I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
In shock news, people who never go the to pub support closing pubs.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Not only that. 50+ years on I still have a memory of the many long holiday trips from London to Devon of my childhood, looking out from the back seat waiting for Stonehenge to come into view, and the excitement when we finally drove past it. We didn't usually stop, yet the sight from the road was magnificent enough to stick in the memory even now. How do you quantify the loss of such memories to future generations of children (and adults), in economic terms?
Same. I also remember happier days when visitors could walk around the stones unhindered and the whole site was a simple child's joy.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Believe me when I say I know all about Stonehenge and the roads - I was brought up in Shrewton for 15 years and my parents still live there. I was being a bit cheeky - the north road was indeed described as an eyesore etc and was closed, although arguably it was more to stop tourists failing to pay to go in (they would stop on the roadside, take photo's over the fence and move on).
It is a farce right now. There is no need for a tunnel - a decent cutting with the road shifted south by a mile would be fine. In reality there are many who just oppose anything at all.
One of the reasons given for opposing the tunnel is that without rubber necking from the A303, many less people would see the stones.
Apparently requiring people to stop, park & walk to the site is too much.
Sounds American style car mad to me - spiritual experiences at 7000rpm.
The A303 is so slow there that you have plenty of time to look at Stonehenge. I'm not sure that stopping and parking for the benefit of seeing them slightly closer is really worth it TBH. The view from the road certainly satiated my appetite. The M4/M5 route to Cornwall is better, anyway.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Believe me when I say I know all about Stonehenge and the roads - I was brought up in Shrewton for 15 years and my parents still live there. I was being a bit cheeky - the north road was indeed described as an eyesore etc and was closed, although arguably it was more to stop tourists failing to pay to go in (they would stop on the roadside, take photo's over the fence and move on).
It is a farce right now. There is no need for a tunnel - a decent cutting with the road shifted south by a mile would be fine. In reality there are many who just oppose anything at all.
Just... £2.4 billion? Seems completely crazy to me.
I don't get the archaeological opposition to doing a cutting or something. Managed well, it's a funded project for local universities. I had a fascinating conversation with some archaelogists during the Edinburgh Tram extension as they unearthed a possible murder victim just down the road from my flat. https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/unusual-burial-discovered-in-leith.htm
I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
Remember that famous poll that said pretty much a quarter of the population never wanted nightclubs to reopen after COVID. Ever.
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Not only that. 50+ years on I still have a memory of the many long holiday trips from London to Devon of my childhood, looking out from the back seat waiting for Stonehenge to come into view, and the excitement when we finally drove past it. We didn't usually stop, yet the sight from the road was magnificent enough to stick in the memory even now. How do you quantify the loss of such memories to future generations of children (and adults), in economic terms?
On that basis we should have built the M25 through central London, so that you can see all the sights.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Not only that. 50+ years on I still have a memory of the many long holiday trips from London to Devon of my childhood, looking out from the back seat waiting for Stonehenge to come into view, and the excitement when we finally drove past it. We didn't usually stop, yet the sight from the road was magnificent enough to stick in the memory even now. How do you quantify the loss of such memories to future generations of children (and adults), in economic terms?
On that basis we should have built the M25 through central London, so that you can see all the sights.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Yes. For years it was always 'Only the philistine British would ruin a site like Stonehenge by allowing a crappy road to run past it. If they cared they'd invest in a tunnel.' Now the road is apparently the most wonderful thing ever and people are campaigning to save it.
I don't think that people opposed to the tunnel are in favour of the road, unless it is used by cyclists only, perhaps.
The road does look a bit less bad than it used to now that the future has it used by zero tailpipe emissions vehicles. Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
There is a list of projects that Britain talks about doing and never manages to get done. Sorting out the A303 past Stonehenge is one. Dualling the A1. Third runway at Heathrow. Fixing up Westminster Palace is becoming another. Possible the Lower Thames Crossing is heading in that direction.
It's a wonder the channel tunnel was ever completed.
It's a strange article about 'interesting' people, including one Elon Musk:
As she says this, her five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously – is strapped to her chest, occasionally burbling, while Malcolm has charge of their two sons Torsten, two, and Octavian, three. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/pronatalists-save-mankind-by-having-babies-silicon-valley/
...
What is to be done? ‘Our solution is, uh, we don’t have a solution,’ he admits. He says the only things proven to increase birth rates are poverty and the oppression of women, which are bad and should be stamped out. The only hope is to find those few families that combine liberal, pluralistic politics, such as support for LGBT rights, with high fertility – or create new, hybrid micro-cultures that value both – and help them multiply.
I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
Remember that famous poll that said pretty much a quarter of the population never wanted nightclubs to reopen after COVID. Ever.
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
Indeed. I would love to see an age breakdown of that 20-25%.
"As I have changed my phones, the messages wouldn't have come across."
Rishi Sunak's words.
Unless you specifically choose not to bring the messages across, they always come across.
I think folk will just presume he’s lying. Most folks have WhatsApp. Most folks have upgraded phones. So they will know how simple it is to migrate to a new phone and keep all their chats.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
Two general thoughts on pandemics: First, globalization and diversity make them more likely; density makes them more deadly. These are not new observations, but it surprises me a bit to see how few pay attention to these lessons from history.
(I would agree that all three are, net, still "good things", though all of them can be overdone.)
Second, if I were running an inquiry, I would begin by studying the differences in other nations (or in the US among states). For example, why did Austria have so much lower a death rate than its neighbor, the Czech Republic?
It is often easier to learn from other's experience than from our own.
(Those interested in this subject may want to read Bill Gates' book. I found it sensible and liked the fact that he was looking for ways to improve, not people to blame.)
I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
Remember that famous poll that said pretty much a quarter of the population never wanted nightclubs to reopen after COVID. Ever.
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
It’s worryingly present across all age groups and all political persuasions too. Who are these people?
I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
Remember that famous poll that said pretty much a quarter of the population never wanted nightclubs to reopen after COVID. Ever.
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
I know it's very boring but the most sensible position on lockdowns is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, and has you have to appreciate the benefit of hindsight.
The greatest inequity was that so much of the cost fell on younger people, directly through education or indirectly because they are less likely to have gardens etc. I wonder how different it might have been under Labour - stricter perhaps, but fairer.
"As I have changed my phones, the messages wouldn't have come across."
Rishi Sunak's words.
Unless you specifically choose not to bring the messages across, they always come across.
I think folk will just presume he’s lying. Most folks have WhatsApp. Most folks have upgraded phones. So they will know how simple it is to migrate to a new phone and keep all their chats.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
I’m surprised that in a government that featured JRM they weren’t conducting government business by carrier pigeon, frankly.
I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
Remember that famous poll that said pretty much a quarter of the population never wanted nightclubs to reopen after COVID. Ever.
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
It’s worryingly present across all age groups and all political persuasions too. Who are these people?
Some insane stats from the usually fairly accurate Economist: 57% of students claim to have a mental health issue 75%+ parents sought mental health advice for children in 2021/2 25%+ 16-18 yo are given extra time in official exams because of health conditions.
Can any of this be true?
One issue is that many students are deploying 'issues; to gain advantage in exams etc. We have hoards of students with DAPs (disability action plans) than get them extra time in exams etc.
Now they may ALL be genuine, but my skeptical head says not. Its another way to game the system.
Quite what they expect in the workplace I have no idea, Boots won't be happy with you getting extra time to do your job...
First, it could all be genuine and there are more and more mental health issues, and indeed physical ones. This should not be controversial. Simple observations tells us more people are obese; more people are short-sighted; more people have dementia (there's a mental health issue!).
Second, as well as deeply cynical students claiming extra time, there is a recent tendency to medicalise personality traits. Introverts who can add up are now "on the spectrum" (cf Leon passim). Wash your hands after relieving yourself? OCD. No girlfriend? Aspies. Like trains? Erm, I'd best stop there.
The point is that as the notion of what constitutes a mental health issue has been broadened, it naturally follows that more and more people get to tick the yes box, alongside genuinely new cases rather than just self-diagnosed or reclassified older ones.
I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
Remember that famous poll that said pretty much a quarter of the population never wanted nightclubs to reopen after COVID. Ever.
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
I know it's very boring but the most sensible position on lockdowns is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes, and has you have to appreciate the benefit of hindsight.
The greatest inequity was that so much of the cost fell on younger people, directly through education or indirectly because they are less likely to have gardens etc. I wonder how different it might have been under Labour - stricter perhaps, but fairer.
Stricter I sense but fairer in what respect? As you’ve identified the cost on mental health, learning etc disproportionally fell on the young. How would Labour have changed that?
The situation that absolutely could have been fairer was the weird tier system though, which was absolutely ridiculous and a complete postcode lottery, that showed itself to be completely useless fairly soon after implementation.
Some insane stats from the usually fairly accurate Economist: 57% of students claim to have a mental health issue 75%+ parents sought mental health advice for children in 2021/2 25%+ 16-18 yo are given extra time in official exams because of health conditions.
Can any of this be true?
One issue is that many students are deploying 'issues; to gain advantage in exams etc. We have hoards of students with DAPs (disability action plans) than get them extra time in exams etc.
Now they may ALL be genuine, but my skeptical head says not. Its another way to game the system.
Quite what they expect in the workplace I have no idea, Boots won't be happy with you getting extra time to do your job...
First, it could all be genuine and there are more and more mental health issues, and indeed physical ones. This should not be controversial. Simple observations tells us more people are obese; more people are short-sighted; more people have dementia (there's a mental health issue!).
Second, as well as deeply cynical students claiming extra time, there is a recent tendency to medicalise personality traits. Introverts who can add up are now "on the spectrum" (cf Leon passim). Wash your hands after relieving yourself? OCD. No girlfriend? Aspies. Like trains? Erm, I'd best stop there.
The point is that as the notion of what constitutes a mental health issue has been broadened, it naturally follows that more and more people get to tick the yes box, alongside genuinely new cases rather than just self-diagnosed or reclassified older ones.
What was bullying is now medical, I am not sure if this is a good improvement or not to be honest.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Yes. For years it was always 'Only the philistine British would ruin a site like Stonehenge by allowing a crappy road to run past it. If they cared they'd invest in a tunnel.' Now the road is apparently the most wonderful thing ever and people are campaigning to save it.
I don't think that people opposed to the tunnel are in favour of the road, unless it is used by cyclists only, perhaps.
The road does look a bit less bad than it used to now that the future has it used by zero tailpipe emissions vehicles. Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
There is a list of projects that Britain talks about doing and never manages to get done. Sorting out the A303 past Stonehenge is one. Dualling the A1. Third runway at Heathrow. Fixing up Westminster Palace is becoming another. Possible the Lower Thames Crossing is heading in that direction.
It's a wonder the channel tunnel was ever completed.
The French were involved in the channel tunnel. We should oursource all our motorways and inter-city rail to the French, we'd have much improved infrastructure in 20 years time.
Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
This I find baffling. If the archeology remains underground we will never know about it. Will it be destroyed by the tunnel (or by a cutting)? No, it will be carefully excavated, documented, and stored in museums for future academic research. Try researching artefacts premanently buried 2m underground.
Some insane stats from the usually fairly accurate Economist: 57% of students claim to have a mental health issue 75%+ parents sought mental health advice for children in 2021/2 25%+ 16-18 yo are given extra time in official exams because of health conditions.
Can any of this be true?
One issue is that many students are deploying 'issues; to gain advantage in exams etc. We have hoards of students with DAPs (disability action plans) than get them extra time in exams etc.
Now they may ALL be genuine, but my skeptical head says not. Its another way to game the system.
Quite what they expect in the workplace I have no idea, Boots won't be happy with you getting extra time to do your job...
First, it could all be genuine and there are more and more mental health issues, and indeed physical ones. This should not be controversial. Simple observations tells us more people are obese; more people are short-sighted; more people have dementia (there's a mental health issue!).
Second, as well as deeply cynical students claiming extra time, there is a recent tendency to medicalise personality traits. Introverts who can add up are now "on the spectrum" (cf Leon passim). Wash your hands after relieving yourself? OCD. No girlfriend? Aspies. Like trains? Erm, I'd best stop there.
The point is that as the notion of what constitutes a mental health issue has been broadened, it naturally follows that more and more people get to tick the yes box, alongside genuinely new cases rather than just self-diagnosed or reclassified older ones.
I have a well-rehearsed rant about this: the TLDR version is that disorders should be moved outside the NHS (later modified to "..except where life threatening"). Science has advanced to the point where normal human variation is medicalised and can be treated, which is of debatable advantage to the person and disadvantage to others.
"As I have changed my phones, the messages wouldn't have come across."
Rishi Sunak's words.
Unless you specifically choose not to bring the messages across, they always come across.
I think folk will just presume he’s lying. Most folks have WhatsApp. Most folks have upgraded phones. So they will know how simple it is to migrate to a new phone and keep all their chats.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
The real problem is government by Whatsapp, Zoom and any other foreign-controlled messaging service, rather than keeping everything under civil service control and properly curated.
Slight cultural discombobulating at the bus stop: young Scottish woman burbling away to her pals on her phone dropping ‘innit’ and ‘holmes’ into her convo like nobody’s business. Not a single swear word either, equally disturbing.
Still much lower than those notorious failed states like Denmark, France, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands, Germany...
I have heard it said many times on here that the UK has been living beyond its means for many years, which I agree with. The answer proposed is usually cuts to public services and benefits.
In fact the answer is simple: we should get used to a slightly higher level of taxation as a % of GDP.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Yes. For years it was always 'Only the philistine British would ruin a site like Stonehenge by allowing a crappy road to run past it. If they cared they'd invest in a tunnel.' Now the road is apparently the most wonderful thing ever and people are campaigning to save it.
I don't think that people opposed to the tunnel are in favour of the road, unless it is used by cyclists only, perhaps.
The road does look a bit less bad than it used to now that the future has it used by zero tailpipe emissions vehicles. Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
There is a list of projects that Britain talks about doing and never manages to get done. Sorting out the A303 past Stonehenge is one. Dualling the A1. Third runway at Heathrow. Fixing up Westminster Palace is becoming another. Possible the Lower Thames Crossing is heading in that direction.
It's a wonder the channel tunnel was ever completed.
The French were involved in the channel tunnel. We should oursource all our motorways and inter-city rail to the French, we'd have much improved infrastructure in 20 years time.
Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
This I find baffling. If the archeology remains underground we will never know about it. Will it be destroyed by the tunnel (or by a cutting)? No, it will be carefully excavated, documented, and stored in museums for future academic research. Try researching artefacts premanently buried 2m underground.
We could outsource our infrastructure to the Northern Irish, who seem to have no trouble running a publicly-owned railway system which runs on time and is cheap.
"As I have changed my phones, the messages wouldn't have come across."
Rishi Sunak's words.
Unless you specifically choose not to bring the messages across, they always come across.
I think folk will just presume he’s lying. Most folks have WhatsApp. Most folks have upgraded phones. So they will know how simple it is to migrate to a new phone and keep all their chats.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
The real problem is government by Whatsapp, Zoom and any other foreign-controlled messaging service, rather than keeping everything under civil service control and properly curated.
There is an interesting point here, in that the digital age whilst making us far more educated in one sense, means politicians constantly have to react and so have no time to actually think about what is going to happen more than one minute ahead. And because of this you get these weird, last minute decisions like the recent Tory economic strategy.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Yes. For years it was always 'Only the philistine British would ruin a site like Stonehenge by allowing a crappy road to run past it. If they cared they'd invest in a tunnel.' Now the road is apparently the most wonderful thing ever and people are campaigning to save it.
I don't think that people opposed to the tunnel are in favour of the road, unless it is used by cyclists only, perhaps.
The road does look a bit less bad than it used to now that the future has it used by zero tailpipe emissions vehicles. Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
There is a list of projects that Britain talks about doing and never manages to get done. Sorting out the A303 past Stonehenge is one. Dualling the A1. Third runway at Heathrow. Fixing up Westminster Palace is becoming another. Possible the Lower Thames Crossing is heading in that direction.
It's a wonder the channel tunnel was ever completed.
The French were involved in the channel tunnel. We should oursource all our motorways and inter-city rail to the French, we'd have much improved infrastructure in 20 years time.
Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
This I find baffling. If the archeology remains underground we will never know about it. Will it be destroyed by the tunnel (or by a cutting)? No, it will be carefully excavated, documented, and stored in museums for future academic research. Try researching artefacts premanently buried 2m underground.
We could outsource our infrastructure to the Northern Irish, who seem to have no trouble running a publicly-owned railway system which runs on time and is cheap.
That can't be true, all transport systems have to be run for profit else you cannot achieve the wonderful efficiency and reliability of the rest-of-UK rail and bus services.
So, applying my 3 questions, did EOTHO work or not?
There is no doubt that the Chancellor was right to be concerned about the financial impact of Covid. The level of support required to maintain hundreds of thousands of businesses not allowed to trade was immense. It made sense to have such a scheme to encourage at least limited trading.
But the scheme was not road tested in terms of its potential impact in spreading Covid. Whilst it is not hard to see the reasons for the scheme that would surely be in the do not repeat pile.
So, in a future pandemic, we need to recognise that we will need to do what we can to keep things going as much as possible but these kind of ideas need to be integrated into the overall plan for handling and modelling the pandemic and not separate from it.
I'll send my bill to the Inquiry.
It's a largely irrelevant question, as far as Sunak's scheme was concerned.
Any future pandemic will be courtesy of a different virus, likely with completely different epidemiological characteristics. And the interventions available to us - for example testing and vaccines - will also be of a completely different order to what was available even a couple of years ago.
The more interesting question is what day 1 measures could we be in a position in future to take in order to limit (and if possible halt) spread of virus, without destroying the economy in the process ?
Having such a plan was what made Taiwan such a notable success in dealing with Covid.
Beyond already having capacity in place, plans for dealing with pandemics once they have taken hold are necessarily ad hoc, I suspect.
I agree that we are much more likely to have a vaccine much faster the next time with the scientific advances made during this one, specifically the computer modelling. It is also obviously the case that any new virus will have its own characteristics.
What I think is important is that we recognise that complete and total shutdown is simply not economically viable for anything other than the shortest of periods and that we need to focus as much on what we can do safely as what we can't.
Though the faster a vaccine can be got into arms from a standing start, the more viable a shutdown in the meantime becomes. In the early days, Swedish theory was that we needed measures that could be sustained for several years because a vaccine could take that long.
But the central irony remains. The UK government were desperate to avoid lockdowns and return to normality. (See also EOTHO, which wouldn't have been a bad idea once the pandemic was actually over.) In doing so, in trying to run the pandemic warm, if not hot, they ended up in a situation where they had to lockdown- and the winter 2021 lockdown was longer and grimmer than in many other countries, despite our vaccine advantage.
Stitches in time saving nine is not a new insight.
The biggest stich in time is not allowing a virus into the country.
Yet we had planes flying in from China weeks after it had gone into lockdown, people going on holiday to covid ridden Spain in summer 2020 and then the import of the Delta variant from India in spring 2021.
Lockdowns and other restrictions were the equivalent of bailing out an overflowing bath which still had the taps turned on.
The virus would have got in anyway unless we'd gone full New Zealand, which we couldn't because of the truckers. People visiting Spain would simply have flown back from Germany instead or something and lied on their forms. Or just hitched a ride on a boat from Calais - seems easy enough these days. And once you get one or two asymptomatic cases in, domestic transmission dominates within a few days.
Given that, you're right that lockdowns were largely pointless and completely counter-productive. And disproportionate for a virus with a 99.8% recovery rate (>99.9% amongst healthy under-70s).
It's been pointed out to you before that your repeated quoting of fantasy figures for "recovery rates" is not only wrong (and you seem to be basing it on a discredited study by a single scientist that completely clashes with the vast majority of others), but obviously absurd when you just divide population numbers by deaths.
(If 10% of the country had covid by the end of 2020 prior to vaccines and 90,000 had died, then if 0.2% was an average rate over the entire population (which you claim it isn't, as under 70s are far lower), then the population of the UK would need to be just under half a billion. Which it really isn't, honest)
Not to mention ignoring the problem of hospitalisations (which ran at over 5% of those infected, and whilst it did skew considerably by age, it wasn't anywhere near as steep as the deaths - especially for those in ICU, of which more than half were under 65) and long-term effects and pretending that everyone who doesn't die is absolutely fine.
If you quote known-wrong figures for this, can we trust your figures for other things?
The other thing to point out is that the death rate in the UK is in the context that the hospital system didn't crash, and most people, particularly younger people, who needed intensive treatment received it.
Not sure what the death rate would be without medical treatment being available, but I think it would have been considerably worse than the death rate we saw.
Very true. In 2021, I plotted the death rate (from death certificates as primary cause) against infection incidence (from the ONS regular study) to get a rough guide to changes in IFR. (Can only be rough because time-to-death is a distribution rather than a fixed interval, causing unavoidable fuzziness and uncertainty).
The highest was in late January 2021 when the hospitals were at their most overloaded (cf reports of intensive care beds being set up in hospital gift shops and the ratio of carers-to-beds was at its worst) and peaked over 1.6% (plus or minus a non-inconsiderable amount due to that fuzziness).
During the pre-vaccination period, it wobbled around 1.2% (and over a sufficiently lengthy period - measured in months - that the fuzziness would average out) and cratered following the vax rollout down to below 0.2%, even with the advent of Delta. Nowadays it should be bit below 0.1%, due to Omicron reverting to about the deadliness level of the original strain and very widespread immunity [death toll of deaths with covid mentioned on death certificate divided by approximate infections at the moment is about 0.13%, but about half of those aren't directly caused by covid, even if it wouldn't exactly have helped]. Which is sort of ironic, given that's the claim given - which means that if it was 0.1% IFR, we wouldn't have locked down or even gone to great lengths to mitigate it, because we're not exactly doing that at the moment.
That can't be true, all transport systems have to be run for profit else you cannot achieve the wonderful efficiency and reliability of the rest-of-UK rail and bus services.
I honestly think the UK must be the best argument against privatisation there has ever been.
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Not only that. 50+ years on I still have a memory of the many long holiday trips from London to Devon of my childhood, looking out from the back seat waiting for Stonehenge to come into view, and the excitement when we finally drove past it. We didn't usually stop, yet the sight from the road was magnificent enough to stick in the memory even now. How do you quantify the loss of such memories to future generations of children (and adults), in economic terms?
On that basis we should have built the M25 through central London, so that you can see all the sights.
There was a proposal to build a motorway on the Thames...
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Yes. For years it was always 'Only the philistine British would ruin a site like Stonehenge by allowing a crappy road to run past it. If they cared they'd invest in a tunnel.' Now the road is apparently the most wonderful thing ever and people are campaigning to save it.
I don't think that people opposed to the tunnel are in favour of the road, unless it is used by cyclists only, perhaps.
The road does look a bit less bad than it used to now that the future has it used by zero tailpipe emissions vehicles. Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
There is a list of projects that Britain talks about doing and never manages to get done. Sorting out the A303 past Stonehenge is one. Dualling the A1. Third runway at Heathrow. Fixing up Westminster Palace is becoming another. Possible the Lower Thames Crossing is heading in that direction.
It's a wonder the channel tunnel was ever completed.
The French were involved in the channel tunnel. We should oursource all our motorways and inter-city rail to the French, we'd have much improved infrastructure in 20 years time.
Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
This I find baffling. If the archeology remains underground we will never know about it. Will it be destroyed by the tunnel (or by a cutting)? No, it will be carefully excavated, documented, and stored in museums for future academic research. Try researching artefacts premanently buried 2m underground.
We could outsource our infrastructure to the Northern Irish, who seem to have no trouble running a publicly-owned railway system which runs on time and is cheap.
That can't be true, all transport systems have to be run for profit else you cannot achieve the wonderful efficiency and reliability of the rest-of-UK rail and bus services.
Sat in a meeting this morning. People from various parts of the UK saying they are done with rail travel. Endless repeated major delays and cancellations mean they just aren't reliable enough to be trusted.
Was lockdown necessary? I am not even sure at this point if it was, having been a strong advocate of it at the time.
Knowing a few people, apparently fit and healthy, who nearly succumbed to Covid in early 2020, I remain an advocate of the lockdowns at least until the majority of the population was vaccinated.
Doctors will be given approval to keep prescribing puberty-blocking drugs to young people under plans to standardise gender identification services in Scotland.
NHS England announced last year that hormone treatments would be prescribed to children only as part of clinical research after a report said that there were “gaps in evidence” on their safety and effectiveness.
Sat in a meeting this morning. People from various parts of the UK saying they are done with rail travel. Endless repeated major delays and cancellations mean they just aren't reliable enough to be trusted.
The problem with the UK rail system is that not only it is expensive, it is unreliable too.
If it was expensive but Swiss-style, I think people would tolerate it. But they don't, because it isn't.
France's system might not be better in actuality, same as Germany's (haven't seen the recent figures but I believe long-form services are more unreliable in those countries but short-form services are more reliable) but they aren't spending £300 to get from Berlin to Hamburg
Now. Stonehenge. I grew up being told that the road that ran alongside it was a bloody eyesore and putting the traffic through a tunnel would restore the site's peace and ancient mysticism. But now, apparently, the road is great and the tunnel an act of cultural barbrarism.
Different road. There used to be one to the North that ran towards Shrewton.
No. That road was insignificant compared with the A303 that runs (checks) 200m south of Stonehenge.
The objections on the basis of trashing the site by removing a trunk road from view are, quite frankly, bonkers.
These protests are all about the anti-road (indeed the anti-everything) brigade, nothing to do with protecting a World Heritage site.
Yes. For years it was always 'Only the philistine British would ruin a site like Stonehenge by allowing a crappy road to run past it. If they cared they'd invest in a tunnel.' Now the road is apparently the most wonderful thing ever and people are campaigning to save it.
I don't think that people opposed to the tunnel are in favour of the road, unless it is used by cyclists only, perhaps.
The road does look a bit less bad than it used to now that the future has it used by zero tailpipe emissions vehicles. Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
There is a list of projects that Britain talks about doing and never manages to get done. Sorting out the A303 past Stonehenge is one. Dualling the A1. Third runway at Heathrow. Fixing up Westminster Palace is becoming another. Possible the Lower Thames Crossing is heading in that direction.
It's a wonder the channel tunnel was ever completed.
The French were involved in the channel tunnel. We should oursource all our motorways and inter-city rail to the French, we'd have much improved infrastructure in 20 years time.
Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
This I find baffling. If the archeology remains underground we will never know about it. Will it be destroyed by the tunnel (or by a cutting)? No, it will be carefully excavated, documented, and stored in museums for future academic research. Try researching artefacts premanently buried 2m underground.
We could outsource our infrastructure to the Northern Irish, who seem to have no trouble running a publicly-owned railway system which runs on time and is cheap.
Probably helps to have: No government, massive subsidy from across the Irish sea and a place the size of a banana.
Was lockdown necessary? I am not even sure at this point if it was, having been a strong advocate of it at the time.
Grudgingly my view is yes, at least for the first lockdown, because I am pretty convinced the NHS would have come close to near total collapse (or even might have done so) if not, which would have had significantly worse outcomes than if not.
Subsequent lockdowns, I am on the fence somewhat. The government fluctuated between being over zealous, and other times coming up with weird halfway house measures that didn’t work.
One thing I do bemoan is that there was (and still is, in many mainstream media outlets) a complete lack of cost-benefit debate in our national conversation. The decision has been taken that lockdown = good and there was very little critical consideration of that in society at large, which has not been of benefit to us in my view - it has continued the trend towards polarisation/absolutist thinking/feelings of exclusion and disillusionment.
Probably helps to have: No government, massive subsidy from across the Irish sea and a place the size of a banana.
So what you are saying, is that even without a functioning government, they still have lower subsidies than the UK rail system and still manage to make it cheaper and work better than the privatised system here which has subsidies far higher than British Rail ever had and is far fragmented, slow and unreliable than ever.
Let's get the Northern Irish in. Or even the French.
Was lockdown necessary? I am not even sure at this point if it was, having been a strong advocate of it at the time.
I still don't understand why it was applied to young and healthy people when they were hardly affected by the virus. People who had to work with vulnerable people, like care home workers, had to work anyway, so the argument that it was the right thing to do in order to protect them doesn't hold water.
Doctors will be given approval to keep prescribing puberty-blocking drugs to young people under plans to standardise gender identification services in Scotland.
NHS England announced last year that hormone treatments would be prescribed to children only as part of clinical research after a report said that there were “gaps in evidence” on their safety and effectiveness.
If it was in force, and effective, then 60%+ of the populace would be supportive of it with only a small voluble liberal minority crying murder about it.
Even if it worked (it won't, it doesn't, it can't) it would still be terrible.
But you are right, fewer people would care.
In your eyes, yes, just as some don't like Australia's approach. But, it would become established and generally accepted.
Also, more European countries would emulate it.
Do you have any evidence that the idea is well supported outside a Tory/UKIP rump of extreme right wingers and racists?
Young people have been utterly screwed by this government on Covid and the aftermath, utterly screwed.
It's something to which almost no attention is paid anywhere else other than here but the evidence is overwhelming.
Their education and social development was horrendously damaged, even although they were at almost no risk at all of serious illness. They were harassed about meeting up with friends (unlike some politicians who seemed to carry on as normal). Their activities, such as night clubs, were specifically targeted and many failed to survive. They get to pay back the £400bn.
The intergenerational fairness of such measures really needs looking at.
Was lockdown necessary? I am not even sure at this point if it was, having been a strong advocate of it at the time.
I still don't understand why it was applied to young and healthy people when they were hardly affected by the virus. People who had to work with vulnerable people, like care home workers, had to work anyway, so the argument that it was the right thing to do in order to protect them doesn't hold water.
BIB is complete bollocks though, isn't it? Lots of young healthy people needed hospital care and many died from Covid in the era before vaccination. And lockdown was not about shielding the elderly and infirm it was about reducing the R to below 1 so that the prevalance dropped.
The idea that young people could be allowed out, and older ones not falls apart when you look at workplaces, homes etc. Young people often live with older people and people who are vulnerable.
"As I have changed my phones, the messages wouldn't have come across."
Rishi Sunak's words.
Unless you specifically choose not to bring the messages across, they always come across.
I think folk will just presume he’s lying. Most folks have WhatsApp. Most folks have upgraded phones. So they will know how simple it is to migrate to a new phone and keep all their chats.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
Because ministers are covered by the Ministerial Code - of which the PM is the final arbiter.
"One of the most astute observations I saw made over the course of the pandemic was that much public discussion about the virus rested on the unspoken contention that covid-19 is transmitted not by close person to person contact, primarily in under-ventilated spaces, but by individual failure: by self indulgence, and by sin."
"Commuter attacked by suspected XL Bully on train platform Footage shows the man trying to get a large dog under control before being thrown to the ground"
If Rwanda was a deterrent it would already be you know, deterring people.
But it isn't.
So it fails on its own terms, why is this not being more widely spoken about?
Why would it be a deterrent when it is not in place?
The announcement was the deterrent, I remember reading it at the time and thinking it was nonsense but that is what the government said.
If you're going to die anyway why do you care? That's what these muppets don't seem to understand. They got rid of the Albanian people and the numbers are still coming.
"Nigel Farage can put this pointless Conservative Party out of its misery The Tories warned that Labour would open the borders and raise taxes, then did it themselves. They deserve to go"
If Rwanda was a deterrent it would already be you know, deterring people.
But it isn't.
So it fails on its own terms, why is this not being more widely spoken about?
I think its advocates would say it can't be a deterrent until it's actually working. I can't see it becoming a meaningful deterrent even if it ever actually gets off the ground, because the capacity of Rwanda to take significant numbers is so constrained anyway. But it seems doubtful it'll ever get off the ground anyway.
And David Jones, ERG deputy chair, said he doesn’t think the bill amendable in its current form, as he explains why they want bill pulled. So position hardening.
This is like Brexit all over again. Unlike Brexit, the non-Tories just need to sit this one out and let the policy collapse into its own contradictions. Not allow themselves to be actively associated with killing the policy otherwise it will become in popular Tory mythology the silver bullet that would have stopped the boats overnight were it not for those pesky lefty lawyers.
My mortgage has just gone to its new interest rate. Up £155 a month. Thank you, Tories!
~£260 for us at current rates but we've got two parts, smaller due Feb 2025 and larger due Dec 2025 so I'm hopeful that will drop a bit before then under the strong and steady leadership of Keir Starmer rather than chaos with Rishi Sunak Unless the fekker clings on so that we have to remortgage the first part under the chaos of a zombie government and a general election.
The cheap money couldn't last forever, but it is unfortunate that that cheap money, by making larger mortgages 'affordable'*, helped to push up property prices to the extent that more realistic rates are now making things painful.
* the affordability tests are interesting as we've always been offered Agreement in Principle amounts far in excess of what we consider we could afford to service
"One of the most astute observations I saw made over the course of the pandemic was that much public discussion about the virus rested on the unspoken contention that covid-19 is transmitted not by close person to person contact, primarily in under-ventilated spaces, but by individual failure: by self indulgence, and by sin."
But surely failure to observe Covid guidance was individual failure, self indulgence and sin?
Now, if only the guidance had been more closely related to risk of infection, then those failings could also be linked to Covid transmission...
My mortgage has just gone to its new interest rate. Up £155 a month. Thank you, Tories!
On the plus side savings rates are up too. 👍
You’ve benefitted from ZIRP, that’s over now. I suspect we are reverting to long term rates now. I’d look at Mark Carney for someone to have a fair share of the blame.
"Nigel Farage can put this pointless Conservative Party out of its misery The Tories warned that Labour would open the borders and raise taxes, then did it themselves. They deserve to go"
There was a fascinating moment in the jungle when contestants Tony Bellew and Josie Gibson interrogated Farage about his views and were surprised to learn that he doesn’t sit in the Commons. Later, Gibson said: “I had no idea he used to work for the European Parliament … It just goes to show how ignorant I’ve been!” Gibson is a presenter for ITV’s This Morning.
If it was in force, and effective, then 60%+ of the populace would be supportive of it with only a small voluble liberal minority crying murder about it.
Even if it worked (it won't, it doesn't, it can't) it would still be terrible.
But you are right, fewer people would care.
In your eyes, yes, just as some don't like Australia's approach. But, it would become established and generally accepted.
Also, more European countries would emulate it.
Do you have any evidence that the idea is well supported outside a Tory/UKIP rump of extreme right wingers and racists?
77% of Conservative voters support processing asylum claims in Rwanda, as do 75% of Leave voters.
61% of Labour voters, 59% of LD voters and 58% of Remainers don't however
Surely we need to cancel the GE and declare martial law to support Rishi and the Rwanda plan. We can't have traitors running the show!
It’s pitiful . Did you see him begging for Labour support in the DE . When he came in even though I’d never vote for him I was relieved after the Bozo and Truss debacles . Now he’s just another liar who has zero spine and is being held hostage by the right wing nutjobs .
New Dutch study on the economic impact of immigration demo-demo.nl/wp-content/upl… migration from other rich countries a net benefit, migration from poor countries a net drain
This should be required reading for our policy makers and officials in the Home Office. Nick Palmer noted one small part of the report ("table on page 90 and the subsequent discussion") to draw his own slanted conclusions. I've now skim-read it in full and would just note its concluding sentence:
The calculations in this report leave no doubt about what this means in the long term: increasing pressure on public finances and ultimately the end of the welfare state as we know it today. A choice for the current legal framework is therefore implicitly a choice against the welfare state.
Have to say am surprised that the ERG looks as if though it might vote down the Rwanda bill. This looks like remainers voting down the May Brexit bill type error to me, but the other way round. The ERG isn't going to get anything if they vote this down.
I remember these people calling into Radio Scotland and suggesting banning under 40s from pubs in the winter of 2020/21. They are at least as dangerous as the "let it rip" libertarians.
Remember that famous poll that said pretty much a quarter of the population never wanted nightclubs to reopen after COVID. Ever.
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
It’s easy to find all sorts of ridiculous propositions that a quarter of people will support in a poll. I mean, the last poll found 25% of people say they’ll vote Conservative!
This is like Brexit all over again. Unlike Brexit, the non-Tories just need to sit this one out and let the policy collapse into its own contradictions. Not allow themselves to be actively associated with killing the policy otherwise it will become in popular Tory mythology the silver bullet that would have stopped the boats overnight were it not for those pesky lefty lawyers.
Labour have little to lose in sticking two fingers up at Sunak and his delusional Bill . They’ve already said they’d ditch the Rwanda plan if they came into office . The only way the Bill gets the nutjob seal of approval is if it breaks international law . The moderates then won’t support it and it has little chance of passing the HOL .
My mortgage has just gone to its new interest rate. Up £155 a month. Thank you, Tories!
~£260 for us at current rates but we've got two parts, smaller due Feb 2025 and larger due Dec 2025 so I'm hopeful that will drop a bit before then under the strong and steady leadership of Keir Starmer rather than chaos with Rishi Sunak Unless the fekker clings on so that we have to remortgage the first part under the chaos of a zombie government and a general election.
The cheap money couldn't last forever, but it is unfortunate that that cheap money, by making larger mortgages 'affordable'*, helped to push up property prices to the extent that more realistic rates are now making things painful.
* the affordability tests are interesting as we've always been offered Agreement in Principle amounts far in excess of what we consider we could afford to service
I think we got AIPed for about 300k on a joint income of 70k odd when I last remortgaged. Madness.
Two general thoughts on pandemics: First, globalization and diversity make them more likely; density makes them more deadly. These are not new observations, but it surprises me a bit to see how few pay attention to these lessons from history.
(I would agree that all three are, net, still "good things", though all of them can be overdone.)
Second, if I were running an inquiry, I would begin by studying the differences in other nations (or in the US among states). For example, why did Austria have so much lower a death rate than its neighbor, the Czech Republic?
It is often easier to learn from other's experience than from our own.
(Those interested in this subject may want to read Bill Gates' book. I found it sensible and liked the fact that he was looking for ways to improve, not people to blame.)
Yes, you want a comparative approach. But perhaps to do a comparative approach well, you need to start with a very detailed look at the approach taken within each country, and maybe the Inquiry provides that for here (as other country’s inquiries will for those countries)?
So, basically, it doesn’t work. Colour us all shocked.
Has to be a high likelihood that the government will pull the bill tonight?
Im starting to think the routes for Rishi are narrowing, and an early 2024 election might now be the only way out.
Say what you like about the ERG, they're extremely good at making themselves the most important people in the room with an effective veto on anything the government does. The way they seem to achieve this is threefold:
- They really do manage to vote as a bloc, more so than any of the other looser groupings in the party - They invent all these very impressive sounding structures (including the ERG itself), the latest being this "star chamber", which give a veneer of expertise and authority to anything they decide - They usually follow through on their threats. Unlike others such as the one nation caucus, they have a track record of voting against the government which means everyone has to take their threats seriously
For all that people across the political spectrum from the staff of most news outlets other than the Mail and Telegraph to Dominic Cummings think they're a bunch of past-it numpties, they still seem to manage to operate as a kind of RMT of the commons.
Doctors will be given approval to keep prescribing puberty-blocking drugs to young people under plans to standardise gender identification services in Scotland.
NHS England announced last year that hormone treatments would be prescribed to children only as part of clinical research after a report said that there were “gaps in evidence” on their safety and effectiveness.
Sat in a meeting this morning. People from various parts of the UK saying they are done with rail travel. Endless repeated major delays and cancellations mean they just aren't reliable enough to be trusted.
The problem with the UK rail system is that not only it is expensive, it is unreliable too.
If it was expensive but Swiss-style, I think people would tolerate it. But they don't, because it isn't.
France's system might not be better in actuality, same as Germany's (haven't seen the recent figures but I believe long-form services are more unreliable in those countries but short-form services are more reliable) but they aren't spending £300 to get from Berlin to Hamburg
Japanese “bullet” trains are cheaper, more frequent, more reliable, quicker and nicer than UK trains… buuuuuuut that’s on the back of a lot of public investment years ago.
Was lockdown necessary? I am not even sure at this point if it was, having been a strong advocate of it at the time.
I still don't understand why it was applied to young and healthy people when they were hardly affected by the virus. People who had to work with vulnerable people, like care home workers, had to work anyway, so the argument that it was the right thing to do in order to protect them doesn't hold water.
Because the less vulnerable will still spread the virus. The vulnerable people catch the virus from someone who isn’t vulnerable, so to protect the vulnerable, you need to keep levels of infection manageable throughout the population.
In a rare defence of Sunak, while I don't think EOTHO was a good idea (and didn't think so at the time) I do think he was perfectly justified, in his role as Chancellor, to push it for its economic benefits. It was up to SAGE,* the Health Secretary and - indeed - the PM to push against it if needed and (for the PM) veto it if required. The ministers, broadly, should be pushing the interests of the area under their care and the PM's job is to balance those competing priorities.
* had they been consulted, which appears not to have been the case
Young people have been utterly screwed by this government on Covid and the aftermath, utterly screwed.
It's something to which almost no attention is paid anywhere else other than here but the evidence is overwhelming.
Their education and social development was horrendously damaged, even although they were at almost no risk at all of serious illness. They were harassed about meeting up with friends (unlike some politicians who seemed to carry on as normal). Their activities, such as night clubs, were specifically targeted and many failed to survive. They get to pay back the £400bn.
The intergenerational fairness of such measures really needs looking at.
The matter has been extensively discussed in the media. The right-leaning media were constantly going on about the ills of lockdowns.
This is only a rough draft of a work in progress, but it looks worth pursuing.
Has some unflattering first reflections on UK defence procurement.
(Benaich was one of the driving forces behind the government's reformed University business spin out policy, which is one of the few things to Sunak's credit.)
Was lockdown necessary? I am not even sure at this point if it was, having been a strong advocate of it at the time.
I still don't understand why it was applied to young and healthy people when they were hardly affected by the virus. People who had to work with vulnerable people, like care home workers, had to work anyway, so the argument that it was the right thing to do in order to protect them doesn't hold water.
Because the less vulnerable will still spread the virus. The vulnerable people catch the virus from someone who isn’t vulnerable, so to protect the vulnerable, you need to keep levels of infection manageable throughout the population.
I suspect you're wasting your breath. If people can't understand something very simple when it's explained to them 100 times, the probability of success at the 101st attempt is not high.
"As I have changed my phones, the messages wouldn't have come across."
Rishi Sunak's words.
Unless you specifically choose not to bring the messages across, they always come across.
I think folk will just presume he’s lying. Most folks have WhatsApp. Most folks have upgraded phones. So they will know how simple it is to migrate to a new phone and keep all their chats.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
As someone who is entirely non-technical and of a similar age, I can kind of get Boris Johnson not understanding WhatsApp, even though I am pretty sure he has lied about it. Rishi Sunak? Not a chance. His a forty-something tech bro. There is not a snowball's chance in hell he does not know how it all works.
"As I have changed my phones, the messages wouldn't have come across."
Rishi Sunak's words.
Unless you specifically choose not to bring the messages across, they always come across.
I think folk will just presume he’s lying. Most folks have WhatsApp. Most folks have upgraded phones. So they will know how simple it is to migrate to a new phone and keep all their chats.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
As someone who is entirely non-technical and of a similar age, I can kind of get Boris Johnson not understanding WhatsApp, even though I am pretty sure he has lied about it. Rishi Sunak? Not a chance. His a forty-something tech bro. There is not a snowball's chance in hell he does not know how it all works.
The same Rishi Sunak who could not work a contactless card payment in his petrol station photo-op? I can easily believe he does not know the ins and outs of WhatsApp. Rishi also wears glasses but only part of the time, so it may well be that he cannot see his Smartphone screen well enough to want to use apps.
Sat in a meeting this morning. People from various parts of the UK saying they are done with rail travel. Endless repeated major delays and cancellations mean they just aren't reliable enough to be trusted.
The problem with the UK rail system is that not only it is expensive, it is unreliable too.
If it was expensive but Swiss-style, I think people would tolerate it. But they don't, because it isn't.
France's system might not be better in actuality, same as Germany's (haven't seen the recent figures but I believe long-form services are more unreliable in those countries but short-form services are more reliable) but they aren't spending £300 to get from Berlin to Hamburg
Japanese “bullet” trains are cheaper, more frequent, more reliable, quicker and nicer than UK trains… buuuuuuut that’s on the back of a lot of public investment years ago.
And limited to non-existent planning restrictions. The trains just bomb through built up areas and countryside on prominent high speed rail lines with none of your tunnelling through suburbs, protecting ancient woodland, avoiding ponds with rare newts or preserving views immortalised in literature. Not that this is an approach we could realistically adopt in the UK, and the Japanese cityscape is by and large pretty ugly as a result of their approach to planning, but it certainly would have made construction a lot simpler and cheaper.
Some Tory MPs claim colleagues threatened with an early election if they vote down the bill
But a number are sceptical No10 would follow through.
One told me they’re minded to vote against providing they can answer the question how this wouldn’t be curtains for Rishi Sunak
I wonder when Labour would ideally want an election. Next May perhaps. Not so soon that they're not caught on the hop without a full policy agenda and plans, not so long that the Tories can salt more tracts of earth ahead of losing.
In any case the government can't call realistically an election now for the same reason they can't call one this time next year: campaigning would go over the Christmas break and piss off all the MPs and activists.
Comments
But yes, they should and will rightly be ignored.
Today's political grid
In which Matt Goodwin decides to give up any semblance of being a respectable academic. He has now completed his story.
I don't get the archaeological opposition to doing a cutting or something. Managed well, it's a funded project for local universities. I had a fascinating conversation with some archaelogists during the Edinburgh Tram extension as they unearthed a possible murder victim just down the road from my flat. https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/news/unusual-burial-discovered-in-leith.htm
Ever.
A worryingly illiberal mindset is present in a lot of the population.
Seems like a revelation just waiting to be made.
The road does look a bit less bad than it used to now that the future has it used by zero tailpipe emissions vehicles. Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
There is a list of projects that Britain talks about doing and never manages to get done. Sorting out the A303 past Stonehenge is one. Dualling the A1. Third runway at Heathrow. Fixing up Westminster Palace is becoming another. Possible the Lower Thames Crossing is heading in that direction.
It's a wonder the channel tunnel was ever completed.
As she says this, her five-month-old daughter Titan Invictus – the couple refuse to give girls feminine names, citing research suggesting they will be taken less seriously – is strapped to her chest, occasionally burbling, while Malcolm has charge of their two sons Torsten, two, and Octavian, three.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/life/pronatalists-save-mankind-by-having-babies-silicon-valley/
...
What is to be done? ‘Our solution is, uh, we don’t have a solution,’ he admits. He says the only things proven to increase birth rates are poverty and the oppression of women, which are bad and should be stamped out. The only hope is to find those few families that combine liberal, pluralistic politics, such as support for LGBT rights, with high fertility – or create new, hybrid micro-cultures that value both – and help them multiply.
But I guess he knows this but what are his options? Stick with idea that he’s a clutz with tech that everyone thinks is fishy. Or say he took steps to erase his past text messages? I guess it is probably better to have folks thinking there is a cover up rather than them knowing there was.
Personally, I don’t think he’s as good at tech as he thinks he is and can well believe he’s lost them accidentally. However, what still staggers me more is that they are conducting Government business over texts - what’s more WhatsApp. And this is somehow acceptable. It is not. I can’t understand why the civil service, security services or even the ICO haven’t / didn’t kick up more of a stink about this.
Even the banks have been fined handsomely for doing that sort of thing.
(I would agree that all three are, net, still "good things", though all of them can be overdone.)
Second, if I were running an inquiry, I would begin by studying the differences in other nations (or in the US among states). For example, why did Austria have so much lower a death rate than its neighbor, the Czech Republic?
It is often easier to learn from other's experience than from our own.
(Those interested in this subject may want to read Bill Gates' book. I found it sensible and liked the fact that he was looking for ways to improve, not people to blame.)
The greatest inequity was that so much of the cost fell on younger people, directly through education or indirectly because they are less likely to have gardens etc. I wonder how different it might have been under Labour - stricter perhaps, but fairer.
(But I agree with your point!)
Second, as well as deeply cynical students claiming extra time, there is a recent tendency to medicalise personality traits. Introverts who can add up are now "on the spectrum" (cf Leon passim). Wash your hands after relieving yourself? OCD. No girlfriend? Aspies. Like trains? Erm, I'd best stop there.
The point is that as the notion of what constitutes a mental health issue has been broadened, it naturally follows that more and more people get to tick the yes box, alongside genuinely new cases rather than just self-diagnosed or reclassified older ones.
The situation that absolutely could have been fairer was the weird tier system though, which was absolutely ridiculous and a complete postcode lottery, that showed itself to be completely useless fairly soon after implementation.
https://www.independent.co.uk/business/uk-tax-level-rises-to-highest-on-record-oecd-b2461712.html
Bloody Rachel Reeves.
Meanwhile the tunnel risks destroying a lot of the archaeology under the ground, possibly.
This I find baffling. If the archeology remains underground we will never know about it. Will it be destroyed by the tunnel (or by a cutting)? No, it will be carefully excavated, documented, and stored in museums for future academic research. Try researching artefacts premanently buried 2m underground.
I have heard it said many times on here that the UK has been living beyond its means for many years, which I agree with. The answer proposed is usually cuts to public services and benefits.
In fact the answer is simple: we should get used to a slightly higher level of taxation as a % of GDP.
In 2021, I plotted the death rate (from death certificates as primary cause) against infection incidence (from the ONS regular study) to get a rough guide to changes in IFR.
(Can only be rough because time-to-death is a distribution rather than a fixed interval, causing unavoidable fuzziness and uncertainty).
The highest was in late January 2021 when the hospitals were at their most overloaded (cf reports of intensive care beds being set up in hospital gift shops and the ratio of carers-to-beds was at its worst) and peaked over 1.6%
(plus or minus a non-inconsiderable amount due to that fuzziness).
During the pre-vaccination period, it wobbled around 1.2% (and over a sufficiently lengthy period - measured in months - that the fuzziness would average out) and cratered following the vax rollout down to below 0.2%, even with the advent of Delta.
Nowadays it should be bit below 0.1%, due to Omicron reverting to about the deadliness level of the original strain and very widespread immunity [death toll of deaths with covid mentioned on death certificate divided by approximate infections at the moment is about 0.13%, but about half of those aren't directly caused by covid, even if it wouldn't exactly have helped]. Which is sort of ironic, given that's the claim given - which means that if it was 0.1% IFR, we wouldn't have locked down or even gone to great lengths to mitigate it, because we're not exactly doing that at the moment.
Doctors will be given approval to keep prescribing puberty-blocking drugs to young people under plans to standardise gender identification services in Scotland.
NHS England announced last year that hormone treatments would be prescribed to children only as part of clinical research after a report said that there were “gaps in evidence” on their safety and effectiveness.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/puberty-blockers-trans-youth-scotland-gbdj869h0
If it was expensive but Swiss-style, I think people would tolerate it. But they don't, because it isn't.
France's system might not be better in actuality, same as Germany's (haven't seen the recent figures but I believe long-form services are more unreliable in those countries but short-form services are more reliable) but they aren't spending £300 to get from Berlin to Hamburg
Subsequent lockdowns, I am on the fence somewhat. The government fluctuated between being over zealous, and other times coming up with weird halfway house measures that didn’t work.
One thing I do bemoan is that there was (and still is, in many mainstream media outlets) a complete lack of cost-benefit debate in our national conversation. The decision has been taken that lockdown = good and there was very little critical consideration of that in society at large, which has not been of benefit to us in my view - it has continued the trend towards polarisation/absolutist thinking/feelings of exclusion and disillusionment.
Let's get the Northern Irish in. Or even the French.
Their education and social development was horrendously damaged, even although they were at almost no risk at all of serious illness.
They were harassed about meeting up with friends (unlike some politicians who seemed to carry on as normal).
Their activities, such as night clubs, were specifically targeted and many failed to survive.
They get to pay back the £400bn.
The intergenerational fairness of such measures really needs looking at.
But it isn't.
So it fails on its own terms, why is this not being more widely spoken about?
The idea that young people could be allowed out, and older ones not falls apart when you look at workplaces, homes etc. Young people often live with older people and people who are vulnerable.
https://renewal.org.uk/lockdowns-moral-mission-creep/
Reposted by Marie Le Conte today.
"One of the most astute observations I saw made over the course of the pandemic was that much public discussion about the virus rested on the unspoken contention that covid-19 is transmitted not by close person to person contact, primarily in under-ventilated spaces, but by individual failure: by self indulgence, and by sin."
Footage shows the man trying to get a large dog under control before being thrown to the ground"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/11/man-attacked-suspected-xl-bully-stratford-train-station/
If you're going to die anyway why do you care? That's what these muppets don't seem to understand. They got rid of the Albanian people and the numbers are still coming.
"Nigel Farage can put this pointless Conservative Party out of its misery
The Tories warned that Labour would open the borders and raise taxes, then did it themselves. They deserve to go"
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/12/10/nigel-farage-rishi-sunak-leadership-challenge
Mark Francois urges government to pull the bill
“It might be better to start again”
And David Jones, ERG deputy chair, said he doesn’t think the bill amendable in its current form, as he explains why they want bill pulled. So position hardening.
https://twitter.com/New_Narrative/status/1734184160699552167
And would Vance, having voted to sell them out to Putin, then commit to defending Ukraine's thereby truncated territory ?
Of course not.
Putin doesn’t sound like a man who’s interested in a negotiated peace in Ukraine:
“They’re running out [of weapons]… They don’t have anything, they have no future. But we do have a future.”
(This is a newly released clip from his Kremlin awards ceremony for troops on Friday)
https://twitter.com/francis_scarr/status/1733826361897136303
JD Vance - along with a significant chunk of the GOP - advocates for war criminals.
The cheap money couldn't last forever, but it is unfortunate that that cheap money, by making larger mortgages 'affordable'*, helped to push up property prices to the extent that more realistic rates are now making things painful.
* the affordability tests are interesting as we've always been offered Agreement in Principle amounts far in excess of what we consider we could afford to service
Now, if only the guidance had been more closely related to risk of infection, then those failings could also be linked to Covid transmission...
https://lawyersforbritain.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Rwanda-111223-final-.pdf
You’ve benefitted from ZIRP, that’s over now. I suspect we are reverting to long term rates now. I’d look at Mark Carney for someone to have a fair share of the blame.
Ah. Mark François is back on the telly. It’s like finding shit on your shoe.
https://x.com/mrjamesob/status/1734214506224476187?s=46
Has to be a high likelihood that the government will pull the bill tonight?
Im starting to think the routes for Rishi are narrowing, and an early 2024 election might now be the only way out.
Nick Palmer noted one small part of the report ("table on page 90 and the subsequent discussion") to draw his own slanted conclusions.
I've now skim-read it in full and would just note its concluding sentence:
The calculations in this report leave no doubt about what this means in the long term: increasing pressure on public finances and ultimately the end of the welfare state as we know it today. A choice for the current legal framework is therefore implicitly a choice against the welfare state.
- They really do manage to vote as a bloc, more so than any of the other looser groupings in the party
- They invent all these very impressive sounding structures (including the ERG itself), the latest being this "star chamber", which give a veneer of expertise and authority to anything they decide
- They usually follow through on their threats. Unlike others such as the one nation caucus, they have a track record of voting against the government which means everyone has to take their threats seriously
For all that people across the political spectrum from the staff of most news outlets other than the Mail and Telegraph to Dominic Cummings think they're a bunch of past-it numpties, they still seem to manage to operate as a kind of RMT of the commons.
* had they been consulted, which appears not to have been the case
Has some unflattering first reflections on UK defence procurement.
(Benaich was one of the driving forces behind the government's reformed University business spin out policy, which is one of the few things to Sunak's credit.)
Bringing Dynamism to European Defense: a new report
https://www.airstreet.com/blog/european-defense-procurement
Boris, of course, has a long history of “seeing” people more than his own (then) wife.
Some Tory MPs claim colleagues threatened with an early election if they vote down the bill
But a number are sceptical No10 would follow through.
One told me they’re minded to vote against providing they can answer the question how this wouldn’t be curtains for Rishi Sunak
Unedifying but wholly predictable.
In any case the government can't call realistically an election now for the same reason they can't call one this time next year: campaigning would go over the Christmas break and piss off all the MPs and activists.