.
Not really. If he stays on as an MP he gets a nice salary, a big expense account, and then if he retires at the election (or better still, stands as an independent and loses) a handsome payoff. All while having to do no work whatsoever.
If he resigns, I don't think he even gets expenses to close his office.
We no more have to continue to accept Brexit as we had to accept Richard Cromwell, James II, Edward VIII or Liz Truss. It is part of our glorious history to get rid of something once we accept it's shit.
Interesting discussion on PT on eternal life - v apt for a Sunday. My sense fwiw is many good solid ordinary decent people don't assess the merits of the idea in rational fashion. They instinctively think "great, means I live forever, rocking good news, bring it on" - but what it actually means is everyone lives forever, so you're still nothing special. You're as utterly insignificant as you were before eternal life came in. That kills the idea stone dead philosophically. And then even forgetting about the flawed philosophy there's a massive problem in practice in that "everyone" includes people you can't bear, they live forever too. Imagine Jacob Rees Mogg superciliating away on your tv screen day after day after day with not only no end in sight but no end even theoretically possible. No. Not for me.
Society advances one death at a time. A society without death would eventually become one without birth and renewal. It would be unimaginably awful.
Eventually people run out of things to talk about. There's a couple of good star trek episodes that deal with this wrt Q continuum.
We no more have to continue to accept Brexit as we had to accept Richard Cromwell, James II, Edward VIII or Liz Truss. It is part of our glorious history to get rid of something once we accept it's shit.
Explain Last of the Summer Wine, then.
It's been off air for a decade. 'bemusedshrugemoji'
I don’t want a long theological debate about Brexit, but I would appreciate it if the government, shortcut the crap, and joined the EEA. That is we should have Brexited all along.
We no more have to continue to accept Brexit as we had to accept Richard Cromwell, James II, Edward VIII or Liz Truss. It is part of our glorious history to get rid of something once we accept it's shit.
Explain Last of the Summer Wine, then.
It's been off air for a decade. 'bemusedshrugemoji'
Yes but it stayed on telly long after everyone accepted it was shit.
We no more have to continue to accept Brexit as we had to accept Richard Cromwell, James II, Edward VIII or Liz Truss. It is part of our glorious history to get rid of something once we accept it's shit.
That's a good idea.
The answer to the question "Do you accept Brexit?" is "In the same way I accept Liz Truss became PM"
Interesting discussion on PT on eternal life - v apt for a Sunday. My sense fwiw is many good solid ordinary decent people don't assess the merits of the idea in rational fashion. They instinctively think "great, means I live forever, rocking good news, bring it on" - but what it actually means is everyone lives forever, so you're still nothing special. You're as utterly insignificant as you were before eternal life came in. That kills the idea stone dead philosophically. And then even forgetting about the flawed philosophy there's a massive problem in practice in that "everyone" includes people you can't bear, they live forever too. Imagine Jacob Rees Mogg superciliating away on your tv screen day after day after day with not only no end in sight but no end even theoretically possible. No. Not for me.
Society advances one death at a time. A society without death would eventually become one without birth and renewal. It would be unimaginably awful.
Eventually people run out of things to talk about. There's a couple of good star trek episodes that deal with this wrt Q continuum.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
Interesting discussion on PT on eternal life - v apt for a Sunday. My sense fwiw is many good solid ordinary decent people don't assess the merits of the idea in rational fashion. They instinctively think "great, means I live forever, rocking good news, bring it on" - but what it actually means is everyone lives forever, so you're still nothing special. You're as utterly insignificant as you were before eternal life came in. That kills the idea stone dead philosophically. And then even forgetting about the flawed philosophy there's a massive problem in practice in that "everyone" includes people you can't bear, they live forever too. Imagine Jacob Rees Mogg superciliating away on your tv screen day after day after day with not only no end in sight but no end even theoretically possible. No. Not for me.
Society advances one death at a time. A society without death would eventually become one without birth and renewal. It would be unimaginably awful.
Eventually people run out of things to talk about. There's a couple of good star trek episodes that deal with this wrt Q continuum.
And, of course, who can forget Zardoz? Despite years of counselling.
Matt Hancock is now third favourite to win I'm A Celebrity but also third favourite to be next out. 10/1 is available either way.
Hancock should have the whip restored sharpish, if Number 10 is, as seems to be the case, running scared of by-elections because otherwise Hancock is incentivised to jump before he is pushed.
Not really. If he stays on as an MP he gets a nice salary, a big expense account, and then if he retires at the election (or better still, stands as an independent and loses) a handsome payoff. All while having to do no work whatsoever.
If he resigns, I don't think he even gets expenses to close his office.
Jared O'Mara is relevant here.
Just wondering, what are the rules about redundancy payoffs for MP's staff? They will usually have been employed for longer than the two year trigger period.
Matt Hancock is now third favourite to win I'm A Celebrity but also third favourite to be next out. 10/1 is available either way.
Hancock should have the whip restored sharpish, if Number 10 is, as seems to be the case, running scared of by-elections because otherwise Hancock is incentivised to jump before he is pushed.
Not really. If he stays on as an MP he gets a nice salary, a big expense account, and then if he retires at the election (or better still, stands as an independent and loses) a handsome payoff. All while having to do no work whatsoever.
If he resigns, I don't think he even gets expenses to close his office.
Jared O'Mara is relevant here.
Hancock is reported as earning £400,000 from I'm A Celebrity, which is more than enough to cover a year's salary as an MP and loss of office. The incentive to resign is that he will have a better pick of media jobs; if he waits until after the election, he will face 200 rivals to be the next Michael Portillo.
Number 10 needs to restore the whip and hold him close; hold out the prospect of returning to office.
Key point is. There are many differing views as to what your average Leave voting punter expected the economic future to look like after Brexit. Almost none of them were remotely like this. That stands whether it is because of Brexit or not. We've Brexited. And we're worse off.
I recall a poll in the run up to Brexit that found that people would oppose Brexit if it made them £50 per year or more worse off. Unfortunately I cannot trace it.
The residual Brexit support is mostly where that is true, the retired and a few financiers and speculators.
I agree though that there is a need for a more positive campaign to Rejoin, not just a desire to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust. To me that includes the desire to fully participate in continent wide solutions to the problems of our age.
The mooted "Swiss style" deal seems to me to be moonshine, and not something that the EU are keen to repeat. It too stalls on FoM.
Joining the SM properly may be more viable, but why would we want to do that without participating in the decision making around that SM by full membership?
To me the only logical outcomes are hard Brexit or no Brexit.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just a expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
Quite the opposite, I believe. Mainstream cryogenic theory says you are just freezing to bridge the awkward gap between now, and proper immortality treatment becoming available. When it does, you thaw and get the treatment. It's like the early Christians not being sure whether the second coming would be in their lifetimes or whether they would have to do the whole death and resurrection thing.
If we have any biologists in, what are the precedents for any biological organism living forever ? For me the issue would be loss of faith in our cultural inheritance, in modern scientific terms yet to be proven that we have another essence ( possibly a quantum field ) that moves from one place to another. This is well outside current orthodoxy ofcourse, but a number of physicists around the edges are increasingly interested in the possibility. As mentioned earlier, one often finds the greatest openness to these ideas among physicists, at the moment, in line with Einstein's openness.
Ah, a believer in Religion Without Sky Faeries.
Penrose wants to be a hard core non-believer but can’t give up the idea that humans are special.
There are plenty of organisms that live a lot longer than we do.
Interesting discussion on PT on eternal life - v apt for a Sunday. My sense fwiw is many good solid ordinary decent people don't assess the merits of the idea in rational fashion. They instinctively think "great, means I live forever, rocking good news, bring it on" - but what it actually means is everyone lives forever, so you're still nothing special. You're as utterly insignificant as you were before eternal life came in. That kills the idea stone dead philosophically. And then even forgetting about the flawed philosophy there's a massive problem in practice in that "everyone" includes people you can't bear, they live forever too. Imagine Jacob Rees Mogg superciliating away on your tv screen day after day after day with not only no end in sight but no end even theoretically possible. No. Not for me.
Society advances one death at a time. A society without death would eventually become one without birth and renewal. It would be unimaginably awful.
Eventually people run out of things to talk about. There's a couple of good star trek episodes that deal with this wrt Q continuum.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
That's a matter of relativity, and how long it feels.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just a expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
Quite the opposite, I believe. Mainstream cryogenic theory says you are just freezing to bridge the awkward gap between now, and proper immortality treatment becoming available. When it does, you thaw and get the treatment. It's like the early Christians not being sure whether the second coming would be in their lifetimes or whether they would have to do the whole death and resurrection thing.
If we have any biologists in, what are the precedents for any biological organism living forever ? For me the issue would be loss of faith in our cultural inheritance, in modern scientific terms yet to be proven that we have another essence ( possibly a quantum field ) that moves from one place to another. This is well outside current orthodoxy ofcourse, but a number of physicists around the edges are increasingly interested in the possibility. As mentioned earlier, one often finds the greatest openness to these ideas among physicists, at the moment, in line with Einstein's openness.
Ah, a believer in Religion Without Sky Faeries.
Penrose wants to be a hard core non-believer but can’t give up the idea that humans are special.
There are plenty of organisms that live a lot longer than we do.
Penrose is an interesting one, isn't he. He thinks that the brain may harbour quantum microtubules, and a number of physicists are interested too.
Matt Hancock is now third favourite to win I'm A Celebrity but also third favourite to be next out. 10/1 is available either way.
Hancock should have the whip restored sharpish, if Number 10 is, as seems to be the case, running scared of by-elections because otherwise Hancock is incentivised to jump before he is pushed.
Not really. If he stays on as an MP he gets a nice salary, a big expense account, and then if he retires at the election (or better still, stands as an independent and loses) a handsome payoff. All while having to do no work whatsoever.
If he resigns, I don't think he even gets expenses to close his office.
Jared O'Mara is relevant here.
Just wondering, what are the rules about redundancy payoffs for MP's staff? They will usually have been employed for longer than the two year trigger period.
MPs are not employed so that doesn't apply. However, defeated incumbents are entitled to a payoff if they have been an MP for two consecutive years at the time of their defeat, and to have the expense of closing their office (whose members are employees and therefore entitled to payment) reimbursed to a certain level. They can also claim their MPs salary for up to two months while winding up their office. This may amount to around £39,000 for them personally.
I agree though that there is a need for a more positive campaign to Rejoin, not just a desire to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust.
The requirement to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust is a necessary but not sufficient condition if we want to avoid doing it all over again.
A methodology that puts off any kind of improvement.
Because grinding peoples faces into the dust doesn’t make them more stubborn. Not at all.
What you actually want to do is to build a political movement of people in favour of Europe. When you have a nice big majority of those, you’ll get rejoin.
You won’t get rejoin because Starmer does a whipped vote on day 1 for rejoin. He won’t commit political suicide for you.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just a expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
Quite the opposite, I believe. Mainstream cryogenic theory says you are just freezing to bridge the awkward gap between now, and proper immortality treatment becoming available. When it does, you thaw and get the treatment. It's like the early Christians not being sure whether the second coming would be in their lifetimes or whether they would have to do the whole death and resurrection thing.
If we have any biologists in, what are the precedents for any biological organism living forever ? For me the issue would be loss of faith in our cultural inheritance, in modern scientific terms yet to be proven that we have another essence ( possibly a quantum field ) that moves from one place to another. This is well outside current orthodoxy ofcourse, but a number of physicists around the edges are increasingly interested in the possibility. As mentioned earlier, one often finds the greatest openness to these ideas among physicists, at the moment, in line with Einstein's openness.
Ah, a believer in Religion Without Sky Faeries.
Penrose wants to be a hard core non-believer but can’t give up the idea that humans are special.
There are plenty of organisms that live a lot longer than we do.
Indeed some organisms are not subject to noticeable senescence, and live until something kills them by predation or accident. Not us though.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just a expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
Quite the opposite, I believe. Mainstream cryogenic theory says you are just freezing to bridge the awkward gap between now, and proper immortality treatment becoming available. When it does, you thaw and get the treatment. It's like the early Christians not being sure whether the second coming would be in their lifetimes or whether they would have to do the whole death and resurrection thing.
If we have any biologists in, what are the precedents for any biological organism living forever ? For me the issue would be loss of faith in our cultural inheritance, in modern scientific terms yet to be proven that we have another essence ( possibly a quantum field ) that moves from one place to another. This is well outside current orthodoxy ofcourse, but a number of physicists around the edges are increasingly interested in the possibility. As mentioned earlier, one often finds the greatest openness to these ideas among physicists, at the moment, in line with Einstein's openness.
Ah, a believer in Religion Without Sky Faeries.
Penrose wants to be a hard core non-believer but can’t give up the idea that humans are special.
There are plenty of organisms that live a lot longer than we do.
Penrose is an interesting one, isn't he. He thinks that the brain may harbour quantum microtubules, and a number of physicists are interested too.
I actually asked him, face to face at a conference, what if we build a machine that does that. He tried to tell me “you can’t” and then got annoyed.
EDIT : what annoyed him, I think was my suggestion that we could vat grow human neurons and build a machine that way, if that is what it took.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
It will last about as long as the arguments about Copernicus.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
You have a fundamentalist (in the religious sense) belief in rejoining. Your fatal mistake is to regard your religion as empirically true.
Brexit is a series of trade-offs. Some people will regard marginally lower GDP growth as a price worth paying for greater democratic accountability (arguments for Scottish independence rest on this case, too).
Others still will argue that while freedom of movement increases overall GDP, it also creates a bifurcated society with an increasingly wealthy, mobile, highly educated elite who enjoy greater freedoms at the expense of suppressing the wages of the poor.
You simply believe that your trade offs are better than the other side's trade offs. Yet you insist you are right with all the religious zeal of a fundamentalist.
Interesting discussion on PT on eternal life - v apt for a Sunday. My sense fwiw is many good solid ordinary decent people don't assess the merits of the idea in rational fashion. They instinctively think "great, means I live forever, rocking good news, bring it on" - but what it actually means is everyone lives forever, so you're still nothing special. You're as utterly insignificant as you were before eternal life came in. That kills the idea stone dead philosophically. And then even forgetting about the flawed philosophy there's a massive problem in practice in that "everyone" includes people you can't bear, they live forever too. Imagine Jacob Rees Mogg superciliating away on your tv screen day after day after day with not only no end in sight but no end even theoretically possible. No. Not for me.
Society advances one death at a time. A society without death would eventually become one without birth and renewal. It would be unimaginably awful.
People of a Spiritualist disposition accept the reality of the death of the physical body whilst believing that the mind/spirit continues in a discarnate form which can still make contact with those still living in the physical body. Those who have significant mediumistic abilities appear to have given very striking evidence of survival.
I agree though that there is a need for a more positive campaign to Rejoin, not just a desire to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust.
The requirement to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust is a necessary but not sufficient condition if we want to avoid doing it all over again.
A methodology that puts off any kind of improvement.
Because grinding peoples faces into the dust doesn’t make them more stubborn. Not at all.
What you actually want to do is to build a political movement of people in favour of Europe. When you have a nice big majority of those, you’ll get rejoin.
You won’t get rejoin because Starmer does a whipped vote on day 1 for rejoin. He won’t commit political suicide for you.
"In favour of Europe" looks like the usual (perhaps inadvertent here) EU/Europe confusion. Supporting Brexit is not opposing Europe - it is opposing the current model of the EU vision put forward by the Brussels establishment. That is changing (cf the recent Conference on the Future of Europe) and will change further, as it is recognised as untenable.
There's a reason why various groups are desperate to centralise things further before any other countries join.
I would say that the author quoted earlier by @northern_monkey is an example of someone who can't bring themselves to stop looking backwards. Which is the reverse of what we need.
I agree though that there is a need for a more positive campaign to Rejoin, not just a desire to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust. To me that includes the desire to fully participate in continent wide solutions to the problems of our age.
If you think the problems of our age are global, are "continent wide solutions" not just a form of parochialism?
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
He says the NHS is under huge pressure because of the pandemic. Which is true up to a point, There are other reasons why it's in a bad way (particularly in England but other nations have issues as well), which are due to the way his government has been managed and continues to manage the NHS and other public services. Of course he doesn't mention those. Our European peers don't have the same problem with their health systems. But he did go on again in the papers about abolishing "NHS pen pushers" as a solution to the problems. This is a sign of an unserious health minister.
It is a little harsh to blame the Westminster government for the shrivelled husk that is the NHS in Wales. Or the mess in Scotland, for that matter.
Blame them for the mess in England, by all means, but surely we have more brains and/or integrity on this board than Sturgeon or Drakeford?
Indeed.
Healthcare is complicated and to be fair to the devolved administrations and to Barclay in his Health Minister role, many of the issues are at the UK government level. The single biggest problem (amongst many) for the NHS is staff shortages. The healthcare system doesn't set its own budget and on current offers, nurses with other public sector workers are getting much less than inflation wage rises (they are striking for a much higher amount). The only way to offer a more attractive wage and stay in budget is to cut headcount, which isn't great when you have staff shortages. Another major problem is bed blocking due to lack of social care, with much the same root causes,
Key takeaway from the Barclay interview is the government has no realistic plan to fix the healthcare problem.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
I agree though that there is a need for a more positive campaign to Rejoin, not just a desire to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust.
The requirement to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust is a necessary but not sufficient condition if we want to avoid doing it all over again.
A methodology that puts off any kind of improvement.
Because grinding peoples faces into the dust doesn’t make them more stubborn. Not at all.
What you actually want to do is to build a political movement of people in favour of Europe. When you have a nice big majority of those, you’ll get rejoin.
You won’t get rejoin because Starmer does a whipped vote on day 1 for rejoin. He won’t commit political suicide for you.
That's not the point.
I want to get (back) to a point where a politician like Nigel Fucking Farage is laughed off the stage instead of being feted on every platform for spouting spurious bullshit.
I want a politician who says with a straight face "We have had enough of experts" expunged.
I want journalists and broadcasters to once again presents facts, not presents opinions as equivalent.
The requirement to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that.
I hope the same thing happens to the SNP in Scotland.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
It will last about as long as the arguments about Copernicus.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
The irony of that post Scott is that there were no religious arguments about Copernicus, in reality, until a hundred years after his death. With one possible exception, all the arguments were made on scientific grounds.
The religious person who refused to give way to reality in that case was the infamous atheist fundamentalist Andrew Dickson White, who made a number of false claims about Copernicus including that his work was suppressed by the Catholic church, as part of the evidence for his (also long-discredited) conflict thesis.
But his followers, alas, show no sign of allowing their religion to give way to reality.
On eternal life, I do wonder if the billionaire-cryogenic phenomenon isn't just a expression of the modern extreme fear of the - I would say incorrect - idea that eternal life isn't possible.
Quite the opposite, I believe. Mainstream cryogenic theory says you are just freezing to bridge the awkward gap between now, and proper immortality treatment becoming available. When it does, you thaw and get the treatment. It's like the early Christians not being sure whether the second coming would be in their lifetimes or whether they would have to do the whole death and resurrection thing.
If we have any biologists in, what are the precedents for any biological organism living forever ? For me the issue would be loss of faith in our cultural inheritance, in modern scientific terms yet to be proven that we have another essence ( possibly a quantum field ) that moves from one place to another. This is well outside current orthodoxy ofcourse, but a number of physicists around the edges are increasingly interested in the possibility. As mentioned earlier, one often finds the greatest openness to these ideas among physicists, at the moment, in line with Einstein's openness.
Ah, a believer in Religion Without Sky Faeries.
Penrose wants to be a hard core non-believer but can’t give up the idea that humans are special.
There are plenty of organisms that live a lot longer than we do.
Indeed some organisms are not subject to noticeable senescence, and live until something kills them by predation or accident. Not us though.
Good morning all, from my hospital bed.
Don’t lobsters and similar crustaceans, live an extremely long time, unless as quoted, they are caught and eaten!
I agree though that there is a need for a more positive campaign to Rejoin, not just a desire to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust. To me that includes the desire to fully participate in continent wide solutions to the problems of our age.
If you think the problems of our age are global, are "continent wide solutions" not just a form of parochialism?
No, there is an important place for global bodies too like the G7, G20, Climate change forums etc.
That doesn't preclude European co-operation as a building block, indeed that is a foundation. It is also far easier to internationally co-operate with peoples whose economies and societies are much like our own.
Fascinating to see some of of the higher profile brexiter Lords getting agitated about the possibility of closer trading relations with the EU. Presumably they’re worrying about their future role
Dunt’s correct - it’s the speed that everything is shifting, momentum is gathering. It’s like the public have given Brexit a chance, on the whole they respected the referendum vote, for all its flaws, but now they’re saying ‘actually, Brexit was a mistake’. Labour need to be brave now.
It’s really not like that at all. It's like a desperate establishment campaign to scare people into rejoining, complete with Osborne's punishment budget. It won't wash.
Dunt’s correct - it’s the speed that everything is shifting, momentum is gathering. It’s like the public have given Brexit a chance, on the whole they respected the referendum vote, for all its flaws, but now they’re saying ‘actually, Brexit was a mistake’. Labour need to be brave now.
Putting a positive gloss on this, the UK might finally get the “mature” and detailed debate we should have had in 2016. Namely - exactly what kind of Brexit, if any, do we want
EEA? EFTA? What?
Not a divisive screaming match with Project Fear on one side and £350m on a bus on the other
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
It will last about as long as the arguments about Copernicus.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
You have a fundamentalist (in the religious sense) belief in rejoining. Your fatal mistake is to regard your religion as empirically true.
Brexit is a series of trade-offs. Some people will regard marginally lower GDP growth as a price worth paying for greater democratic accountability (arguments for Scottish independence rest on this case, too).
Others still will argue that while freedom of movement increases overall GDP, it also creates a bifurcated society with an increasingly wealthy, mobile, highly educated elite who enjoy greater freedoms at the expense of suppressing the wages of the poor.
You simply believe that your trade offs are better than the other side's trade offs. Yet you insist you are right with all the religious zeal of a fundamentalist.
Also not the point I was making.
There is an argument that people would support a Brexit that makes us poorer, but it would not have won the vote and it was not the argument made at the time.
Remainers said leaving would be bad economically.
Brexiteers said leaving would be good economically.
Only one of those statements is true.
Only one of them is real.
The other is fantasy.
We voted for fantasy. That does not trump reality.
How do we avoid this situation in the future if we continue to indulge the fantasists?
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
He says the NHS is under huge pressure because of the pandemic. Which is true up to a point, There are other reasons why it's in a bad way (particularly in England but other nations have issues as well), which are due to the way his government has been managed and continues to manage the NHS and other public services. Of course he doesn't mention those. Our European peers don't have the same problem with their health systems. But he did go on again in the papers about abolishing "NHS pen pushers" as a solution to the problems. This is a sign of an unserious health minister.
It is a little harsh to blame the Westminster government for the shrivelled husk that is the NHS in Wales. Or the mess in Scotland, for that matter.
Blame them for the mess in England, by all means, but surely we have more brains and/or integrity on this board than Sturgeon or Drakeford?
Indeed.
Healthcare is complicated and to be fair to the devolved administrations and to Barclay in his Health Minister role, many of the issues are at the UK government level. The single biggest problem (amongst many) for the NHS is staff shortages. The healthcare system doesn't set its own budget and on current offers, nurses with other public sector workers are getting much less than inflation wage rises (they are striking for a much higher amount). The only way to offer a more attractive wage and stay in budget is to cut headcount, which isn't great when you have staff shortages. Another major problem is bed blocking due to lack of social care, with much the same root causes,
Key takeaway from the Barclay interview is the government has no realistic plan to fix the healthcare problem.
Obviously not.
He complains about pen-pushers but the NHS has lower admin overhead than comparable health systems, and arguably therefore not enough.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
I voted Remain *despite* despising the EU and many of its works.
Part of the problem was the methodology used by the U.K. in Europe. Blair gave up the rebate, for a vague promise of a review of the Common Agricultural policy. When he asked about it, Chirac told him that he was “Ill mannered” for bringing the subject up.
The issue was the belief that by sacrificing things, we would get Brownie points that we could cash in.
What should have been done was a deal on the CAP vs Rebate, so that after Chirac’s little bon mot, someone in the EU would have asked about the rebate. And been told that it was ill mannered for them to ask. That’s how the game is played.
Seeing we are talking about Brexit again. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement is a poor deal for the UK and should never have been negotiated, but we are stuck with it. I see very little appetite from the EU and the current and next UK governments to renegotiate it. We might be able to mitigate some of the worst effects while staying within the framework of the TCA.
It could be a "presumed alignment". As a policy the UK sticks with EU regulation unless it sees a good reason to change. The UK is aligned to the EU in whatever areas both parties agree the UK is aligned, which allows a number of checks to be de-risked and barriers removed. This is some of the thinking going into improvements to the Northern Ireland protocol, but it conceivably extend to the whole UK. It is far from a single market with its benefits but it could remove the bottlenecks at Dover for example.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
NATO and the EU are a very powerful combination. As close as we’ve been able to manage on this side of the Atlantic to the American dream.
One guarantees freedom from (largely Russian) imperialistic tyranny; the other promises economic development and the opportunity to travel freely for work and leisure. The post Soviet era without both would have been much less successful for Eastern Europe. Look at Poland and the Baltics, and now even the troubled Balkans, to see the dynamic in action.
Security independence outside NATO is a dead end for Europe as the current war has shown. Economic independence outside the EU is a drag on prosperity for integrated European economies like Britain as our trade stats have shown.
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
He says the NHS is under huge pressure because of the pandemic. Which is true up to a point, There are other reasons why it's in a bad way (particularly in England but other nations have issues as well), which are due to the way his government has been managed and continues to manage the NHS and other public services. Of course he doesn't mention those. Our European peers don't have the same problem with their health systems. But he did go on again in the papers about abolishing "NHS pen pushers" as a solution to the problems. This is a sign of an unserious health minister.
It is a little harsh to blame the Westminster government for the shrivelled husk that is the NHS in Wales. Or the mess in Scotland, for that matter.
Blame them for the mess in England, by all means, but surely we have more brains and/or integrity on this board than Sturgeon or Drakeford?
Indeed.
Healthcare is complicated and to be fair to the devolved administrations and to Barclay in his Health Minister role, many of the issues are at the UK government level. The single biggest problem (amongst many) for the NHS is staff shortages. The healthcare system doesn't set its own budget and on current offers, nurses with other public sector workers are getting much less than inflation wage rises (they are striking for a much higher amount). The only way to offer a more attractive wage and stay in budget is to cut headcount, which isn't great when you have staff shortages. Another major problem is bed blocking due to lack of social care, with much the same root causes,
Key takeaway from the Barclay interview is the government has no realistic plan to fix the healthcare problem.
Obviously not.
He complains about pen-pushers but the NHS has lower admin overhead than comparable health systems, and arguably therefore not enough.
From what I have seen, too much admin is pushed on medical staff. Strangely, doctors are not super super keen on paperwork. They seem to prefer doing medicine, for some reason.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
It will last about as long as the arguments about Copernicus.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
You have a fundamentalist (in the religious sense) belief in rejoining. Your fatal mistake is to regard your religion as empirically true.
Brexit is a series of trade-offs. Some people will regard marginally lower GDP growth as a price worth paying for greater democratic accountability (arguments for Scottish independence rest on this case, too).
Others still will argue that while freedom of movement increases overall GDP, it also creates a bifurcated society with an increasingly wealthy, mobile, highly educated elite who enjoy greater freedoms at the expense of suppressing the wages of the poor.
You simply believe that your trade offs are better than the other side's trade offs. Yet you insist you are right with all the religious zeal of a fundamentalist.
Personally, I don't accept lower GDP growth as the price for leaving, beyond a potential small curve downwards whilst the economy adjusts. Britain is now in control of its own national resources and regulation, and I would expect our ability to act more quickly and effectively than competitor economies within the EU to see us significantly outstrip them in years to come. However, that will take a Government that is committed to the UK's interests, not aligning us with a global agenda that often runs counter to them.
We have deep-seating issues in our economy. It's depressing that once again, people are selling us the idea that joining the EU (then the EEC) is some sort of cure for them. As historical record clearly shows, we remained the sick man of Europe until the Thatcher reforms. Joining the EEC wasn't the answer then, and rejoining the EU sure as shit isn't the answer now.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Dunt’s correct - it’s the speed that everything is shifting, momentum is gathering. It’s like the public have given Brexit a chance, on the whole they respected the referendum vote, for all its flaws, but now they’re saying ‘actually, Brexit was a mistake’. Labour need to be brave now.
It’s really not like that at all. It's like a desperate establishment campaign to scare people into rejoining, complete with Osborne's punishment budget. It won't wash.
I dunno - people will look at independent forecasts from the OBR and IFS, and conclude that part of the impact on their incomes is because of Brexit. Some, not all.
Unless those amazing trade deals magic something up
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
He says the NHS is under huge pressure because of the pandemic. Which is true up to a point, There are other reasons why it's in a bad way (particularly in England but other nations have issues as well), which are due to the way his government has been managed and continues to manage the NHS and other public services. Of course he doesn't mention those. Our European peers don't have the same problem with their health systems. But he did go on again in the papers about abolishing "NHS pen pushers" as a solution to the problems. This is a sign of an unserious health minister.
It is a little harsh to blame the Westminster government for the shrivelled husk that is the NHS in Wales. Or the mess in Scotland, for that matter.
Blame them for the mess in England, by all means, but surely we have more brains and/or integrity on this board than Sturgeon or Drakeford?
Indeed.
Healthcare is complicated and to be fair to the devolved administrations and to Barclay in his Health Minister role, many of the issues are at the UK government level. The single biggest problem (amongst many) for the NHS is staff shortages. The healthcare system doesn't set its own budget and on current offers, nurses with other public sector workers are getting much less than inflation wage rises (they are striking for a much higher amount). The only way to offer a more attractive wage and stay in budget is to cut headcount, which isn't great when you have staff shortages. Another major problem is bed blocking due to lack of social care, with much the same root causes,
Key takeaway from the Barclay interview is the government has no realistic plan to fix the healthcare problem.
Obviously not.
He complains about pen-pushers but the NHS has lower admin overhead than comparable health systems, and arguably therefore not enough.
From what I have seen, too much admin is pushed on medical staff. Strangely, doctors are not super super keen on paperwork. They seem to prefer doing medicine, for some reason.
Decent interview with Steve Barclay on sky news. Like Matt Hancock he was part of the 2010 intake of MPs but didn't have the same stellar rise. As for another member of the 2010 intake, what happened to Sajid Javid?
He says the NHS is under huge pressure because of the pandemic. Which is true up to a point, There are other reasons why it's in a bad way (particularly in England but other nations have issues as well), which are due to the way his government has been managed and continues to manage the NHS and other public services. Of course he doesn't mention those. Our European peers don't have the same problem with their health systems. But he did go on again in the papers about abolishing "NHS pen pushers" as a solution to the problems. This is a sign of an unserious health minister.
It is a little harsh to blame the Westminster government for the shrivelled husk that is the NHS in Wales. Or the mess in Scotland, for that matter.
Blame them for the mess in England, by all means, but surely we have more brains and/or integrity on this board than Sturgeon or Drakeford?
Indeed.
Healthcare is complicated and to be fair to the devolved administrations and to Barclay in his Health Minister role, many of the issues are at the UK government level. The single biggest problem (amongst many) for the NHS is staff shortages. The healthcare system doesn't set its own budget and on current offers, nurses with other public sector workers are getting much less than inflation wage rises (they are striking for a much higher amount). The only way to offer a more attractive wage and stay in budget is to cut headcount, which isn't great when you have staff shortages. Another major problem is bed blocking due to lack of social care, with much the same root causes,
Key takeaway from the Barclay interview is the government has no realistic plan to fix the healthcare problem.
Obviously not.
He complains about pen-pushers but the NHS has lower admin overhead than comparable health systems, and arguably therefore not enough.
From what I have seen, too much admin is pushed on medical staff. Strangely, doctors are not super super keen on paperwork. They seem to prefer doing medicine, for some reason.
I question whether Barclay can sufficiently distinguish between what the NHS does well, and what it does less well - what should stay centralised and what should be devolved more locally.
Some centralised stuff works very well - I'd perhaps identify NICE treatment standards and the centralised purchasing operation, and the large research databases which facilitated development of COVID treatmenrs as good centralised things.
I wonder how much of the Barclay agenda is actually about obfuscating stats he finds embarrassing.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
I voted Remain *despite* despising the EU and many of its works.
Part of the problem was the methodology used by the U.K. in Europe. Blair gave up the rebate, for a vague promise of a review of the Common Agricultural policy. When he asked about it, Chirac told him that he was “Ill mannered” for bringing the subject up.
The issue was the belief that by sacrificing things, we would get Brownie points that we could cash in.
What should have been done was a deal on the CAP vs Rebate, so that after Chirac’s little bon mot, someone in the EU would have asked about the rebate. And been told that it was ill mannered for them to ask. That’s how the game is played.
It's a game a majority no longer wanted to play. Thank you for asking.
Those playing the game were very happily doing so without allowing the voters a say. Some were doing very nicely out of it. You can tell how well in that after 6 years, they still haven't stopped squealing like stuck pigs.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
NATO and the EU are a very powerful combination. As close as we’ve been able to manage on this side of the Atlantic to the American dream.
One guarantees freedom from (largely Russian) imperialistic tyranny; the other promises economic development and the opportunity to travel freely for work and leisure. The post Soviet era without both would have been much less successful for Eastern Europe. Look at Poland and the Baltics, and now even the troubled Balkans, to see the dynamic in action.
Security independence outside NATO is a dead end for Europe as the current war has shown. Economic independence outside the EU is a drag on prosperity for integrated European economies like Britain as our trade stats have shown.
Europe has no security independence inside NATO as that organisation is dominated by the US. Poland had to check with Biden if they could give Fulcrums to Ukraine and the answer was 'no'.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
I voted Remain *despite* despising the EU and many of its works.
Part of the problem was the methodology used by the U.K. in Europe. Blair gave up the rebate, for a vague promise of a review of the Common Agricultural policy. When he asked about it, Chirac told him that he was “Ill mannered” for bringing the subject up.
The issue was the belief that by sacrificing things, we would get Brownie points that we could cash in.
What should have been done was a deal on the CAP vs Rebate, so that after Chirac’s little bon mot, someone in the EU would have asked about the rebate. And been told that it was ill mannered for them to ask. That’s how the game is played.
It's a game a majority no longer wanted to play. Thank you for asking.
Those playing the game were very happily doing so without allowing the voters a say. Some were doing very nicely out of it. You can tell how well in that after 6 years, they still haven't stopped squealing like stuck pigs.
I agree with the premise that Rejoin or Not Brexit is not the solution to all British ills.
It does indeed risk being seen as a magic bullets.
The connection is that in order to address British economic issues you have to be realistic and the same mindset naturally results in one realising that Brexit was a fucking disaster.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Thanks for that - I'll give it a listen.
France, Netherlands, Germany is a reasonable triplet in Europe as comparators, certainly.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
It will last about as long as the arguments about Copernicus.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
You have a fundamentalist (in the religious sense) belief in rejoining. Your fatal mistake is to regard your religion as empirically true.
Brexit is a series of trade-offs. Some people will regard marginally lower GDP growth as a price worth paying for greater democratic accountability (arguments for Scottish independence rest on this case, too).
Others still will argue that while freedom of movement increases overall GDP, it also creates a bifurcated society with an increasingly wealthy, mobile, highly educated elite who enjoy greater freedoms at the expense of suppressing the wages of the poor.
You simply believe that your trade offs are better than the other side's trade offs. Yet you insist you are right with all the religious zeal of a fundamentalist.
Also not the point I was making.
There is an argument that people would support a Brexit that makes us poorer, but it would not have won the vote and it was not the argument made at the time.
Remainers said leaving would be bad economically.
Brexiteers said leaving would be good economically.
Only one of those statements is true.
Only one of them is real.
The other is fantasy.
We voted for fantasy. That does not trump reality.
How do we avoid this situation in the future if we continue to indulge the fantasists?
The problem with your argument there is that lots of politicians, business leaders, random people on twitter, etc, made lots of arguments.
At the ballot box, nobody was being asked to vote for the Brexit Party, for Farage's vision of Leave, for Johnson's, etc. People were asked to assess all the arguments made and choose an option based on their beliefs.
And that is the problem - beliefs come down to your value system and what you consider to be acceptable trade-offs.
As someone who values democratic accountability I was absolutely bloody livid at the lie we were promised a referendum on the EU constitution that became rubber stamped as the Lisbon Treaty. Therefore it was very hard for me to place any trust in remainer politicians who wanted us tied to the project in perpetuity without a say in the matter.
My point is that people voted the way they did for all kinds of reasons, all of them valid, and all of them depending on your values and the expected trade-offs. There was no right or wrong answer in 2016, only opinion based on your values. Yet you cling to the belief that your religion is empirically verifiable and everyone else is a dangerous heretic.
A greater understanding of why people have different beliefs to your own would go a long way to helping you understand why you lost the vote.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Adding five million unskilled and semi-skilled people to a population, in less than a decade, will have exactly that effect.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Adding five million unskilled and semi-skilled people to a population, in less than a decade, will have exactly that effect.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
I voted Remain *despite* despising the EU and many of its works.
Part of the problem was the methodology used by the U.K. in Europe. Blair gave up the rebate, for a vague promise of a review of the Common Agricultural policy. When he asked about it, Chirac told him that he was “Ill mannered” for bringing the subject up.
The issue was the belief that by sacrificing things, we would get Brownie points that we could cash in.
What should have been done was a deal on the CAP vs Rebate, so that after Chirac’s little bon mot, someone in the EU would have asked about the rebate. And been told that it was ill mannered for them to ask. That’s how the game is played.
It's a game a majority no longer wanted to play. Thank you for asking.
Those playing the game were very happily doing so without allowing the voters a say. Some were doing very nicely out of it. You can tell how well in that after 6 years, they still haven't stopped squealing like stuck pigs.
Now nobody is doing nicely.
I'm doing very nicely. I no longer have Nigel Farage holding sway over me from Brussels.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Adding five million unskilled and semi-skilled people to a population, in less than a decade, will have exactly that effect.
Actually, the reverse. But you do you.
Ah yes, making the minimum wage, the maximum wage for millions of people, makes them richer than when their labour is a scarce resource. Of course it does.
Dunt’s correct - it’s the speed that everything is shifting, momentum is gathering. It’s like the public have given Brexit a chance, on the whole they respected the referendum vote, for all its flaws, but now they’re saying ‘actually, Brexit was a mistake’. Labour need to be brave now.
It’s really not like that at all. It's like a desperate establishment campaign to scare people into rejoining, complete with Osborne's punishment budget. It won't wash.
I dunno - people will look at independent forecasts from the OBR and IFS, and conclude that part of the impact on their incomes is because of Brexit. Some, not all.
Unless those amazing trade deals magic something up
Remainers are incredibly inconsistent on these arguments. Reducing trade friction with the EU is going to be an enormous boost. Reducing trade friction with anyone else is magic fantasy. Yes, the EU is closer, but it's only a small fraction of the world economy. You can see the net effect is neutral because even in the EU, our trade with Europe was less than 50%.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Adding five million unskilled and semi-skilled people to a population, in less than a decade, will have exactly that effect.
Actually, the reverse. But you do you.
Ah yes, making the minimum wage, the maximum wage for millions of people, makes them richer than when their labour is a scarce resource. Of course it does.
As as been pointed out to you countless times, EU migration was better skilled than domestic labour, improved corporate productivity, and helped ease the demographic burden besides.
That’s not to say there were no issues, but basically your argument is 100% wrong.
I know anti-immigration sneering is pretty much all you have left, but it’s boring to see it trotted out over and over.
Especially from someone who is…an immigrant…married to…an immigrant.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
It will last about as long as the arguments about Copernicus.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
You have a fundamentalist (in the religious sense) belief in rejoining. Your fatal mistake is to regard your religion as empirically true.
Brexit is a series of trade-offs. Some people will regard marginally lower GDP growth as a price worth paying for greater democratic accountability (arguments for Scottish independence rest on this case, too).
Others still will argue that while freedom of movement increases overall GDP, it also creates a bifurcated society with an increasingly wealthy, mobile, highly educated elite who enjoy greater freedoms at the expense of suppressing the wages of the poor.
You simply believe that your trade offs are better than the other side's trade offs. Yet you insist you are right with all the religious zeal of a fundamentalist.
Also not the point I was making.
There is an argument that people would support a Brexit that makes us poorer, but it would not have won the vote and it was not the argument made at the time.
Remainers said leaving would be bad economically.
Brexiteers said leaving would be good economically.
Only one of those statements is true.
Only one of them is real.
The other is fantasy.
We voted for fantasy. That does not trump reality.
How do we avoid this situation in the future if we continue to indulge the fantasists?
The problem with your argument there is that lots of politicians, business leaders, random people on twitter, etc, made lots of arguments.
At the ballot box, nobody was being asked to vote for the Brexit Party, for Farage's vision of Leave, for Johnson's, etc. People were asked to assess all the arguments made and choose an option based on their beliefs.
And that is the problem - beliefs come down to your value system and what you consider to be acceptable trade-offs.
As someone who values democratic accountability I was absolutely bloody livid at the lie we were promised a referendum on the EU constitution that became rubber stamped as the Lisbon Treaty. Therefore it was very hard for me to place any trust in remainer politicians who wanted us tied to the project in perpetuity without a say in the matter.
My point is that people voted the way they did for all kinds of reasons, all of them valid, and all of them depending on your values and the expected trade-offs. There was no right or wrong answer in 2016, only opinion based on your values. Yet you cling to the belief that your religion is empirically verifiable and everyone else is a dangerous heretic.
A greater understanding of why people have different beliefs to your own would go a long way to helping you understand why you lost the vote.
Same for me. The grotesque and shameful lies over the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution made me finally determined that, if ever I got a vote, I would surely vote against the EU in any form
I had one caveat. If we got serious reform I could be reconciled. I had hopes Cameron would achieve that, he did nothing of the sort
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
I voted Remain *despite* despising the EU and many of its works.
Part of the problem was the methodology used by the U.K. in Europe. Blair gave up the rebate, for a vague promise of a review of the Common Agricultural policy. When he asked about it, Chirac told him that he was “Ill mannered” for bringing the subject up.
The issue was the belief that by sacrificing things, we would get Brownie points that we could cash in.
What should have been done was a deal on the CAP vs Rebate, so that after Chirac’s little bon mot, someone in the EU would have asked about the rebate. And been told that it was ill mannered for them to ask. That’s how the game is played.
It's a game a majority no longer wanted to play. Thank you for asking.
Those playing the game were very happily doing so without allowing the voters a say. Some were doing very nicely out of it. You can tell how well in that after 6 years, they still haven't stopped squealing like stuck pigs.
Now nobody is doing nicely.
I'm doing very nicely. I no longer have Nigel Farage holding sway over me from Brussels.
Better meds eh? Amazing what doctors can do these days.
Obviously not every Remainer is a Europhile, but many of the most vocal are. They attribute things to the EU that have little to do with it, a perennial favourite of mine being European peace, somehow they forget the very existence of NATO.
NATO and the EU are a very powerful combination. As close as we’ve been able to manage on this side of the Atlantic to the American dream.
One guarantees freedom from (largely Russian) imperialistic tyranny; the other promises economic development and the opportunity to travel freely for work and leisure. The post Soviet era without both would have been much less successful for Eastern Europe. Look at Poland and the Baltics, and now even the troubled Balkans, to see the dynamic in action.
Security independence outside NATO is a dead end for Europe as the current war has shown. Economic independence outside the EU is a drag on prosperity for integrated European economies like Britain as our trade stats have shown.
Europe has no security independence inside NATO as that organisation is dominated by the US. Poland had to check with Biden if they could give Fulcrums to Ukraine and the answer was 'no'.
Probably unhelpful terminology on my part. I mean independence from the external threat, which for Eastern Europe is Russia.
Obviously not full independence of action, otherwise no treaty organisation could ever survive. All involve trading some sovereignty for a material or security benefit. See EU likewise.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Adding five million unskilled and semi-skilled people to a population, in less than a decade, will have exactly that effect.
Actually, the reverse. But you do you.
Ah yes, making the minimum wage, the maximum wage for millions of people, makes them richer than when their labour is a scarce resource. Of course it does.
As as been pointed out to you countless times, EU migration was better skilled than domestic labour, improved corporate productivity, and helped ease the demographic burden besides.
I know anti-immigration sneering is pretty much all you have left, but it’s boring to see it trotted out over and over.
Yes, you seem convinced that a native population where a huge number of people are reliant on minimum wage, unwaged ‘gig’ work, and state benefit top-ups, is a happy state of affairs.
Dunt’s correct - it’s the speed that everything is shifting, momentum is gathering. It’s like the public have given Brexit a chance, on the whole they respected the referendum vote, for all its flaws, but now they’re saying ‘actually, Brexit was a mistake’. Labour need to be brave now.
It’s really not like that at all. It's like a desperate establishment campaign to scare people into rejoining, complete with Osborne's punishment budget. It won't wash.
I dunno - people will look at independent forecasts from the OBR and IFS, and conclude that part of the impact on their incomes is because of Brexit. Some, not all.
Unless those amazing trade deals magic something up
There are profound questions regarding the neutrality of the OBR, and the IFS isn't even meant to be neutral.
No-one here apart from me probably listens to R4, but this morning David Goodhart, who coined the "somewheres" and "anywheres" dichotomy, had the Point of View slot after the Sunday service. He points out that there's really hardly anything between the main parties in terms of policies. Brexit has made us more democratic and we have achieved a better balance between anywheres and somewheres. The dominant anywhere establishment on the right and the left had built an economy around their interests. He reckons that the anywhere agenda remains the default but has been diluted since Brexit. Despite all he thinks that our politics is now better balanced, even though it is stuck in the morass and we need more vision from our politicians. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001f5kt
I've told the story before of a Chinese seminar where I was asked whether most people in Britain actually feel they are being given a meaningful choice. For many it's more like choosing football teams to back - they have a preference but it's not based on any detailed policy differences.
The trouble is that, as we saw with Truss and (narrowly) Corbyn, people don't like radical alternatives. They're more comfortable with tootling along with something roughly like the present, only better managed and with more help for people like themselves. Generally that instinct is right - history is littered with disasters of people seizing radical alternatives. But occasionally the consensus will simply be wrong and we'll be stuck in a rut for too long.
The answer for your Chinese should have been that it is less about the choice than in the behaviour of and incentives for those who are chosen or unchosen.
Putting aside Brexit, Torsten Bell explains the uniquely British economic malaise very well on a recent episode of “News Agents”.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Adding five million unskilled and semi-skilled people to a population, in less than a decade, will have exactly that effect.
Actually, the reverse. But you do you.
Ah yes, making the minimum wage, the maximum wage for millions of people, makes them richer than when their labour is a scarce resource. Of course it does.
As as been pointed out to you countless times, EU migration was better skilled than domestic labour, improved corporate productivity, and helped ease the demographic burden besides.
I know anti-immigration sneering is pretty much all you have left, but it’s boring to see it trotted out over and over.
Yes, you seem convinced that a native population where a huge number of people are reliant on minimum wage, unwaged ‘gig’ work, and state benefit top-ups, is a happy state of affairs.
But EU migration didn’t cause those things.
Minimum wage, gig economy (eg zero hours contracting) and in-work benefits are all deliberate cross-party policies of the last xx years.
Dunno about that - empirical evidence suggests the argument about Brexit could easily last forever.
It will last about as long as the arguments about Copernicus.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
You have a fundamentalist (in the religious sense) belief in rejoining. Your fatal mistake is to regard your religion as empirically true.
Brexit is a series of trade-offs. Some people will regard marginally lower GDP growth as a price worth paying for greater democratic accountability (arguments for Scottish independence rest on this case, too).
Others still will argue that while freedom of movement increases overall GDP, it also creates a bifurcated society with an increasingly wealthy, mobile, highly educated elite who enjoy greater freedoms at the expense of suppressing the wages of the poor.
You simply believe that your trade offs are better than the other side's trade offs. Yet you insist you are right with all the religious zeal of a fundamentalist.
Also not the point I was making.
There is an argument that people would support a Brexit that makes us poorer, but it would not have won the vote and it was not the argument made at the time.
Remainers said leaving would be bad economically.
Brexiteers said leaving would be good economically.
Only one of those statements is true.
Only one of them is real.
The other is fantasy.
We voted for fantasy. That does not trump reality.
How do we avoid this situation in the future if we continue to indulge the fantasists?
The problem with your argument there is that lots of politicians, business leaders, random people on twitter, etc, made lots of arguments.
At the ballot box, nobody was being asked to vote for the Brexit Party, for Farage's vision of Leave, for Johnson's, etc. People were asked to assess all the arguments made and choose an option based on their beliefs.
And that is the problem - beliefs come down to your value system and what you consider to be acceptable trade-offs.
As someone who values democratic accountability I was absolutely bloody livid at the lie we were promised a referendum on the EU constitution that became rubber stamped as the Lisbon Treaty. Therefore it was very hard for me to place any trust in remainer politicians who wanted us tied to the project in perpetuity without a say in the matter.
My point is that people voted the way they did for all kinds of reasons, all of them valid, and all of them depending on your values and the expected trade-offs. There was no right or wrong answer in 2016, only opinion based on your values. Yet you cling to the belief that your religion is empirically verifiable and everyone else is a dangerous heretic.
A greater understanding of why people have different beliefs to your own would go a long way to helping you understand why you lost the vote.
Same for me. The grotesque and shameful lies over the Lisbon Treaty/Constitution made me finally determined that, if ever I got a vote, I would surely vote against the EU in any form
I had one caveat. If we got serious reform I could be reconciled. I had hopes Cameron would achieve that, he did nothing of the sort
That’s because he gave himself about three months and thought he could charm Merkel with a Midsomer Murders boxset.
Comments
https://twitter.com/jemmaforte/status/1594271852934959105?s=20&t=mDW6c4CXggqGKrREepz5QA
My fear is less of Trump (although it remains the case he could win if he stands - he's flawed but not, sadly, quite unelectable). It's more that De Santis - a more credible but nonetheless rather extreme figure - would be GOP candidate and prevail against a clearly elderly Biden simply because it's easier to convey energy and drive if you're not 82.
Biden said he wanted to be a bridge to the future - but he should think about which future he wants to be a bridge to.
And there's no good reason to think Harris would be the favourite.
I voted remain but accept brexit
However, urgent review into our trade relationship is required without actually rejoining
https://twitter.com/jemmaforte/status/1594271852934959105?s=46&t=Josa0hgSdakTaL2G4BGCsg
Angela Rippon on GBeebies? Who knew?
The trouble is that, as we saw with Truss and (narrowly) Corbyn, people don't like radical alternatives. They're more comfortable with tootling along with something roughly like the present, only better managed and with more help for people like themselves. Generally that instinct is right - history is littered with disasters of people seizing radical alternatives. But occasionally the consensus will simply be wrong and we'll be stuck in a rut for too long.
What does "accept Brexit" mean?
I accept Brexit.
I accept that it makes us poorer, that it weakens our standing on the international stage, that it restricts my freedoms as a citizen and increases my costs as a consumer.
All of those things were known before the referendum, which is why I don't vote for it.
Brexiteers seem to think "accept Brexit" means deny the reality of how shit it is.
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Retreating Russians destroyed the city's power grid, repair works are ongoing to this day.
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1593907434300403719
There are many differing views as to what your average Leave voting punter expected the economic future to look like after Brexit.
Almost none of them were remotely like this.
That stands whether it is because of Brexit or not.
We've Brexited. And we're worse off.
The SNP tried to legislate away reality.
Brexiteers tried to vote it away.
In both cases reality comes up trumps.
Hancock should have the whip restored sharpish, if Number 10 is, as seems to be the case, running scared of by-elections because otherwise Hancock is incentivised to jump before he is pushed.
Blame them for the mess in England, by all means, but surely we have more brains and/or integrity on this board than Sturgeon or Drakeford?
Doesn't mean the person who supported the losing party should give up and become a member of the winning party.
As many on here seem to think applies with Brexit.
If he resigns, I don't think he even gets expenses to close his office.
Jared O'Mara is relevant here.
The answer to the question "Do you accept Brexit?" is "In the same way I accept Liz Truss became PM"
Remainers don't "love the EU"
I voted Remain not because I love the EU, I really don’t, but I wanted nurse for fear of something worse….and wasn’t I absolutely right
https://twitter.com/HarryWorcester/status/1593957527011590147
Number 10 needs to restore the whip and hold him close; hold out the prospect of returning to office.
The residual Brexit support is mostly where that is true, the retired and a few financiers and speculators.
I agree though that there is a need for a more positive campaign to Rejoin, not just a desire to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust. To me that includes the desire to fully participate in continent wide solutions to the problems of our age.
The mooted "Swiss style" deal seems to me to be moonshine, and not something that the EU are keen to repeat. It too stalls on FoM.
Joining the SM properly may be more viable, but why would we want to do that without participating in the decision making around that SM by full membership?
To me the only logical outcomes are hard Brexit or no Brexit.
Eventually the religious give way to the realists.
Penrose wants to be a hard core non-believer but can’t give up the idea that humans are special.
There are plenty of organisms that live a lot longer than we do.
https://www.theipsa.org.uk/freedom-of-information/cas-156839
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50826472
Because grinding peoples faces into the dust doesn’t make them more stubborn. Not at all.
What you actually want to do is to build a political movement of people in favour of Europe. When you have a nice big majority of those, you’ll get rejoin.
You won’t get rejoin because Starmer does a whipped vote on day 1 for rejoin. He won’t commit political suicide for you.
EDIT : what annoyed him, I think was my suggestion that we could vat grow human neurons and build a machine that way, if that is what it took.
Brexit is a series of trade-offs. Some people will regard marginally lower GDP growth as a price worth paying for greater democratic accountability (arguments for Scottish independence rest on this case, too).
Others still will argue that while freedom of movement increases overall GDP, it also creates a bifurcated society with an increasingly wealthy, mobile, highly educated elite who enjoy greater freedoms at the expense of suppressing the wages of the poor.
You simply believe that your trade offs are better than the other side's trade offs. Yet you insist you are right with all the religious zeal of a fundamentalist.
There's a reason why various groups are desperate to centralise things further before any other countries join.
I would say that the author quoted earlier by @northern_monkey is an example of someone who can't bring themselves to stop looking backwards. Which is the reverse of what we need.
Healthcare is complicated and to be fair to the devolved administrations and to Barclay in his Health Minister role, many of the issues are at the UK government level. The single biggest problem (amongst many) for the NHS is staff shortages. The healthcare system doesn't set its own budget and on current offers, nurses with other public sector workers are getting much less than inflation wage rises (they are striking for a much higher amount). The only way to offer a more attractive wage and stay in budget is to cut headcount, which isn't great when you have staff shortages. Another major problem is bed blocking due to lack of social care, with much the same root causes,
Key takeaway from the Barclay interview is the government has no realistic plan to fix the healthcare problem.
I want to get (back) to a point where a politician like Nigel Fucking Farage is laughed off the stage instead of being feted on every platform for spouting spurious bullshit.
I want a politician who says with a straight face "We have had enough of experts" expunged.
I want journalists and broadcasters to once again presents facts, not presents opinions as equivalent.
The requirement to grind Brexiteers faces into the dust is a necessary but not sufficient condition for that.
I hope the same thing happens to the SNP in Scotland.
The religious person who refused to give way to reality in that case was the infamous atheist fundamentalist Andrew Dickson White, who made a number of false claims about Copernicus including that his work was suppressed by the Catholic church, as part of the evidence for his (also long-discredited) conflict thesis.
But his followers, alas, show no sign of allowing their religion to give way to reality.
More here: https://historyforatheists.com/2018/07/the-great-myths-6-copernicus-deathbed-publication/
Don’t lobsters and similar crustaceans, live an extremely long time, unless as quoted, they are caught and eaten!
That doesn't preclude European co-operation as a building block, indeed that is a foundation. It is also far easier to internationally co-operate with peoples whose economies and societies are much like our own.
EEA? EFTA? What?
Not a divisive screaming match with Project Fear on one side and £350m on a bus on the other
I am trying to be optimistic
There is an argument that people would support a Brexit that makes us poorer, but it would not have won the vote and it was not the argument made at the time.
Remainers said leaving would be bad economically.
Brexiteers said leaving would be good economically.
Only one of those statements is true.
Only one of them is real.
The other is fantasy.
We voted for fantasy. That does not trump reality.
How do we avoid this situation in the future if we continue to indulge the fantasists?
He complains about pen-pushers but the NHS has lower admin overhead than comparable health systems, and arguably therefore not enough.
Part of the problem was the methodology used by the U.K. in Europe. Blair gave up the rebate, for a vague promise of a review of the Common Agricultural policy. When he asked about it, Chirac told him that he was “Ill mannered” for bringing the subject up.
The issue was the belief that by sacrificing things, we would get Brownie points that we could cash in.
What should have been done was a deal on the CAP vs Rebate, so that after Chirac’s little bon mot, someone in the EU would have asked about the rebate. And been told that it was ill mannered for them to ask. That’s how the game is played.
It could be a "presumed alignment". As a policy the UK sticks with EU regulation unless it sees a good reason to change. The UK is aligned to the EU in whatever areas both parties agree the UK is aligned, which allows a number of checks to be de-risked and barriers removed. This is some of the thinking going into improvements to the Northern Ireland protocol, but it conceivably extend to the whole UK. It is far from a single market with its benefits but it could remove the bottlenecks at Dover for example.
One guarantees freedom from (largely Russian) imperialistic tyranny; the other promises economic development and the opportunity to travel freely for work and
leisure. The post Soviet era without both would have been much less successful for Eastern Europe. Look at Poland and the Baltics, and now even the troubled Balkans, to see the dynamic in action.
Security independence outside NATO is a dead end for Europe as the current war has shown. Economic independence outside the EU is a drag on prosperity for integrated European economies like Britain as our trade stats have shown.
We have deep-seating issues in our economy. It's depressing that once again, people are selling us the idea that joining the EU (then the EEC) is some sort of cure for them. As historical record clearly shows, we remained the sick man of Europe until the Thatcher reforms. Joining the EEC wasn't the answer then, and rejoining the EU sure as shit isn't the answer now.
Take five countries with which Britons might think they are broadly comparable: France, Netherlands, Germany, Canada and Australia.
Britain is much more unequal and quite a bit poorer. The wealthiest in Britain are doing the same (or better), but the middle and bottom are *much* poorer than their peers.
If Britain was like these neighbours, the average family would be £8,800 better off per year.
And now, that family faces increased energy costs which are priced globally…
Unless those amazing trade deals magic something up
Some centralised stuff works very well - I'd perhaps identify NICE treatment standards and the centralised purchasing operation, and the large research databases which facilitated development of COVID treatmenrs as good centralised things.
I wonder how much of the Barclay agenda is actually about obfuscating stats he finds embarrassing.
Those playing the game were very happily doing so without allowing the voters a say. Some were doing very nicely out of it. You can tell how well in that after 6 years, they still haven't stopped squealing like stuck pigs.
It does indeed risk being seen as a magic bullets.
The connection is that in order to address British economic issues you have to be realistic and the same mindset naturally results in one realising that Brexit was a fucking disaster.
France, Netherlands, Germany is a reasonable triplet in Europe as comparators, certainly.
At the ballot box, nobody was being asked to vote for the Brexit Party, for Farage's vision of Leave, for Johnson's, etc. People were asked to assess all the arguments made and choose an option based on their beliefs.
And that is the problem - beliefs come down to your value system and what you consider to be acceptable trade-offs.
As someone who values democratic accountability I was absolutely bloody livid at the lie we were promised a referendum on the EU constitution that became rubber stamped as the Lisbon Treaty. Therefore it was very hard for me to place any trust in remainer politicians who wanted us tied to the project in perpetuity without a say in the matter.
My point is that people voted the way they did for all kinds of reasons, all of them valid, and all of them depending on your values and the expected trade-offs. There was no right or wrong answer in 2016, only opinion based on your values. Yet you cling to the belief that your religion is empirically verifiable and everyone else is a dangerous heretic.
A greater understanding of why people have different beliefs to your own would go a long way to helping you understand why you lost the vote.
But you do you.
That’s not to say there were no issues, but basically your argument is 100% wrong.
I know anti-immigration sneering is pretty much all you have left, but it’s boring to see it trotted out over and over.
Especially from someone who is…an immigrant…married to…an immigrant.
I had one caveat. If we got serious reform I could be reconciled. I had hopes Cameron would achieve that, he did nothing of the sort
Obviously not full independence of action, otherwise no treaty organisation could ever survive. All involve trading some sovereignty for a material or security benefit. See EU likewise.
I have him doing it from the House of lords where I can't.
Minimum wage, gig economy (eg zero hours contracting) and in-work benefits are all deliberate cross-party policies of the last xx years.
Change in the EU is glacial.