Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-018.pdf "The results indicate that EOTHO induced higher footfall (by 5%-6%) associated with recreational activities, concentrated on specific days when the discount was available (Mondays to Wednesdays in August). However, the programme failed to encourage people to go out for other purposes and to eat out after the discount ended.
"EOTHO also increased recruitment in the food preparation & service sector. We observe an increase in the number of jobs posts (by 7%-14%) on the Indeed website. We do not find evidence of an increase in the number of job posts in other industries, suggesting the effect on recruitment was concentrated on food establishments. As this indicator measures the flow of job adverts, a transitory effect on job posts could still imply a permanent increase in the number of employees.
"Over 160 million meals were claimed by the end of September 2020, with government spending £849 million on the policy. Data limitations as well as the interaction between different policies complicate any cost-benefit calculation of the programme. On top of that, there is evidence indicating the increase in footfall due to EOTHO had an adverse effect on new COVID-19 cases. Thus, any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections. Further research – using administrative data– is needed to assess the overall cost-effectiveness of EOTHO."
All that 'may have' and 'up to' pales in comparison compared to how much covid was imported from France, Spain etc in the summer and autumn of 2020.
It seems that those still frothing about EOTHO have no problems with British people going to a restaurant at that time as long as that restaurant was in another country with far more prevalent covid.
Both symptoms of a wider underlying problem.
We all wanted to think that COVID was basically a solved problem in summer 2020. We all did, really, but the UK government (freedom! profits! dislike of bad news!) was particularly prone to that bit of wishful thinking.
We treated it as VE day, when it was more like the end of the Battle of Britain.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
On topic - I suspect so because I don’t think the Tories could pull off another coup without the whole country giving up on them now. 4 PMs in a parliament is patently ridiculous.
BUT:
I think there is a case, if Sunak is facing all but certain defeat, where he might quit as Tory leader but not PM, and let a new candidate fight the GE.
Technically, that allows him to avoid the heavy loss and he can have some legacy on the after dinner speech circuit as coming in as a crisis manager etc without the difficult footnote that he led his party to a landslide defeat.
I do not put it past Sunak or the Tory Party to try a wheeze like that to present themselves as the change candidates in the election.
Sunak resigning and forcing a leadership contest is a different vibe from the Party knifing Sunak and having a leadership contest.
Still damaging to what is left of the Tory rep. But perhaps less damaging
I can plausibly see a scenario where Rishi hands the reigns over to Braverman to fight 2024, where she will promptly run a Trumpian “drain the swamp” campaign.
Braverman??? Really
What should the UK version of Krystalnacht be called? We might want to start researching it early.
That seems an unfairly short time for @Alanbrooke's provocative header. He deserved longer.
Yes, a very good and pertinent piece. Kay Burley on Sky News just mentioned that Save the Children won’t be happy with the uk government not calling for a ceasefire. Why should their opinion count any more than anyone else’s?
Ultimately I did not agree with @Alanbrooke's position but I have greatly welcomed his thread headers over the last week or so. A new and different voice is very welcome and he writes very well. I hope he is not discouraged by this somewhat unfortunate timing.
I'll republish Alan's piece later, a bit of a publishing SNAFU took place.
On topic - I suspect so because I don’t think the Tories could pull off another coup without the whole country giving up on them now. 4 PMs in a parliament is patently ridiculous.
BUT:
I think there is a case, if Sunak is facing all but certain defeat, where he might quit as Tory leader but not PM, and let a new candidate fight the GE.
Technically, that allows him to avoid the heavy loss and he can have some legacy on the after dinner speech circuit as coming in as a crisis manager etc without the difficult footnote that he led his party to a landslide defeat.
I do not put it past Sunak or the Tory Party to try a wheeze like that to present themselves as the change candidates in the election.
Sunak resigning and forcing a leadership contest is a different vibe from the Party knifing Sunak and having a leadership contest.
Still damaging to what is left of the Tory rep. But perhaps less damaging
I can plausibly see a scenario where Rishi hands the reigns over to Braverman to fight 2024, where she will promptly run a Trumpian “drain the swamp” campaign.
Braverman??? Really
What should the UK version of Krystalnacht be called? We might want to start researching it early.
I see no reason to change my view she is going to be the next leader, I’m afraid. She should be the red hot favourite IMHO.
Yes Sunak is safe. He generally polls better than his party and nobody else wants to do the job until Opposition when Labour would have to deal with inflation and the economy in government
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-018.pdf "The results indicate that EOTHO induced higher footfall (by 5%-6%) associated with recreational activities, concentrated on specific days when the discount was available (Mondays to Wednesdays in August). However, the programme failed to encourage people to go out for other purposes and to eat out after the discount ended.
"EOTHO also increased recruitment in the food preparation & service sector. We observe an increase in the number of jobs posts (by 7%-14%) on the Indeed website. We do not find evidence of an increase in the number of job posts in other industries, suggesting the effect on recruitment was concentrated on food establishments. As this indicator measures the flow of job adverts, a transitory effect on job posts could still imply a permanent increase in the number of employees.
"Over 160 million meals were claimed by the end of September 2020, with government spending £849 million on the policy. Data limitations as well as the interaction between different policies complicate any cost-benefit calculation of the programme. On top of that, there is evidence indicating the increase in footfall due to EOTHO had an adverse effect on new COVID-19 cases. Thus, any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections. Further research – using administrative data– is needed to assess the overall cost-effectiveness of EOTHO."
All that 'may have' and 'up to' pales in comparison compared to how much covid was imported from France, Spain etc in the summer and autumn of 2020.
It seems that those still frothing about EOTHO have no problems with British people going to a restaurant at that time as long as that restaurant was in another country with far more prevalent covid.
The Government made several different mistakes when it came to the spread of the disease. The existence of one failure does not mean another failure is unimportant.
I've just heard on radio news (Deutschlandfunk) that the Rusian parliament has voted to break from the agreement not to carry out nuclear tests. (Reported by Reuters)
The news just seems to get worse day by day, bit by bit.
Check FlightRadar for test flights from American air bases in Europe for the next couple of days. That was what happened the last couple of times Russia rattled its nuclear sabre.
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
Its possible! I don't it will happen though: Flights won't start going to Rwanda Inflation won't fall as quickly as hoped - fuel and energy prices through the winter They can't Stop The Boats. Imagine the impact of a surge in crossings during an April campaign as the weather improves They can't stop using hotels as they have to put them somewhere.
Jerusalem looks like a beautiful city when you see BBC reporters positioned in front of that hill full of Cypress trees .
You can’t get a starker comparison to the scenes in Gaza .
“Jerusalem the Golden”
It is indeed a lovely city. Not quite beautiful in the way of Venice or Paris or Bath (or Siracusa!) but lovely. The history on top of that makes it intensely magical
eg you can literally walk down “the valley of the shadow of death”. Gehenna. It’s a little valley right by the Old City where ur-Israelis did barbaric child sacrifices - throwing babies into vast bronze ovens - as priests played trumpets to drown out the screams
When the sacrifices were stopped it became a cemetery then a kind of garbage pit. Even today it has an air of accursed evil. No one lives there. 4000 years of psychogeography
(Very) off topic - I note stories of people approaching retirement age with interest only mortgages on their OO properties seem to be cropping up in the papers. You can smell the "missold" claims coming up a few years down the line from here, but I think people with an interest only mortgage knew exactly what it is they were buying tbh.
They will have received statements every year on what they owed.
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
This keeps being reported as 'closing hotels' but is that correct? I thought the idea is they go back to normal 'non migrant' business.
It's poorly phrased both my myself and the Government. It's a return to 'non-migrant' business but "closing the migrant hotels" sounds a lot better from a PR approach.
God. I'm doing the Government's job for them. Get a grip.
Yes mustn't on any account do that. But ok, right, that's what I thought. We are Taking Back Our Hotels.
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
So what?
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
I've just heard on radio news (Deutschlandfunk) that the Rusian parliament has voted to break from the agreement not to carry out nuclear tests. (Reported by Reuters)
The news just seems to get worse day by day, bit by bit.
Check FlightRadar for test flights from American air bases in Europe for the next couple of days. That was what happened the last couple of times Russia rattled its nuclear sabre.
#1 on FlightRadar this morning, is an American RC-135 Combat Sent surveillance aircraft out of Mildenhall, currently just off the coast of Kaliningrad, presumably watching for bears and submarines.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
Eh? People caught it eventually anyway surely? Unless you have evidence that it caused excess deaths?
You forget the impact of the vaccines. If you delay cases past vaccination, you can either stop people catching the virus or when they do so, it is much less serious. Those ~69k infections happened before vaccination. Without EOTHO, most of those people would have gotten to vaccination without getting infected.
Sure, but there was no lockdown at that time in any case. It was the middle of summer. Did you refuse to go out, see your family, go on holiday, even though you were allowed to? As I say, people were gathering anyway, this scheme just directed that revenue into hospitality and away from supermarkets - which had been making an absolute mint during the pandemic thanks to a state-mandated monopoly.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-018.pdf "The results indicate that EOTHO induced higher footfall (by 5%-6%) associated with recreational activities, concentrated on specific days when the discount was available (Mondays to Wednesdays in August). However, the programme failed to encourage people to go out for other purposes and to eat out after the discount ended.
"EOTHO also increased recruitment in the food preparation & service sector. We observe an increase in the number of jobs posts (by 7%-14%) on the Indeed website. We do not find evidence of an increase in the number of job posts in other industries, suggesting the effect on recruitment was concentrated on food establishments. As this indicator measures the flow of job adverts, a transitory effect on job posts could still imply a permanent increase in the number of employees.
"Over 160 million meals were claimed by the end of September 2020, with government spending £849 million on the policy. Data limitations as well as the interaction between different policies complicate any cost-benefit calculation of the programme. On top of that, there is evidence indicating the increase in footfall due to EOTHO had an adverse effect on new COVID-19 cases. Thus, any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections. Further research – using administrative data– is needed to assess the overall cost-effectiveness of EOTHO."
All that 'may have' and 'up to' pales in comparison compared to how much covid was imported from France, Spain etc in the summer and autumn of 2020.
It seems that those still frothing about EOTHO have no problems with British people going to a restaurant at that time as long as that restaurant was in another country with far more prevalent covid.
The Government made several different mistakes when it came to the spread of the disease. The existence of one failure does not mean another failure is unimportant.
So why do you keep babbling about EOTHO and ignoring the non-existent border control when it was the latter which was far more damaging.
And not just throughout 2020 but also the importation of the delta variant from India in spring 2021 - casually allowed into the UK because Boris wanted a trip to India and a ride on an elephant.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-018.pdf "The results indicate that EOTHO induced higher footfall (by 5%-6%) associated with recreational activities, concentrated on specific days when the discount was available (Mondays to Wednesdays in August). However, the programme failed to encourage people to go out for other purposes and to eat out after the discount ended.
"EOTHO also increased recruitment in the food preparation & service sector. We observe an increase in the number of jobs posts (by 7%-14%) on the Indeed website. We do not find evidence of an increase in the number of job posts in other industries, suggesting the effect on recruitment was concentrated on food establishments. As this indicator measures the flow of job adverts, a transitory effect on job posts could still imply a permanent increase in the number of employees.
"Over 160 million meals were claimed by the end of September 2020, with government spending £849 million on the policy. Data limitations as well as the interaction between different policies complicate any cost-benefit calculation of the programme. On top of that, there is evidence indicating the increase in footfall due to EOTHO had an adverse effect on new COVID-19 cases. Thus, any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections. Further research – using administrative data– is needed to assess the overall cost-effectiveness of EOTHO."
All that 'may have' and 'up to' pales in comparison compared to how much covid was imported from France, Spain etc in the summer and autumn of 2020.
It seems that those still frothing about EOTHO have no problems with British people going to a restaurant at that time as long as that restaurant was in another country with far more prevalent covid.
One of the absurdities was that EOTHO applied in Leicester too, even though we were the only part of the country still under mixing regulations, not allowed to visit other peoples houses.
I remember driving up London Rd seeing the queues outside all the restaurants on that strip thinking how crazy and contradictory it was. Indeed I posted it here at the time.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
They wouldn't. But they want you to forget they were demanding we purchase PPE from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE. And then criticised the governemnt for, er, buying from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procurement powers of this government.
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Ah. Well one is surely supposed to have people* to put together such kits?
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
Eh? People caught it eventually anyway surely? Unless you have evidence that it caused excess deaths?
Timing is everything. Infecting people before there was a vaccine is rather different to a vaccinated person catching it.
So hang on, there was no lockdown at that time, but you didn’t go out nor meet anyone? If so, you were vanishingly rare.
Yes Sunak is safe. He generally polls better than his party and nobody else wants to do the job until Opposition when Labour would have to deal with inflation and the economy in government
Yep. Hey I've gone off your Barclay tip though. Did him @ 36 but I've got out @ 32. I don't think he's got the oooph. Can't quite see him as the post landslide Tory LOTO. I think the party will want a bit of a thrill to cheer them up.
Can anyone bring themselves to care what “happens to Sunak”?!
His Dad covid vaccinated my Mum yesterday
I hope she sung his praises and expressed sympathy with him doing the job in such difficult times. Afterall, you don't want to annoy the person wielding the needle
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Ah. Well one is surely supposed to have people* to put together such kits?
*not husband
Don’t IKEA offer a delivery and assembly assembly service in the UK?
Many of these groups in gender and health lobbying are, effectively, sockpuppet organisations that take funding from the govt then, in turn, lobby the govt for their pet project.
As you say, the govt is subcontracting out its thinking to these groups. They are effectively arms of the state. The main issue with that, I can see, is these groups simply have a single issue and a single viewpoint. There is also the issue of mission creep and where does it stop. The moment they win, the moment they have influenced and changed policy they cease to need to be so they have to find something else to campaign on to keep the funds flowing.
The day that the whole transgender stuff started, can be traced back to the day the US Supreme Court legalised gay marriage. The same group of activists, having won their case on gay marriage, simply moved on to the next cause before the money dried up.
I saw a tweet from the mid 2010s (I think it was Matt Walsh or someone similar) that made me think it was the other way around: that having lost the battle on gay marriage, the antis turned their guns on trans as a battle they could win. As one of our Americans (@SeaShantyIrish2 ?) said, gay marriage is now off the Overton Window in the US. I'll see if I can dig it out.
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Ah. Well one is surely supposed to have people* to put together such kits?
*not husband
I always get a team in. 'Self assembly' carries very real risks to physical and mental wellbeing.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
Quite so, and nowhere was that more evident than right here on PB, where authoritarians of left, centre and right united and showed their true colours. It was a haunting, horrible time.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
The level of dysfunction within the Johnson Downing Street -- or rather the Johnson/Cummings Downing Street -- was unusual compared to other governments, although who knows what a Corbyn Downing Street would have been like!
But, yes, in general, the pandemic was a rare and extreme event. No-one was going to get it perfectly right. We should seek to learn from the (inevitable) mistakes to try and do better in the future.
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Ah. Well one is surely supposed to have people* to put together such kits?
*not husband
Boat people at Calais should claim prowess at flat-pack construction. They'd be given a RN escort to Dover....
Jerusalem looks like a beautiful city when you see BBC reporters positioned in front of that hill full of Cypress trees .
You can’t get a starker comparison to the scenes in Gaza .
“Jerusalem the Golden”
It is indeed a lovely city. Not quite beautiful in the way of Venice or Paris or Bath (or Siracusa!) but lovely. The history on top of that makes it intensely magical
eg you can literally walk down “the valley of the shadow of death”. Gehenna. It’s a little valley right by the Old City where ur-Israelis did barbaric child sacrifices - throwing babies into vast bronze ovens - as priests played trumpets to drown out the screams
When the sacrifices were stopped it became a cemetery then a kind of garbage pit. Even today it has an air of accursed evil. No one lives there. 4000 years of psychogeography
I think even if you’re not religious it would be a fascinating place to visit . I would like to do that one day once things calm down . If they ever do !
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Ah. Well one is surely supposed to have people* to put together such kits?
*not husband
I always get a team in. 'Self assembly' carries very real risks to physical and mental wellbeing.
If Ikea construction is too zen, you can always enlist a 5 and 3 year old to help. I find that ups the excitement levels. Add in a one year old trying to eat the screws and you don't need to splash out money on theme park thrills
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
They wouldn't. But they want you to forget they were demanding we purchase PPE from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE. And then criticised the governemnt for, er, buying from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procuremenrt powers of this government.
The simple and basic thing that needs to be changed is that where we handed out £107m PPE contracts without tender to a company set up the day before by a Tory with no track record in PPE - and then no usable PPE was delivered - the money should be clawed back.
We just about managed to get enough PPE. But we sourced a load of crap - or in some cases fresh air - and paid regardless. Any decent contract has a performance clause. And don't say it was done in haste because a boilerplate contract could have been drawn up in half an hour which would have covered the taxpayer.
This negligent approach to handing out public money - and to whom it was handed in what circumstances - is a true scandal and highlights the open corruption in the Tory party. I know the Tories keep wanting to pivot this back to Starmer. But Starmer wasn't in government handing billions to his spiv mates for nothing. People haven't forgotten what happened...
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
Try telling a dead child in Gaza that their death is justified because it is all "on Hamas", and so anything goes.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the non-scumbags managed to condemn all the atrocities, quite regularly.
John Hume and David Trimble seemed to be able to do this, explicitly talking of the latest incident, without equivocation, hesitation, deviation or repetition.
Those who refused to talk about "their side" had the perfect right to. But even the dogs knew *what* they were, for their equivocation and whataboutery.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
They wouldn't. But they want you to forget they were demanding we purchase PPE from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE. And then criticised the governemnt for, er, buying from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procurement powers of this government.
Coincidentally, the government had ignored earlier warnings to stockpile PPE.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
So what?
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
Fair point. There is some worrying revisionism on show today. I had hoped we had overcome covid, psychologically, as a nation, now everyone has had it.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
They wouldn't. But they want you to forget they were demanding we purchase PPE from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE. And then criticised the governemnt for, er, buying from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procurement powers of this government.
There was panic and no time to do the normal checks . Everyone knows my thoughts on the Tory government but I’ve always been very reluctant to criticize them on Covid .
I don’t doubt there was some fraud but that tends to happen more frequently when you’re rushing out schemes .
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
Try telling a dead child in Gaza that their death is justified because it is all "on Hamas", and so anything goes.
Try telling someone with foetal alcohol syndrome that they're sick because their parents got drunk and took drugs while pregnant.
Its tragic if any children die in Gaza, but it is entirely on Hamas. The tragedy doesn't change that.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
To redress the balance in some small way towards an industry that had been scythed by state mandate.
Jerusalem looks like a beautiful city when you see BBC reporters positioned in front of that hill full of Cypress trees .
You can’t get a starker comparison to the scenes in Gaza .
“Jerusalem the Golden”
It is indeed a lovely city. Not quite beautiful in the way of Venice or Paris or Bath (or Siracusa!) but lovely. The history on top of that makes it intensely magical
eg you can literally walk down “the valley of the shadow of death”. Gehenna. It’s a little valley right by the Old City where ur-Israelis did barbaric child sacrifices - throwing babies into vast bronze ovens - as priests played trumpets to drown out the screams
When the sacrifices were stopped it became a cemetery then a kind of garbage pit. Even today it has an air of accursed evil. No one lives there. 4000 years of psychogeography
I think even if you’re not religious it would be a fascinating place to visit . I would like to do that one day once things calm down . If they ever do !
Jerusalem is slap bang in the middle of the country so probably safe whatever happens. You can, or at least could, get tours tailored to whichever cultural heritage most interested you.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
Yes on the second; but on the first, if I was living in Gaza I would also probably be pretty reluctant to discuss Hamas on the radio, for purely personal safety reasons...
There won't be any serious opposition threat to him for a decade. The Tories will be flattened like a a Giza apartment block at the GE.
Depends on the economy, if inflation rises under a Labour government more than wages, taxes go up and there are regular strikes the Tories would revive quicker than Lazarus
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Ah. Well one is surely supposed to have people* to put together such kits?
*not husband
Don’t IKEA offer a delivery and assembly assembly service in the UK?
Yep although I think delivery and assembly are separate - so you get the boxes and sometime / days later the assembly person turns up.
Yes Sunak is safe. He generally polls better than his party and nobody else wants to do the job until Opposition when Labour would have to deal with inflation and the economy in government
Yep. Hey I've gone off your Barclay tip though. Did him @ 36 but I've got out @ 32. I don't think he's got the oooph. Can't quite see him as the post landslide Tory LOTO. I think the party will want a bit of a thrill to cheer them up.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
So what?
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
"especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not"? Yesterday, you were an expert on international law. Today, an expert on vaccine development.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 describes the vaccine development landscape in early April 2020, well before EOTHO. We knew vaccines were in development (78 confirmed vaccines in development by 7 April, with 5 in Phase 1 trials). That article was predicting vaccines in use by early 2021; in fact, it was a bit sooner (Dec 2020).
We knew a vaccine was on the way. Having cases before a vaccine rather than after a vaccine is a bad idea.
Jerusalem looks like a beautiful city when you see BBC reporters positioned in front of that hill full of Cypress trees .
You can’t get a starker comparison to the scenes in Gaza .
“Jerusalem the Golden”
It is indeed a lovely city. Not quite beautiful in the way of Venice or Paris or Bath (or Siracusa!) but lovely. The history on top of that makes it intensely magical
eg you can literally walk down “the valley of the shadow of death”. Gehenna. It’s a little valley right by the Old City where ur-Israelis did barbaric child sacrifices - throwing babies into vast bronze ovens - as priests played trumpets to drown out the screams
When the sacrifices were stopped it became a cemetery then a kind of garbage pit. Even today it has an air of accursed evil. No one lives there. 4000 years of psychogeography
I think even if you’re not religious it would be a fascinating place to visit . I would like to do that one day once things calm down . If they ever do !
I visited Jersusalem about 1971 on an excursion from a cruise. The coach stopped on a hill outside Jerusalem and I had my first sight of Jerusalem, which took my breath away. It really was "Jerusalem The Golden."
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
Does assisting citizens to an early grave count as an economic benefit?
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
Try telling a dead child in Gaza that their death is justified because it is all "on Hamas", and so anything goes.
The deaths of Gazan children are not justified. Your anger at those deaths should be directed at Hamas. Demand that Hamas surrenders. Demand that Hamas stops firing rockets at civilians in Israel. Demand that Hamas releases its hostages.
How can you possibly expect Israel to do nothing when it is under attack?
That seems an unfairly short time for @Alanbrooke's provocative header. He deserved longer.
Yes, a very good and pertinent piece. Kay Burley on Sky News just mentioned that Save the Children won’t be happy with the uk government not calling for a ceasefire. Why should their opinion count any more than anyone else’s?
The opinion of a charity specialising in easing children's suffering that current Israeli policy is causing massive suffering to children does seem relevant.
Personally as one of the few MPs who was in both Labour Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Palestine (I was on the executive of the former), I must say I'm losing sympathy with Israel despite the horrific Hamas atrocities. Frankly they should get on with the invasion if they're going to do it and then run the area they occupy until further notice, not just starve the population. And the refusal of a visa to a UN official "to teach them a lesson" sounds petulant and tin-eared.
I disagree - although the fault is the media not Save the Children.
The right policy for Israel/Gaza is hugely complicated and involves balancing many factors.
Emoting “won’t someone think of the children” is not constructive in any way.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging an activity which boosted both the economy generally, low paid workers particularly and the mental well being of those who used EOTHO to get back into societal activity.
Given what we now know of the damaging effects the covid restrictions had on mental well being we can be sure they would have been worse without the encouragement EOTHO gave people.
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
It is a plausible timeline, although the one thing that could muddy the waters is the impending war in the middle east and what happens there.
Alot of labours support is pro Palestine, not just the Muslim vote. They could easily be turned off labour due to its avid pro Israel stance.
They could but most of the strongest pro Palestinian Labour vote is in safe Labour seats in Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, Bethnal Green etc.
Whereas the highest Jewish vote is in Tory marginals like Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet
After having spent five hours and £500 at Ikea yesterday, I'm now in Ikea build hell.
Last time I did this, I was in hospital with meningitis the next day.
(Correlation != causation...)
The wife buying flat packs without consultation, then standing over you questioning the lack of progress as you try to make sense of a poor translation from Mandarin via Swahili, is a well known ground for divorce....
I'm puzzled by these posts. Ikea furnitute construction is one of the joys of life, to be done with a beer in a zen like state of contentedness and bliss
Ikea skip the language translation problems anyway by simply giving only pictures.
Except the Good Lady Wife never buys from Ikea. She buys exclusively from some ninth tier of flat-pack hell. Housed in an Amazon facility somewhere near Corby.
Ah. Well one is surely supposed to have people* to put together such kits?
*not husband
Don’t IKEA offer a delivery and assembly assembly service in the UK?
Yep although I think delivery and assembly are separate - so you get the boxes and sometime / days later the assembly person turns up.
I guess the assembly guys can be more local, and do more jobs if they don’t need to go to the warehouse. In my little city-state of relatively cheap labour, they usually come together to deliver and assemble. They like me, because I often tell the assembly guys I don’t need their services! They must be thinking who’s this weird British guy who wants to assemble his own furniture?
That seems an unfairly short time for @Alanbrooke's provocative header. He deserved longer.
Yes, a very good and pertinent piece. Kay Burley on Sky News just mentioned that Save the Children won’t be happy with the uk government not calling for a ceasefire. Why should their opinion count any more than anyone else’s?
The opinion of a charity specialising in easing children's suffering that current Israeli policy is causing massive suffering to children does seem relevant.
Personally as one of the few MPs who was in both Labour Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Palestine (I was on the executive of the former), I must say I'm losing sympathy with Israel despite the horrific Hamas atrocities. Frankly they should get on with the invasion if they're going to do it and then run the area they occupy until further notice, not just starve the population. And the refusal of a visa to a UN official "to teach them a lesson" sounds petulant and tin-eared.
If they “do the invasion” the hostages are killed and Israel is criticised.
If they wait and allow supplies in Hamas gets stronger (they are diverting fuel from hospitals for their own use for example)
If they wait and don’t allow supplies in then they are criticised for “starving the population”.
War is shit. Especially for the innocent bystanders. But Hamas started this and must be eradicated if there is to be a hope of long term peace. Israel is doing the best it can to minimise civilian casualties against the backdrop of needing to deal with Hamas.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
So what?
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
"especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not"? Yesterday, you were an expert on international law. Today, an expert on vaccine development.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 describes the vaccine development landscape in early April 2020, well before EOTHO. We knew vaccines were in development (78 confirmed vaccines in development by 7 April, with 5 in Phase 1 trials). That article was predicting vaccines in use by early 2021; in fact, it was a bit sooner (Dec 2020).
We knew a vaccine was on the way. Having cases before a vaccine rather than after a vaccine is a bad idea.
More revisionism.
We ‘knew’ nothing of the sort. Several were in development but no one had any idea whether they would work - indeed there was much scepticism that they would work.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
Tim Martin is a Europhobic Right-winger, so that was probably just a party-political ruse on his part - endorsing a politician whom he saw as one of his own. Would he have thrown petals over, say, John McDonnell if Labour had introduced something similar? I find that difficult to believe.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
So what?
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
"especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not"? Yesterday, you were an expert on international law. Today, an expert on vaccine development.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 describes the vaccine development landscape in early April 2020, well before EOTHO. We knew vaccines were in development (78 confirmed vaccines in development by 7 April, with 5 in Phase 1 trials). That article was predicting vaccines in use by early 2021; in fact, it was a bit sooner (Dec 2020).
We knew a vaccine was on the way. Having cases before a vaccine rather than after a vaccine is a bad idea.
We didn't know there would be vaccines, we hoped there might be, and certainly they came sooner than expected. Indeed most of Europe didn't have vaccines when we did quite famously, it could have gone the other way around.
Simply saying lockdown and have no activities until vaccines is not a reasonable attitude.
There are things more important than case numbers. That you refuse to accept that is why we'll never see eye to eye on this.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
Eh? People caught it eventually anyway surely? Unless you have evidence that it caused excess deaths?
Timing is everything. Infecting people before there was a vaccine is rather different to a vaccinated person catching it.
So hang on, there was no lockdown at that time, but you didn’t go out nor meet anyone? If so, you were vanishingly rare.
I kept my interactions to a minimum and certainly did not go to places where other people were sitting down in near proximity for prolonged periods.
"I think even if you’re not religious it would be a fascinating place to visit . I would like to do that one day once things calm down . If they ever do !"
+++++++
Yes, one of the top five most interesting towns/cities on earth. History on history on history, and you don't need to be religious at all to feel the thunderous weight of it
Tho of course plenty of agnostic people go there and suddenly become religious. A known syndrome. Be careful!
It's like the opposite of Paris Syndrome when Japanese people go to Paris and realise it isn't a fairy tale place like in Ratatouille but has litter and graffiti and crime and non-French people and they spaz out
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging an activity which boosted both the economy generally, low paid workers particularly and the mental well being of those who used EOTHO to get back into societal activity.
Given what we now know of the damaging effects the covid restrictions had on mental well being we can be sure they would have been worse without the encouragement EOTHO gave people.
Indeed. It is telling that I remember my first EOTHO lunch clearly. A lovely sunny August day in a beautiful beer garden by the Thames in Oxfordshire. A relief from months of depression and misery.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
Eh? People caught it eventually anyway surely? Unless you have evidence that it caused excess deaths?
You forget the impact of the vaccines. If you delay cases past vaccination, you can either stop people catching the virus or when they do so, it is much less serious. Those ~69k infections happened before vaccination. Without EOTHO, most of those people would have gotten to vaccination without getting infected.
Sure, but there was no lockdown at that time in any case. It was the middle of summer. Did you refuse to go out, see your family, go on holiday, even though you were allowed to? As I say, people were gathering anyway, this scheme just directed that revenue into hospitality and away from supermarkets - which had been making an absolute mint during the pandemic thanks to a state-mandated monopoly.
I don't follow your all-or-nothing argument. There was no lockdown. That was a policy choice. Given rates of infection vs. the many costs of a lockdown, that was a sensible policy choice.
But EOTHO wasn't just directing revenue to a different sector. It was encouraging a specific activity that increased spread. It cost lots of money. Two downsides. On the upside, it helped the hospitality industry. Was that a sensible policy choice? Support could have been given to the hospitality sector in other ways. The Government could have spent towards a billion pounds on something else (e.g. support for children whose education had been disrupted, more air filtration to reduce spread of the virus, more money on processing asylum seekers, build some more roads, ...).
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
This keeps being reported as 'closing hotels' but is that correct? I thought the idea is they go back to normal 'non migrant' business.
Rwanda flights aren't November unless I've missed something.
And I'm not sure a May election would allow you to claim the number of boats is down - you would need an election in March / early April latest to get away with using the lack of boats due to winter weather..
IIRC the Supreme Court has said it expects to deliver its judgment in November. Suella has said that flights can resume the moment the Court comes down in favour of the Government.
It's a timeline. It's flexible. As I've said elsewhere, I can see that this is how Number 10 and CCHQ have planned it.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-018.pdf "The results indicate that EOTHO induced higher footfall (by 5%-6%) associated with recreational activities, concentrated on specific days when the discount was available (Mondays to Wednesdays in August). However, the programme failed to encourage people to go out for other purposes and to eat out after the discount ended.
"EOTHO also increased recruitment in the food preparation & service sector. We observe an increase in the number of jobs posts (by 7%-14%) on the Indeed website. We do not find evidence of an increase in the number of job posts in other industries, suggesting the effect on recruitment was concentrated on food establishments. As this indicator measures the flow of job adverts, a transitory effect on job posts could still imply a permanent increase in the number of employees.
"Over 160 million meals were claimed by the end of September 2020, with government spending £849 million on the policy. Data limitations as well as the interaction between different policies complicate any cost-benefit calculation of the programme. On top of that, there is evidence indicating the increase in footfall due to EOTHO had an adverse effect on new COVID-19 cases. Thus, any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections. Further research – using administrative data– is needed to assess the overall cost-effectiveness of EOTHO."
All that 'may have' and 'up to' pales in comparison compared to how much covid was imported from France, Spain etc in the summer and autumn of 2020.
It seems that those still frothing about EOTHO have no problems with British people going to a restaurant at that time as long as that restaurant was in another country with far more prevalent covid.
Fallacy. Covid didn't care where it was seeded or how. They all added up.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
They wouldn't. But they want you to forget they were demanding we purchase PPE from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE. And then criticised the governemnt for, er, buying from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procurement powers of this government.
Coincidentally, the government had ignored earlier warnings to stockpile PPE.
One thing I'd like to know is how much was 'lost' either through paying for usable but overpriced PPE, paying for unusable PPE or outright fraud.
Compared to how much was 'saved' by outsourcing PPE production to other countries in earlier years.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-018.pdf "The results indicate that EOTHO induced higher footfall (by 5%-6%) associated with recreational activities, concentrated on specific days when the discount was available (Mondays to Wednesdays in August). However, the programme failed to encourage people to go out for other purposes and to eat out after the discount ended.
"EOTHO also increased recruitment in the food preparation & service sector. We observe an increase in the number of jobs posts (by 7%-14%) on the Indeed website. We do not find evidence of an increase in the number of job posts in other industries, suggesting the effect on recruitment was concentrated on food establishments. As this indicator measures the flow of job adverts, a transitory effect on job posts could still imply a permanent increase in the number of employees.
"Over 160 million meals were claimed by the end of September 2020, with government spending £849 million on the policy. Data limitations as well as the interaction between different policies complicate any cost-benefit calculation of the programme. On top of that, there is evidence indicating the increase in footfall due to EOTHO had an adverse effect on new COVID-19 cases. Thus, any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections. Further research – using administrative data– is needed to assess the overall cost-effectiveness of EOTHO."
All that 'may have' and 'up to' pales in comparison compared to how much covid was imported from France, Spain etc in the summer and autumn of 2020.
It seems that those still frothing about EOTHO have no problems with British people going to a restaurant at that time as long as that restaurant was in another country with far more prevalent covid.
The Government made several different mistakes when it came to the spread of the disease. The existence of one failure does not mean another failure is unimportant.
So why do you keep babbling about EOTHO and ignoring the non-existent border control when it was the latter which was far more damaging.
And not just throughout 2020 but also the importation of the delta variant from India in spring 2021 - casually allowed into the UK because Boris wanted a trip to India and a ride on an elephant.
EOTHO came up in the discussion and I commented on it. EOTHO came up because it was Sunak's idea and the thread is about Sunak.
I can't remember who the Home Secretary was at the time, we went through so many, but if we have a thread on the person concerned, that would seem a great time to discuss the choices they made.
That seems an unfairly short time for @Alanbrooke's provocative header. He deserved longer.
Yes, a very good and pertinent piece. Kay Burley on Sky News just mentioned that Save the Children won’t be happy with the uk government not calling for a ceasefire. Why should their opinion count any more than anyone else’s?
The opinion of a charity specialising in easing children's suffering that current Israeli policy is causing massive suffering to children does seem relevant.
Personally as one of the few MPs who was in both Labour Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Palestine (I was on the executive of the former), I must say I'm losing sympathy with Israel despite the horrific Hamas atrocities. Frankly they should get on with the invasion if they're going to do it and then run the area they occupy until further notice, not just starve the population. And the refusal of a visa to a UN official "to teach them a lesson" sounds petulant and tin-eared.
I disagree - although the fault is the media not Save the Children.
The right policy for Israel/Gaza is hugely complicated and involves balancing many factors.
Emoting “won’t someone think of the children” is not constructive in any way.
It is a complicated matter. But a children's charity saying "won't someone think of the children" hardly seems the most outrageous of inputs.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
Does assisting citizens to an early grave count as an economic benefit?
Oh yes, in certain persons' views. As demonstrated repeatedly on PB. "They're only a couple of years to go to the average life span so who gives a shit if they die?"
Which was a glorious example of a statistical fallacy ...
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
Eh? People caught it eventually anyway surely? Unless you have evidence that it caused excess deaths?
Timing is everything. Infecting people before there was a vaccine is rather different to a vaccinated person catching it.
So hang on, there was no lockdown at that time, but you didn’t go out nor meet anyone? If so, you were vanishingly rare.
I kept my interactions to a minimum and certainly did not go to places where other people were sitting down in near proximity for prolonged periods.
You were a rare case. Most people were absolutely desperate to escape incarceration by that stage and holidayed and pubbed in the fresh air during summer when infections were low. That period probably relieved much mental illness and depression caused by prolonged isolation.
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
It is a plausible timeline, although the one thing that could muddy the waters is the impending war in the middle east and what happens there.
Alot of labours support is pro Palestine, not just the Muslim vote. They could easily be turned off labour due to its avid pro Israel stance.
They could but most of the strongest pro Palestinian Labour vote is in safe Labour seats in Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, Bethnal Green etc.
Whereas the highest Jewish vote is in Tory marginals like Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet
I am pretty sure the entire Jewish vote will now shift. en masse, to the Tories. Labour cannot be trusted, will be the thought, no matter what Starmer says
It is far too small to sway an election but, as you imply, could shunt a couple of seats to Sunal that might otherwise have been lost
I wonder what the same process will do in the USA? Florida?
Nothing to do with either our inadequate infrastructure to deal with climate change.
She is right though, even if she phrased it badly. These wrap-around systems with rain coming from the east do cause more trouble than the usual winter storms.
This isn't necessarily because of our sh*t infrastructure, it is built in to the structure of the land.
Rivers in the west tend to be shorter and steeper. Rivers in the east tend to flow out into a wider and flatter floodplain which has lower capacity in the primary channel.
When the rain comes from the west this isn't a problem as most of it falls on the upslope in the other catchment.
2007 was a perfect example of rainfall from the east here - it included the wettest day here in at least 50 years - and it caused major flooding.
Here's a picture I took of our river on Saturday:
If the embankment wasn't 1cm lower on the right hundreds of people would be flooded, as it is 2-3m above the surrounding land. As it is some smaller communities were affected.
In 2019 Fishlake flooded from secondary washlands similar to the one you see here as the river stayed high for much longer and they filled up.
The current flood might actually have been caused by having more infrastructure - as Sheffield and Chesterfield have had higher defences built since 2007 and thus the river peak has thus been moved downstream.
Floods are a good example of the current dilemma though - with our limited resources, should we put billions into cutting emissions, or billions into adapting to live with climate change?
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
Eh? People caught it eventually anyway surely? Unless you have evidence that it caused excess deaths?
Timing is everything. Infecting people before there was a vaccine is rather different to a vaccinated person catching it.
So hang on, there was no lockdown at that time, but you didn’t go out nor meet anyone? If so, you were vanishingly rare.
Again, it's not all or nothing. We all had to make risk calculations, the government did, and we did as individuals. The choices were not everyone stay at home or EOTHO, but nothing in between. We could have lifted the lockdown, but not spent lots of money encouraging one particular behaviour that promoted spread.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
Eh? People caught it eventually anyway surely? Unless you have evidence that it caused excess deaths?
Timing is everything. Infecting people before there was a vaccine is rather different to a vaccinated person catching it.
So hang on, there was no lockdown at that time, but you didn’t go out nor meet anyone? If so, you were vanishingly rare.
Again, it's not all or nothing. We all had to make risk calculations, the government did, and we did as individuals. The choices were not everyone stay at home or EOTHO, but nothing in between. We could have lifted the lockdown, but not spent lots of money encouraging one particular behaviour that promoted spread.
But considering the money spent was great value for money in promoting a wanted and necessary behaviour, it was a job very well done.
Mental health and the economy matters more than case numbers in August ever could or did.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
The biggest harm to the economy was caused by high rates of COVID-19. Avoiding high rates of COVID-19 infection was good for the economy.
There were plenty of things the Treasury could have done with £849 million that would have encouraged economic activity without causing as much virus spread. What about building some shiny new roads, for example? Some people say that's a good way of promoting economic activity.
There’s lots to criticize this government over but I tend to think any government would struggle in its response to the pandemic .
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
They wouldn't. But they want you to forget they were demanding we purchase PPE from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE. And then criticised the governemnt for, er, buying from vendors who didn't actually have any PPE.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procurement powers of this government.
There was panic and no time to do the normal checks . Everyone knows my thoughts on the Tory government but I’ve always been very reluctant to criticize them on Covid .
I don’t doubt there was some fraud but that tends to happen more frequently when you’re rushing out schemes .
The government made mistakes with COVID. Any government would have done. They were held to account in the media and by the opposition for their actions, sometimes I think the positions taken were unfair on the government given their position in an unprecedented situation, some were fair criticisms.
I have a lot of criticisms about how Covid was handled, but not in a party political way because I don’t think it came down to Labour/Tory but more to do with the way the state functioned and the rather authoritarian mindset exerted by certain institutions and individuals.
Where the government do deserve everything that was thrown at them was the lockdown parties and the rule breaking. They should have operated at a higher standard, or at the very least should have publicised how their working practices were being handled in Downing St. The parties should never have happened. On that front (which is interestingly where the tide started to turn against the Tories) the public had them bang to rights.
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
It is a plausible timeline, although the one thing that could muddy the waters is the impending war in the middle east and what happens there.
Alot of labours support is pro Palestine, not just the Muslim vote. They could easily be turned off labour due to its avid pro Israel stance.
They could but most of the strongest pro Palestinian Labour vote is in safe Labour seats in Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, Bethnal Green etc.
Whereas the highest Jewish vote is in Tory marginals like Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet
I am pretty sure the entire Jewish vote will now shift. en masse, to the Tories. Labour cannot be trusted, will be the thought, no matter what Starmer says
It is far too small to sway an election but, as you imply, could shunt a couple of seats to Sunal that might otherwise have been lost
I wonder what the same process will do in the USA? Florida?
Locally ,Im surprised we havent heard much from George Galloway, he's the dog that hasnt barked in the current conflict.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the non-scumbags managed to condemn all the atrocities, quite regularly.
John Hume and David Trimble seemed to be able to do this, explicitly talking of the latest incident, without equivocation, hesitation, deviation or repetition.
Those who refused to talk about "their side" had the perfect right to. But even the dogs knew *what* they were, for their equivocation and whataboutery.
The conflict in Northern Ireland was ultimately resolved, however, by a process that included talking to the scumbags.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
I think the conference given by one of the released hostages yesterday was enlightening. She is a long time activist, from what I understand a founding member of Women Wage Peace. She had driven Gazan children and adults to and from hospitals in Israel to get them better healthcare. She said she went through hell, was beaten with a crowbar - and you can argue that her statements about being treated well and her shaking her captor’s hand was all in aid of making sure her husband stays safe. But she, as well as many of those who lost family, either who were killed or kidnapped, still advocate peace and note the humanity of their captors, their enemy. Whilst people here go out of their way to note how killing a cowering 7 year old, an atrocious thing to do, shows how Hamas are all Nazis I saw no one talk about the woman who had soldiers enter her home, ask to eat some of her food, and then left - who seemed just surprised as she was that they had made it across the border and said "do not worry, we are Muslim" when asked if they were going to kill her or her kids.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
The biggest harm to the economy was caused by high rates of COVID-19. Avoiding high rates of COVID-19 infection was good for the economy.
There were plenty of things the Treasury could have done with £849 million that would have encouraged economic activity without causing as much virus spread. What about building some shiny new roads, for example? Some people say that's a good way of promoting economic activity.
That's revisionism and factually incorrect, the rates of Covid19 were exceptionally low in August not high.
Schools and Universities reopening utterly dwarfed EOTHO and made it inconsequential anyway. Freshers Flu is not a Covid phenomenon.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cepcovid-19-018.pdf "The results indicate that EOTHO induced higher footfall (by 5%-6%) associated with recreational activities, concentrated on specific days when the discount was available (Mondays to Wednesdays in August). However, the programme failed to encourage people to go out for other purposes and to eat out after the discount ended.
"EOTHO also increased recruitment in the food preparation & service sector. We observe an increase in the number of jobs posts (by 7%-14%) on the Indeed website. We do not find evidence of an increase in the number of job posts in other industries, suggesting the effect on recruitment was concentrated on food establishments. As this indicator measures the flow of job adverts, a transitory effect on job posts could still imply a permanent increase in the number of employees.
"Over 160 million meals were claimed by the end of September 2020, with government spending £849 million on the policy. Data limitations as well as the interaction between different policies complicate any cost-benefit calculation of the programme. On top of that, there is evidence indicating the increase in footfall due to EOTHO had an adverse effect on new COVID-19 cases. Thus, any economic gains from the scheme may have come at the cost of more infections. Further research – using administrative data– is needed to assess the overall cost-effectiveness of EOTHO."
All that 'may have' and 'up to' pales in comparison compared to how much covid was imported from France, Spain etc in the summer and autumn of 2020.
It seems that those still frothing about EOTHO have no problems with British people going to a restaurant at that time as long as that restaurant was in another country with far more prevalent covid.
Fallacy. Covid didn't care where it was seeded or how. They all added up.
But if it was kept out of the country then it couldn't have spread.
What we had in the summer of 2020 was an almost covid free UK after the restrictions.
But covid was still prevalent in other countries.
So people going to, for example, Spain in summer 2020 would have a wild time and catch covid, then spread it around to everyone on the plane back and then likely infect their friends and work colleagues once home.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
I find this attitude bizarre. EOTHO was done in the summer, when you could eat outside, and helped an industry that was/is on its knees thanks to covid lockdowns. People were allowed to meet by then anyway, if it encouraged them to spend in pubs and restaurants rather than have dos at home, so much the better.
Was one of the few good things Sunak has done.
There's an unpleasant authoritarianism being displayed which feels that everything should have been restricted and nobody allowed to enjoy themselves at all.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
What tosh. We're talking about EOTHO. EOTHO was not a restriction. Not doing EOTHO wouldn't have been a restriction either. It was about an unprecedented subsidy costing nearly a billion pounds to encourage an activity.
Encouraging economic activities and ensuring the economy stays afloat is what the Treasury should be doing.
Does assisting citizens to an early grave count as an economic benefit?
What a ridiculous hyperbolic post. People could meet and gather anyway, at that time. Do you have single shred of evidence that Eoho caused excess deaths?
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the non-scumbags managed to condemn all the atrocities, quite regularly.
John Hume and David Trimble seemed to be able to do this, explicitly talking of the latest incident, without equivocation, hesitation, deviation or repetition.
Those who refused to talk about "their side" had the perfect right to. But even the dogs knew *what* they were, for their equivocation and whataboutery.
The conflict in Northern Ireland was ultimately resolved, however, by a process that included talking to the scumbags.
Alongside and after a process that involved arresting the scumbags and having the military on the streets too.
That seems an unfairly short time for @Alanbrooke's provocative header. He deserved longer.
Yes, a very good and pertinent piece. Kay Burley on Sky News just mentioned that Save the Children won’t be happy with the uk government not calling for a ceasefire. Why should their opinion count any more than anyone else’s?
Ultimately I did not agree with @Alanbrooke's position but I have greatly welcomed his thread headers over the last week or so. A new and different voice is very welcome and he writes very well. I hope he is not discouraged by this somewhat unfortunate timing.
I'll republish Alan's piece later, a bit of a publishing SNAFU took place.
Remember when Wetherspoons used to have big posters thanking “Dishy Rishi”?
I do not know if Wetherspoons has a company motto, but "We'll do/say anything for money" might be a suitable choice for them...
Given Eat out to Help out really helped the hospitality industry why shouldn't they say thanks.
The industry has had a torrid time. Still does.
EOTHO might have helped the hospitality industry but it did not help the rest of us much. It was a great spreader for covid. At the time I was astounded that they did it and I certainly did not avail myself of it either.
But Wetherspoons made a lot of bad headlines during covid for how they treated their staff.
https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/132/643/1200/6382847 "The above conservative assumptions would indicate that the EOHO scheme may have caused up to 69,008 infections directly and indirectly between calendar weeks 32 and 40."
So what?
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
"especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not"? Yesterday, you were an expert on international law. Today, an expert on vaccine development.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 describes the vaccine development landscape in early April 2020, well before EOTHO. We knew vaccines were in development (78 confirmed vaccines in development by 7 April, with 5 in Phase 1 trials). That article was predicting vaccines in use by early 2021; in fact, it was a bit sooner (Dec 2020).
We knew a vaccine was on the way. Having cases before a vaccine rather than after a vaccine is a bad idea.
We didn't know there would be vaccines, we hoped there might be, and certainly they came sooner than expected. Indeed most of Europe didn't have vaccines when we did quite famously, it could have gone the other way around.
Simply saying lockdown and have no activities until vaccines is not a reasonable attitude.
There are things more important than case numbers. That you refuse to accept that is why we'll never see eye to eye on this.
I have to agree with you on the vaccine availability. In mid-2020, we knew many brilliant people were working on vaccines. But we had no guarantee that any of them would work well enough to be useful.
In the end we got three within a year. That was due to some brilliant work by scientists (and politicians...), but also luck. It could easily have gone the other way - look at how many diseases and infections still do not have vaccines, even after many years of work. ANd of the 78 confirmed vaccines, three initially succeeded. Just three.
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the non-scumbags managed to condemn all the atrocities, quite regularly.
John Hume and David Trimble seemed to be able to do this, explicitly talking of the latest incident, without equivocation, hesitation, deviation or repetition.
Those who refused to talk about "their side" had the perfect right to. But even the dogs knew *what* they were, for their equivocation and whataboutery.
How many of the scum-bags on our side decried our atrocities? Hell, many English people don't know half of them and the government has given immunity to those left that carried them out!
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
I’ve written it before but will write it again. Absolutely none of what Israel has been doing over the last few weeks is on them, every single death of Palestinian civilians is a direct result of what Hamas did. There are no “buts”, there is no space for “whataboutery”. Every single Palestinian death since Hamas decided to make their terrorist attack on Israelis civilians is on Hamas.
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
In what world were things getting better for Palestinians in Gaza, or even the West Bank? Do you think Hamas sprung out of nowhere like Athena from Zeus - no rhyme nor reason? Do you think everyone who talks about this is just a raging anti-Semite or anti-Zionist and has is projecting nuance and context where there is none, like shadows on a wall? Just like the example of NI given at the start of this conversation - they came from a history, a conflict, an occupation. They aren't just evil people with evil thoughts in their heads doing evil deeds for evil ends.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
“ The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? ”
TLDR: they absolutely hate Jews, they want all Jews gone, they want to kill as many Jews as possible so they can cleanse the entire region of Jews and make it Muslim
This is their CHARTER, not some crank anti-Semite in a shed with a printing press. The Charter in action is what we saw on October 7
Israel can never compromise with this. They need to invade Gaza now and get the fuck on with the whole ghastly process. Delay makes it all worse
On topic. I don't care how absurd replacing Sunak would be - they ARE absurd and will do it if they thought it would help. I don't think it will happen because who do you replace him with? Can the parliamentary party coalesce around a true winner? And either get that person through the members vote or get away without one?
Sunak will be PM until January of 2025.
The biggest problem is that there is no one obvious to take over in a coronation. Not that coronations tend to work anyway (Sunak, May, Brown...), and a contest would be a ridiculous indulgence.
Sunak should call a GE in the spring. The longer this drags on the worse it gets.
It makes sense to go to the country in the Spring.
November: Autumn Statement (or is it a Budget?) in which the Chancellor confirms the Triple Lock and an 8% increase in state pension for the core vote.
November: Flights resume to Rwanda.
December: Inflation falls to between 5% - 6% (roughly half of where it was).
Autumn/Winter: Number of boat crossings falls (though not stopped).
January: Close 50 hotels housing migrants appealing to the Right.
March: Close a further 50 hotels housing migrants (100 in total) appealing to the Right.
April: 8% increase kicks in.
April: Dissolve Parliament and call an Election as the Prime Minister who has halved inflation, stopped the boats, got rid of migrants and protected the Triple Lock.
Of course, the fly in the ointment is the Supreme Court. If they rule against the Government on the Rwanda plan then the Government may be tempted to say "We can't close the hotels because we can't send them to Rwanda. We're being held back by an activist judiciary".
It is a plausible timeline, although the one thing that could muddy the waters is the impending war in the middle east and what happens there.
Alot of labours support is pro Palestine, not just the Muslim vote. They could easily be turned off labour due to its avid pro Israel stance.
They could but most of the strongest pro Palestinian Labour vote is in safe Labour seats in Bradford, Birmingham, Luton, Bethnal Green etc.
Whereas the highest Jewish vote is in Tory marginals like Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet
I am pretty sure the entire Jewish vote will now shift. en masse, to the Tories. Labour cannot be trusted, will be the thought, no matter what Starmer says
It is far too small to sway an election but, as you imply, could shunt a couple of seats to Sunal that might otherwise have been lost
I wonder what the same process will do in the USA? Florida?
Isn't equating British Jews to supporters of Israel a form of anti-semitism?
Two memorable bits from R4 Today this morning. The comment by Nick R after an interview with a lovely and distressed woman in Gaza who worked for Oxfam that 'she was not willing to discuss Hamas'; secondly the Palestinian woman interviewed, not in Gaza, and asked about her thoughts on the 7th October killings: "I will not answer that question".
Elephants in rooms.
It’s exactly like Northern Ireland - when asked about the latest atrocity by X, it was telling when the talking head from X would start talking about anything else.
Even trying to get them to say something like “we condemn all violence” was apparently rude.
When people who are deeply invested in Palestinian freedom are asked about condemning Hamas or October 7th directly, and they don't answer, it is not because they condone Hamas - it is because it immediately shifts the conversation to the premise that the lives of Israelis matter and the lives of Palestinians do not. Because for most people it is a given that what Hamas did was unacceptable, but we still have to debate whether the acts of the IDF and state of Israel over decades are unacceptable because most of the power structure supports them.
As we have seen in conversations here over the last fortnight, no matter how much anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause says what Hamas did was atrocious, but that the loss of civilian life in Palestine is not an acceptable reaction, the response is always - well, does Israel not have the right to defend itself? What else is Israel supposed to do? Should Israel have to put up with a neighbour that wishes to wipe them out? Which makes no sense when Israel is by far the best funded military in the area, backed by the US, and controls most of the borders of Gaza and the West Bank. It has been a source of contention for years that the UN and other international bodies will repeatedly point to Israeli treatment of the Palestinians as a problem, as crimes, as illegal under international law - and yet they can because they are supported by the global superpower.
I was listening to someone talk about this yesterday, which kind of crystalised the madness of this to me. Gaza is not a recognised state - not by Israel and not by the international community at large (some individual states do, but only some). Were Gaza a state the acts of Israel over the last decade would be grounds for Gaza to declare war on Israel - the blockades and sieges, the killing of Palestinians on their land, the incursions onto their land, etc.
But Gaza is not a state, it is an occupied area - occupied by Israel. If it is occupied land, then Israel cannot be at war with it - at best it would be managing its occupied territories, it has obligations under international law. Under international law an occupying power cannot be "provoked" by those it occupies in to war. So, by casting Gaza as this state-that-is-not-a-state Israeli policy towards it can be both the justification for treating Gaza and the Palestinians there inhumanely, whilst at the same time saying that their reactions to that treatment are a justification for more of the same.
Again, what Hamas did earlier this month was abominable, a crime itself - but the treatment of civilian Palestinians prior to that and now are bigger "elephants in the room" in my mind then repeatedly condemning Hamas and then going "and therefore that means Israel can do ______"
During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the non-scumbags managed to condemn all the atrocities, quite regularly.
John Hume and David Trimble seemed to be able to do this, explicitly talking of the latest incident, without equivocation, hesitation, deviation or repetition.
Those who refused to talk about "their side" had the perfect right to. But even the dogs knew *what* they were, for their equivocation and whataboutery.
The conflict in Northern Ireland was ultimately resolved, however, by a process that included talking to the scumbags.
We're at about 1602 in terms of comparitive history. A while to run yet - it didn't have to be this way, Clinton and Rabhin Barak got so close. Oh Yasser, what did you do
Comments
We all wanted to think that COVID was basically a solved problem in summer 2020. We all did, really, but the UK government (freedom! profits! dislike of bad news!) was particularly prone to that bit of wishful thinking.
We treated it as VE day, when it was more like the end of the Battle of Britain.
At the time it manifested itself with demands for a 'zero covid' strategy which would have required North Korean levels of state oppression.
https://youtu.be/xVnHZ5SF1Jg?t=85
👍
You can’t get a starker comparison to the scenes in Gaza .
Flights won't start going to Rwanda
Inflation won't fall as quickly as hoped - fuel and energy prices through the winter
They can't Stop The Boats. Imagine the impact of a surge in crossings during an April campaign as the weather improves
They can't stop using hotels as they have to put them somewhere.
It is indeed a lovely city. Not quite beautiful in the way of Venice or Paris or Bath (or Siracusa!) but lovely. The history on top of that makes it intensely magical
eg you can literally walk down “the valley of the shadow of death”. Gehenna. It’s a little valley right by the Old City where ur-Israelis did barbaric child sacrifices - throwing babies into vast bronze ovens - as priests played trumpets to drown out the screams
When the sacrifices were stopped it became a cemetery then a kind of garbage pit. Even today it has an air of accursed evil. No one lives there. 4000 years of psychogeography
And likely re-mortgaged several times.
But grifters will try to grift.
I doubt Labour would have done much better .
If flattening the curve was the idea, then having some infections during August when infection rates were very low helps keep them flat, especially when it wasn't known if there'd be a vaccine or not.
Especially when its fit and healthy people willing to go out who were getting infected. No big deal at all.
And not just throughout 2020 but also the importation of the delta variant from India in spring 2021 - casually allowed into the UK because Boris wanted a trip to India and a ride on an elephant.
I remember driving up London Rd seeing the queues outside all the restaurants on that strip thinking how crazy and contradictory it was. Indeed I posted it here at the time.
Everyone on the planet was trying to source PPE at the same time. That we never actually ran out of it should - nothwithstanding some scammers who got in the mix - be a credit to the procurement powers of this government.
*not husband
If Hamas had not acted then the moral position was swinging well away from the Israelis because of Netanyahu and the fact that a lot of supporters of Israel were deeply uncomfortable with his government.
If Hamas had not done their murderous deed then moves towards peace between Israel and Arab States would keep rolling.
If peace between Israel and Arab states reached their end goal then its would be possible for them to work a solution to the Palestinian issue because Israel could reduce their hardline position when the Arab States could show that they do not believe in a violent solution and pull the rug out from under those who think a violent solution is the answer.
So Hamas murdered Israeli civilians that day. Do you think they thought “what we will do is murder a load of Israeli civilians at a peace rave and kids in a Kibutz and the Israelis will say it’s a fair cop and we need to just give Hamas and the Palestinians what they want”?
Do you think that Hamas believed that it would force the hand of the Israelis in peace talks with Arab States?
Or do you think that Hamas wanted to cause bloodshed and fear, sacrifice the lives of Palestinian civilians - and don’t tell me they didn’t expect a fierce violent Israeli response - for their own murderous aims?
Hamas got what they wanted, fear in Israel, discord with Israel in the Arab/Muslim world, Jeremy Bowen on the news showing the plight of Palestinian civilians, misinformation on global media about the hospital attack. And what they got was bought with the lives of Palestinian civilians.
So when you write your next post with a “but Israel” remember that things were moving in a better direction with Israel losing a lot of moral high ground, moves towards regional peace and understanding and a potential for change until that first Israeli youth dancing at a party got shot, the first Israeli kid was shot in front of their parents, the first Israeli civilian got dragged off to a terrifying captivity. This is on Hamas.
But, yes, in general, the pandemic was a rare and extreme event. No-one was going to get it perfectly right. We should seek to learn from the (inevitable) mistakes to try and do better in the future.
We just about managed to get enough PPE. But we sourced a load of crap - or in some cases fresh air - and paid regardless. Any decent contract has a performance clause. And don't say it was done in haste because a boilerplate contract could have been drawn up in half an hour which would have covered the taxpayer.
This negligent approach to handing out public money - and to whom it was handed in what circumstances - is a true scandal and highlights the open corruption in the Tory party. I know the Tories keep wanting to pivot this back to Starmer. But Starmer wasn't in government handing billions to his spiv mates for nothing. People haven't forgotten what happened...
By delaying he has let the narrative become steadily more pro-Palestinian.
And by allowing hostage negotiations Israel is allowing Hamas to trickle them out for more time and concessions.
John Hume and David Trimble seemed to be able to do this, explicitly talking of the latest incident, without equivocation, hesitation, deviation or repetition.
Those who refused to talk about "their side" had the perfect right to. But even the dogs knew *what* they were, for their equivocation and whataboutery.
(incidentally it's been ages since I bought up my old "Tim Martin always looks like he's pissed his pants" insult. Ahhh, feel the nostalgia...)
Clearly I was wrong.
I don’t doubt there was some fraud but that tends to happen more frequently when you’re rushing out schemes .
Its tragic if any children die in Gaza, but it is entirely on Hamas. The tragedy doesn't change that.
There won't be any serious opposition threat to him for a decade. The Tories will be flattened like a a Giza apartment block at the GE.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5 describes the vaccine development landscape in early April 2020, well before EOTHO. We knew vaccines were in development (78 confirmed vaccines in development by 7 April, with 5 in Phase 1 trials). That article was predicting vaccines in use by early 2021; in fact, it was a bit sooner (Dec 2020).
We knew a vaccine was on the way. Having cases before a vaccine rather than after a vaccine is a bad idea.
How can you possibly expect Israel to do nothing when it is under attack?
The right policy for Israel/Gaza is hugely complicated and involves balancing many factors.
Emoting “won’t someone think of the children” is not constructive in any way.
Given what we now know of the damaging effects the covid restrictions had on mental well being we can be sure they would have been worse without the encouragement EOTHO gave people.
Whereas the highest Jewish vote is in Tory marginals like Finchley and Golders Green and Chipping Barnet
If they wait and allow supplies in Hamas gets stronger (they are diverting fuel from hospitals for their own use for example)
If they wait and don’t allow supplies in then they are criticised for “starving the population”.
War is shit. Especially for the innocent bystanders. But Hamas started this and must be eradicated if there is to be a hope of long term peace. Israel is doing the best it can to minimise civilian casualties against the backdrop of needing to deal with Hamas.
We ‘knew’ nothing of the sort. Several were in development but no one had any idea whether they would work - indeed there was much scepticism that they would work.
Simply saying lockdown and have no activities until vaccines is not a reasonable attitude.
There are things more important than case numbers. That you refuse to accept that is why we'll never see eye to eye on this.
"I think even if you’re not religious it would be a fascinating place to visit . I would like to do that one day once things calm down . If they ever do !"
+++++++
Yes, one of the top five most interesting towns/cities on earth. History on history on history, and you don't need to be religious at all to feel the thunderous weight of it
Tho of course plenty of agnostic people go there and suddenly become religious. A known syndrome. Be careful!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerusalem_syndrome
It's like the opposite of Paris Syndrome when Japanese people go to Paris and realise it isn't a fairy tale place like in Ratatouille but has litter and graffiti and crime and non-French people and they spaz out
But EOTHO wasn't just directing revenue to a different sector. It was encouraging a specific activity that increased spread. It cost lots of money. Two downsides. On the upside, it helped the hospitality industry. Was that a sensible policy choice? Support could have been given to the hospitality sector in other ways. The Government could have spent towards a billion pounds on something else (e.g. support for children whose education had been disrupted, more air filtration to reduce spread of the virus, more money on processing asylum seekers, build some more roads, ...).
It's a timeline. It's flexible. As I've said elsewhere, I can see that this is how Number 10 and CCHQ have planned it.
Things never go to plan, however.
Compared to how much was 'saved' by outsourcing PPE production to other countries in earlier years.
I can't remember who the Home Secretary was at the time, we went through so many, but if we have a thread on the person concerned, that would seem a great time to discuss the choices they made.
Which was a glorious example of a statistical fallacy ...
It is far too small to sway an election but, as you imply, could shunt a couple of seats to Sunal that might otherwise have been lost
I wonder what the same process will do in the USA? Florida?
This isn't necessarily because of our sh*t infrastructure, it is built in to the structure of the land.
Rivers in the west tend to be shorter and steeper. Rivers in the east tend to flow out into a wider and flatter floodplain which has lower capacity in the primary channel.
When the rain comes from the west this isn't a problem as most of it falls on the upslope in the other catchment.
2007 was a perfect example of rainfall from the east here - it included the wettest day here in at least 50 years - and it caused major flooding.
Here's a picture I took of our river on Saturday:
If the embankment wasn't 1cm lower on the right hundreds of people would be flooded, as it is 2-3m above the surrounding land. As it is some smaller communities were affected.
In 2019 Fishlake flooded from secondary washlands similar to the one you see here as the river stayed high for much longer and they filled up.
The current flood might actually have been caused by having more infrastructure - as Sheffield and Chesterfield have had higher defences built since 2007 and thus the river peak has thus been moved downstream.
Floods are a good example of the current dilemma though - with our limited resources, should we put billions into cutting emissions, or billions into adapting to live with climate change?
Mental health and the economy matters more than case numbers in August ever could or did.
There were plenty of things the Treasury could have done with £849 million that would have encouraged economic activity without causing as much virus spread. What about building some shiny new roads, for example? Some people say that's a good way of promoting economic activity.
I have a lot of criticisms about how Covid was handled, but not in a party political way because I don’t think it came down to Labour/Tory but more to do with the way the state functioned and the rather authoritarian mindset exerted by certain institutions and individuals.
Where the government do deserve everything that was thrown at them was the lockdown parties and the rule breaking. They should have operated at a higher standard, or at the very least should have publicised how their working practices were being handled in Downing St. The parties should never have happened. On that front (which is interestingly where the tide started to turn against the Tories) the public had them bang to rights.
I can consider the motivations and feelings of many Israelis and Zionists - both the sympathetic and the unsympathetic. The colonial mindset, the right to land, the desire for homogeneity and a strong homeland. The desire for a haven, a safe place after the horrors of the Holocaust and European anti-Semitism, the fear after the wars with their neighbours, the paranoia that the threat is still ever strong despite Israel being by far one of the best equipped nations militarily in the region. Why can't you do the same for Palestinians? Yes, the unsympathetic - the anti-Semitism, the dehumanisation of their perceived enemy, the hatred and violence. But the fear, the death, the lack of security, the lack of change, the constant loss of land and rights and the desire to go home. The death of mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. The experience for most Palestinians in Gaza who are under the age of 18 of only knowing life in an open air cage.
The specific reason for the attack by Hamas I cannot claim knowledge of. But the general feeling, I expect, is a fatalism - what else can they do? Palestinians peacefully march to the border fence in protest in 18-19 and they get shot, sniped. The UN repeatedly calls Israeli settlement schemes illegal, they keep happening. Israel controls their borders, their food, their energy, their water. They look to the West Bank, where apparently peaceful coexistence is "working" - which is where Palestinian labour is allowed to move (for the benefit of Israeli companies), where settlers will still steal land and houses and the IDF will still back them up. Is that what is to be aspired to? And the other Arab Middle Eastern countries increasingly let them die because business with Israel and the US is dependent on them doing so, so the only other friends are equally desperate or extreme.
Almost every conversation here devolves into a statement that the violence of Hamas, their killing of children and women, of Kibutz and raves is a sign of their inherent evil, inhumanity, how they need to be dealt with. And every example of Israeli forces killing children and women, the historical wrongs, the management of Gaza is met with a "well, that's war" and a shrug. Hamas could take the same position, no? "Why did you kill civilians, kidnap them, kill children?" ... "Well, that's war". It doesn't get us anywhere to paint one side as inhuman monsters with inhuman motives.
Total war on Gaza, on Palestinians, will do one thing - create the next generation of people who, wrongly, feel that the only route to justice is wiping Israel off the map. The only long term peaceful solution requires the stronger party, which is undoubtedly Israel, to show mercy first and go to the negotiation table.
Schools and Universities reopening utterly dwarfed EOTHO and made it inconsequential anyway. Freshers Flu is not a Covid phenomenon.
What we had in the summer of 2020 was an almost covid free UK after the restrictions.
But covid was still prevalent in other countries.
So people going to, for example, Spain in summer 2020 would have a wild time and catch covid, then spread it around to everyone on the plane back and then likely infect their friends and work colleagues once home.
In the end we got three within a year. That was due to some brilliant work by scientists (and politicians...), but also luck. It could easily have gone the other way - look at how many diseases and infections still do not have vaccines, even after many years of work. ANd of the 78 confirmed vaccines, three initially succeeded. Just three.
Absolutely fucking laughable and naive.
"I thought it might be helpful for at least some people on the Left if I shared some excerpts from the founding Charter of Hamas. A 🧵
1) We'll start with Article 22, which reads like a loving homage to the Protocols or Mein Kampf."
https://x.com/Daniel_Sugarman/status/1717100846134042716?s=20
TLDR: they absolutely hate Jews, they want all Jews gone, they want to kill as many Jews as possible so they can cleanse the entire region of Jews and make it Muslim
This is their CHARTER, not some crank anti-Semite in a shed with a printing press. The Charter in action is what we saw on October 7
Israel can never compromise with this. They need to invade Gaza now and get the fuck on with the whole ghastly process. Delay makes it all worse
https://holocaustremembrance.com/resources/working-definitions-charters/working-definition-antisemitism