Back on topic, surely the positive for 2023 is the final demise of Boris Johnson as a political force. And not just the man (the legend) himself - his entire political coalition is done.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I had a similar experience with weight and mental health. I look at some of the pictures I took of myself as lockdown ground on and its clear I was falling apart. There were also online evening drinks with friends where (although I don't remember) I would also fall apart.
Then things started to unlock. A few shafts of light but the unlocked world of shields and restrictions was also horrible - went to the pub with friends once and it was bad enough that we switched back to online. And then down came Covid and restrictions again. The most oppressive it got was that winter of 2020 where I lived in the Covid hotspot of the whole country and practically *nobody* went outside voluntarily.
Happily we moved to Scotland in February 2021 to an area that had hardly had any Covid, and was managing the pandemic better. And I was able to make the decision to wean myself off the happy pills I'd been on since the previous summer. Kept working (somehow), kept all the weight as well. 2024 is me making a Serious Effort to get this fat off.
Scotland was managing the pandemic better? Really?
But my experience was similar. I was suicidal and also spent time on the happy pills. And it was disastrous for my then-5-year-old daughter. Some sort of teaching continued for my older children, albeit online, but you can't teach a five year old online. And any sort of teaching basically stopped for about a year, even when the schools were open. But the social impact was worse. 5 year olds need other 5 year olds. And the data and anecdata I have seen is that that cohort - born 2014-2019 - are a bit fucked. Academically way behind where they should be, and SEN rates more than double that of the 2009-2014 cohort. And, of course, they get to grow up in a country which has visibly impoverished itself by turning off the economy for the best part of a year.
I have a real world comparison I can make between experiences in the NE vs the NE. Practically everything is better in the NE of Scotland vs the NE of England. "Better" is not the same as "good" - I have a long list of complaints against health and education up here. But an even longer list against life on Teesside.
I agree with you entirely about the impact on kids - my own included. But again again - there was no option to leave the schools fully open. None. And it is absurd revisionism to imagine it could have happened.
Of course there was an option to leave schools fully open. Sweden and many other nations around the planet did it.
It was a choice to close schools. A bad, mistaken choice.
If a school lacked enough staff for a day or a week it could close for a day or a week as an emergency measure - without resulting in every other school in the country closing, and reopening within a day or a week rather than months later.
Question - who would have been teaching these kids? So we have "a school" - and we know it wouldn't be singular - closing for "a week" and then reopening with no further issues, completely unimpeded.
Its nonsense. People would look at their colleagues and friends ancd family getting seriously ill, many ending up in completely swamped hospitals, some dying, and they would assess it was not worth the risk.
We get an uncontrolled shutdown. In schools instead of schools staying open - why do you keep saying they were closed - they would have closed, in an uncontrolled manner.
I know you disliked lockdown on ideological grounds. I disliked it on much more personal grounds as it nearly broke me. But this fantasy that you have where we just ignored the pox and carried on as normal is a fantasy.
Teachers would be teaching the kids. Same as in every other country in the planet that kept schools open.
Uncontrolled shutdowns are infinitely better as its individual schools for a couple of days, not total paralysis of every school for months on end.
I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed.
Yes, you do keep saying that. But schools were not closed. So why do you keep saying that?
Because they were closed to millions of children.
Them being open to a select few is not the same as them being open.
I believe in a universal education, open to all. Don't you?
Oh dear. Park the reframe out of the way. Being open is the same as being open. We have to have debate and political discourse based on facts. "Schools were closed" is false. Wrong. Incorrect. Not a fact.
It is a fact.
They were closed to the general public, but allowed a few in. That's closed.
Universal education is open to all, or its not universal education.
You can't be partially pregnant. Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open.
If a school opens its doors in the summer holidays to a few pupils doing activities do you count that as the school being open? 🤦♂️
I'm not going to go any further. As the husband of a teaching assistant injured whilst apparently not working in a school which wasn't open whilst looking after pupils who weren't there, I will take your usual wankery under advisement.
"Open" is an absolute. Something is, or isn't. "Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open." - is Eton not open then?
Laughable.
Don't be stupid, schools are often open out of hours or during the holidays for limited number of people to attend clubs or whatever, but that's still out of hours and they're still considered closed at that time.
My children attend clubs afterschool, such as they were in the choir afterschool in the build-up to Christmas - during the times they were there in the choir but all other pupils were not present, was the school open in your eyes? Don't be silly. Indeed they advertise themselves as being shut at that time, if I put their school address into Google Maps when its time to pick them up, Google says the premises is closed at that time. Despite the fact they're present with my children.
If Eton were the only school and pupils of other schools had no school place then yes our schooling system would be closed to everyone not at Eton.
Instead we have universal education, which is open to all. Except during Covid, when schools were closed and not open to all their pupils.
Universal education is open to all children. If not all children have an education available to them, then our schooling is closed. Its not good enough to handwave it away by saying that a select privileged few have an education so that's fine, who needs universal education - and shame on you for even suggesting it!
Again with the pitiful strawman bullshit. You do yourself no favours when you dig yourself into a pit like this.
No pit.
In this country we have universal education open to all, not a privileged few.
During Covid that was closed to most.
Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise, but for most children the school was closed to them.
Good. We have gone from: "I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed." to "Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise"
Lazy brickies, only managing 4 houses a year. How many here have ever worked on a building site?
Me. I was 5 and helping out when they were building an extension on our house.
They even let me where a yellow hard hat.
When I say helping out I mean observing.
Part owner of a construction company.
The sound insulative properties of building under construction are fascinating.
Step into a room. Hammering, sawing, banging. Step out. Silence.
When completed, this feature vanishes.
Aliens, it must be aliens.
A big problem is the treatment of the workforce in general. Even if you treat them decently, they keep the attitudes that have been beaten into them for a long time.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
I’m hearing that this new cohort is especially fucked from personal anecdotes - teacher/professor friends. But also seeing it online
It makes sense. Even a war arguably isn’t as traumatic as what we did to our own societies 2020-2022
I sincerely pray that you are right in your sunny Californian optimism
Absolutely, there has been damage inflicted on young people that will affect them the rest of their lives.
Which should be pretty bloody obvious. If I don't take my kids to school for a week as I want to take them on holiday then I'm breaking the law and can be fined, as its so crucial that children don't miss even a week of schooling - but we shut schools for months and people have a ladida its all fine attitude to it.
No its not all fine. What we did to children was terrible, unforgiveable, and all to save some people from a natural end to their life from a natural virus. It will affect children for decades to come.
There are children approaching GCSEs etc now who missed absolutely crucial formative time at school and never caught up.
I do think this is being massively overstated.
My son is now 20. As a result of the lockdowns he lost about a year from school. He had quite a lot of classes online. He remained in contact with his friends through social media. He was denied the chance to shine in both his Highers and Advanced Highers in that he did not sit proper, national exams. People will always look somewhat askance at the marks given in those years and, frankly, rightly so. He missed out in respect of debating competitions. Although he did a lot of these online the social buzz simply wasn't there. At the risk of upsetting @TSE he still got to a good University.
It was not great for him, he missed out on quite a lot, especially socially. But he coped and so far as I can see his cohort did likewise. Children from poorer backgrounds and who were less able academically will undoubtedly have suffered more. But not much more.
It would be nice if people showed as much concern for poor people in general as they do for them from the impacts of lockdown.
The lack of resilience to COVID was often a result long term structural issues - a lesser example being a lack of high quality public spaces like parks and playing fields for people living in flats, while the middle class lounged in their gardens. Obesity, education, single parents and so on - long term factors associated with poverty that all made COVID worse.
For me, the deepest inequity was the insanely high savings rates that richer people had, which subsequently fuelled inflation even while high interest rates smashed renters and mortgage holders.
You'll be pleased to know then that I do share my concern consistently and want to see ten million new houses built across the country so everyone, not just the well off, can have a house of their own with their own garden and off-road parking spaces etc.
Nobody in this country should be so poor that they are compelled to having to live in a flat.
Percentage of people living in flats:
UK 15%
Switzerland 60% Germany 57% Sweden 40%
In my experience, flats are much more pleasant places to live in Germany than they are in the UK. They are typically low-rise, spacious and well maintained with properly tended communal outdoor areas. People typically live in a rented flat in town when they are young, moving to (or building) a large, detached house in the suburbs as their family grows. The high population density in the town centres creates a buzz that the younger folks enjoy, while the suburbs are more peaceful and individualistic.
Leasehold.
In a UK flat, you don't own a single brick, yet are subject to absurd and often inflated service charges, and as the post-Grenfell era has demonstrated, would have more statutory rights if your car if it caught fire than you ever would trying to get the "owners" of the block you lease to pay up, as they're usually a shell company in the Bahamas...
A treasure trove of data and analysis in this FT article, explaining why leaseholders are second class citizens but only in England and Wales, where leasehold prevails. People are happy to live in flats elsewhere in the world, but also in Scotland, where commonhold is the norm, too. In England and Wales 95% of flats are leasehold. The above article makes it very clear that leasehold is to blame for our aversion to living in flats.
It doesn't really show that - leasehold existed for centuries before the Grenfell fire in 2017, and house and flat prices moved in step. What it shows is that the cladding cockup caused a (hopefully temporary) divergence in prices after 2017. It needs to break the statistics down between flats with cladding issues and those without to prove its point, but it doesn't do that. Nor does it show that commonhold or share of freehold flats in England and Wales performed better after 2017 than leasehold flats.
It also doesn't show that people are happy to live in flats elsewhere in the world where leasehold doesn't exist - anecdotally, in the US and Australia, for example, the social preference is markedly for houses as it is in the UK - arguably even more so. It shows, however, that unlike us there was no change in 2017, because there was no Grenfell fire.
It also tries to link the cladding scandal with the leasehold system, which is rather tenuous to say the least - I think it was terrible government regulation that was far more to blame. And you get terrible apartment block management in New York just like Newcastle.
I'm no fan of leasehold at all, and there are definitely dozens of arguments to make against it, but the FT article conflates points and overreaches.
The problem for people who didn’t want us to leave the EU, who haven’t got over the referendum defeat and therefore hate Boris trying to make the case that he would be be doing worse than Sunak is that the opinion polls asking 2019 Tory voters who they’d prefer as leader constantly have him streets ahead of Sunak (and Truss when the question was asked)
My mum still thinks the sun shines out of Johnsons arse. She got Nadines book for a Chritmas present, and not as an ironic read.
Must make for some interesting conversations!
Someone gave me a book satirising the Blair years, with endorsements from the Mail, Telegraph and Spectator on the cover. He said with evident sincerity that he thought I'd like it, as I'd lived through the times being described. He'd not spotted it was a piss-take.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I had a similar experience with weight and mental health. I look at some of the pictures I took of myself as lockdown ground on and its clear I was falling apart. There were also online evening drinks with friends where (although I don't remember) I would also fall apart.
Then things started to unlock. A few shafts of light but the unlocked world of shields and restrictions was also horrible - went to the pub with friends once and it was bad enough that we switched back to online. And then down came Covid and restrictions again. The most oppressive it got was that winter of 2020 where I lived in the Covid hotspot of the whole country and practically *nobody* went outside voluntarily.
Happily we moved to Scotland in February 2021 to an area that had hardly had any Covid, and was managing the pandemic better. And I was able to make the decision to wean myself off the happy pills I'd been on since the previous summer. Kept working (somehow), kept all the weight as well. 2024 is me making a Serious Effort to get this fat off.
Scotland was managing the pandemic better? Really?
But my experience was similar. I was suicidal and also spent time on the happy pills. And it was disastrous for my then-5-year-old daughter. Some sort of teaching continued for my older children, albeit online, but you can't teach a five year old online. And any sort of teaching basically stopped for about a year, even when the schools were open. But the social impact was worse. 5 year olds need other 5 year olds. And the data and anecdata I have seen is that that cohort - born 2014-2019 - are a bit fucked. Academically way behind where they should be, and SEN rates more than double that of the 2009-2014 cohort. And, of course, they get to grow up in a country which has visibly impoverished itself by turning off the economy for the best part of a year.
I have a real world comparison I can make between experiences in the NE vs the NE. Practically everything is better in the NE of Scotland vs the NE of England. "Better" is not the same as "good" - I have a long list of complaints against health and education up here. But an even longer list against life on Teesside.
I agree with you entirely about the impact on kids - my own included. But again again - there was no option to leave the schools fully open. None. And it is absurd revisionism to imagine it could have happened.
Of course there was an option to leave schools fully open. Sweden and many other nations around the planet did it.
It was a choice to close schools. A bad, mistaken choice.
If a school lacked enough staff for a day or a week it could close for a day or a week as an emergency measure - without resulting in every other school in the country closing, and reopening within a day or a week rather than months later.
Question - who would have been teaching these kids? So we have "a school" - and we know it wouldn't be singular - closing for "a week" and then reopening with no further issues, completely unimpeded.
Its nonsense. People would look at their colleagues and friends ancd family getting seriously ill, many ending up in completely swamped hospitals, some dying, and they would assess it was not worth the risk.
We get an uncontrolled shutdown. In schools instead of schools staying open - why do you keep saying they were closed - they would have closed, in an uncontrolled manner.
I know you disliked lockdown on ideological grounds. I disliked it on much more personal grounds as it nearly broke me. But this fantasy that you have where we just ignored the pox and carried on as normal is a fantasy.
Teachers would be teaching the kids. Same as in every other country in the planet that kept schools open.
Uncontrolled shutdowns are infinitely better as its individual schools for a couple of days, not total paralysis of every school for months on end.
I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed.
Yes, you do keep saying that. But schools were not closed. So why do you keep saying that?
Because they were closed to millions of children.
Them being open to a select few is not the same as them being open.
I believe in a universal education, open to all. Don't you?
Oh dear. Park the reframe out of the way. Being open is the same as being open. We have to have debate and political discourse based on facts. "Schools were closed" is false. Wrong. Incorrect. Not a fact.
It is a fact.
They were closed to the general public, but allowed a few in. That's closed.
Universal education is open to all, or its not universal education.
You can't be partially pregnant. Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open.
If a school opens its doors in the summer holidays to a few pupils doing activities do you count that as the school being open? 🤦♂️
I'm not going to go any further. As the husband of a teaching assistant injured whilst apparently not working in a school which wasn't open whilst looking after pupils who weren't there, I will take your usual wankery under advisement.
"Open" is an absolute. Something is, or isn't. "Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open." - is Eton not open then?
Laughable.
Don't be stupid, schools are often open out of hours or during the holidays for limited number of people to attend clubs or whatever, but that's still out of hours and they're still considered closed at that time.
My children attend clubs afterschool, such as they were in the choir afterschool in the build-up to Christmas - during the times they were there in the choir but all other pupils were not present, was the school open in your eyes? Don't be silly. Indeed they advertise themselves as being shut at that time, if I put their school address into Google Maps when its time to pick them up, Google says the premises is closed at that time. Despite the fact they're present with my children.
If Eton were the only school and pupils of other schools had no school place then yes our schooling system would be closed to everyone not at Eton.
Instead we have universal education, which is open to all. Except during Covid, when schools were closed and not open to all their pupils.
Universal education is open to all children. If not all children have an education available to them, then our schooling is closed. Its not good enough to handwave it away by saying that a select privileged few have an education so that's fine, who needs universal education - and shame on you for even suggesting it!
Again with the pitiful strawman bullshit. You do yourself no favours when you dig yourself into a pit like this.
No pit.
In this country we have universal education open to all, not a privileged few.
During Covid that was closed to most.
Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise, but for most children the school was closed to them.
Good. We have gone from: "I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed." to "Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise"
Lockdowns involved a difficult balancing of risks, of costs. Increased deaths from COVID vs. social and economic disruption. The thing to remember when discussing the issue with Bart is that he explicitly doesn't see increased deaths as a cost, so of course he comes to very different conclusions as to what should have been done.
The problem for people who didn’t want us to leave the EU, who haven’t got over the referendum defeat and therefore hate Boris trying to make the case that he would be be doing worse than Sunak is that the opinion polls asking 2019 Tory voters who they’d prefer as leader constantly have him streets ahead of Sunak (and Truss when the question was asked)
My mum still thinks the sun shines out of Johnsons arse. She got Nadines book for a Chritmas present, and not as an ironic read.
Gosh that would test my filial piety.
It did! So I had to keep the conversation moving on...
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I had a similar experience with weight and mental health. I look at some of the pictures I took of myself as lockdown ground on and its clear I was falling apart. There were also online evening drinks with friends where (although I don't remember) I would also fall apart.
Then things started to unlock. A few shafts of light but the unlocked world of shields and restrictions was also horrible - went to the pub with friends once and it was bad enough that we switched back to online. And then down came Covid and restrictions again. The most oppressive it got was that winter of 2020 where I lived in the Covid hotspot of the whole country and practically *nobody* went outside voluntarily.
Happily we moved to Scotland in February 2021 to an area that had hardly had any Covid, and was managing the pandemic better. And I was able to make the decision to wean myself off the happy pills I'd been on since the previous summer. Kept working (somehow), kept all the weight as well. 2024 is me making a Serious Effort to get this fat off.
Scotland was managing the pandemic better? Really?
But my experience was similar. I was suicidal and also spent time on the happy pills. And it was disastrous for my then-5-year-old daughter. Some sort of teaching continued for my older children, albeit online, but you can't teach a five year old online. And any sort of teaching basically stopped for about a year, even when the schools were open. But the social impact was worse. 5 year olds need other 5 year olds. And the data and anecdata I have seen is that that cohort - born 2014-2019 - are a bit fucked. Academically way behind where they should be, and SEN rates more than double that of the 2009-2014 cohort. And, of course, they get to grow up in a country which has visibly impoverished itself by turning off the economy for the best part of a year.
I have a real world comparison I can make between experiences in the NE vs the NE. Practically everything is better in the NE of Scotland vs the NE of England. "Better" is not the same as "good" - I have a long list of complaints against health and education up here. But an even longer list against life on Teesside.
I agree with you entirely about the impact on kids - my own included. But again again - there was no option to leave the schools fully open. None. And it is absurd revisionism to imagine it could have happened.
Of course there was an option to leave schools fully open. Sweden and many other nations around the planet did it.
It was a choice to close schools. A bad, mistaken choice.
If a school lacked enough staff for a day or a week it could close for a day or a week as an emergency measure - without resulting in every other school in the country closing, and reopening within a day or a week rather than months later.
Question - who would have been teaching these kids? So we have "a school" - and we know it wouldn't be singular - closing for "a week" and then reopening with no further issues, completely unimpeded.
Its nonsense. People would look at their colleagues and friends ancd family getting seriously ill, many ending up in completely swamped hospitals, some dying, and they would assess it was not worth the risk.
We get an uncontrolled shutdown. In schools instead of schools staying open - why do you keep saying they were closed - they would have closed, in an uncontrolled manner.
I know you disliked lockdown on ideological grounds. I disliked it on much more personal grounds as it nearly broke me. But this fantasy that you have where we just ignored the pox and carried on as normal is a fantasy.
Teachers would be teaching the kids. Same as in every other country in the planet that kept schools open.
Uncontrolled shutdowns are infinitely better as its individual schools for a couple of days, not total paralysis of every school for months on end.
I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed.
Yes, you do keep saying that. But schools were not closed. So why do you keep saying that?
Because they were closed to millions of children.
Them being open to a select few is not the same as them being open.
I believe in a universal education, open to all. Don't you?
Oh dear. Park the reframe out of the way. Being open is the same as being open. We have to have debate and political discourse based on facts. "Schools were closed" is false. Wrong. Incorrect. Not a fact.
It is a fact.
They were closed to the general public, but allowed a few in. That's closed.
Universal education is open to all, or its not universal education.
You can't be partially pregnant. Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open.
If a school opens its doors in the summer holidays to a few pupils doing activities do you count that as the school being open? 🤦♂️
I'm not going to go any further. As the husband of a teaching assistant injured whilst apparently not working in a school which wasn't open whilst looking after pupils who weren't there, I will take your usual wankery under advisement.
"Open" is an absolute. Something is, or isn't. "Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open." - is Eton not open then?
Laughable.
Don't be stupid, schools are often open out of hours or during the holidays for limited number of people to attend clubs or whatever, but that's still out of hours and they're still considered closed at that time.
My children attend clubs afterschool, such as they were in the choir afterschool in the build-up to Christmas - during the times they were there in the choir but all other pupils were not present, was the school open in your eyes? Don't be silly. Indeed they advertise themselves as being shut at that time, if I put their school address into Google Maps when its time to pick them up, Google says the premises is closed at that time. Despite the fact they're present with my children.
If Eton were the only school and pupils of other schools had no school place then yes our schooling system would be closed to everyone not at Eton.
Instead we have universal education, which is open to all. Except during Covid, when schools were closed and not open to all their pupils.
Universal education is open to all children. If not all children have an education available to them, then our schooling is closed. Its not good enough to handwave it away by saying that a select privileged few have an education so that's fine, who needs universal education - and shame on you for even suggesting it!
Again with the pitiful strawman bullshit. You do yourself no favours when you dig yourself into a pit like this.
No pit.
In this country we have universal education open to all, not a privileged few.
During Covid that was closed to most.
Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise, but for most children the school was closed to them.
But the over the top tear-jerking rhetoric isn't helping your case.
For a start, education was still happening and open to all pupils. A lot of it was online, and that was massively suboptimal, but it wasn't nothing. (It's a fair point that England put too much of its limited face to face capacity into exam years, when lower primary would have been a better use, you would need to ask the DfE about that.)
Then, despite what the famously calm neutral and detached Telegraph would have you believe, there were months of disruption to schools in Sweden.
But ultimately... The UK government was determined, even quite aggressive, in wanting to keep schools open. It failed to do so because it failed to keep infection levels low enough for that to be a viable plan.
I live in a new build estate, made entirely out of three and four bed homes. No "starter" one or two bed homes have been built, no flats.
Literally every home on my road that has been sold is occupied. There's only one house on my street that's not been sold, and is thus unoccupied.
The idea that estates are being built which are not being sold is farcical - if it were true, then developers would go out of business, they need to sell whatever they build or they have no cashflow. 🤦♂️
We need more homes. Let the market decide, let people decide, if they want a semi they'll buy from developer building a semi - if they want a flat, let them go buy one there. We don't need to dictate "starter" homes or any other shit like flats, if that's not what people want. We just need to get out of the way and let millions more houses get built to resolve the shortage.
A significant player in that market - the developer - doesn't give a shit about housing supply. They would much rather restrict it by building detached houses and eating up land, allowing them to charge exorbitant prices for poor workmanship.
Imagine how more people could have been housed your estate was apartment buildings instead.
Yes but then we'd be living in an apartment. Yuck!
The only reason that developers get a say is due to our broken planning system that gives consent to developments.
Abolish the requirement for planning consent and everyone could get whatever they want built on their own land, which cuts out developments and developers altogether. Countries like Japan that have done that houses (or blocks of flat) are built mostly individually rather than as "estates" by a solitary developer.
Britain is one of the most economically unbalanced countries in the world. We can't afford to let "the market" concrete over London's green belt and let the rest of the country wither and die. We need new towns in the left behind regions and that requires government action.
There are vacant homes in the north that are being knocked down because no one wants to live there
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I had a similar experience with weight and mental health. I look at some of the pictures I took of myself as lockdown ground on and its clear I was falling apart. There were also online evening drinks with friends where (although I don't remember) I would also fall apart.
Then things started to unlock. A few shafts of light but the unlocked world of shields and restrictions was also horrible - went to the pub with friends once and it was bad enough that we switched back to online. And then down came Covid and restrictions again. The most oppressive it got was that winter of 2020 where I lived in the Covid hotspot of the whole country and practically *nobody* went outside voluntarily.
Happily we moved to Scotland in February 2021 to an area that had hardly had any Covid, and was managing the pandemic better. And I was able to make the decision to wean myself off the happy pills I'd been on since the previous summer. Kept working (somehow), kept all the weight as well. 2024 is me making a Serious Effort to get this fat off.
Scotland was managing the pandemic better? Really?
But my experience was similar. I was suicidal and also spent time on the happy pills. And it was disastrous for my then-5-year-old daughter. Some sort of teaching continued for my older children, albeit online, but you can't teach a five year old online. And any sort of teaching basically stopped for about a year, even when the schools were open. But the social impact was worse. 5 year olds need other 5 year olds. And the data and anecdata I have seen is that that cohort - born 2014-2019 - are a bit fucked. Academically way behind where they should be, and SEN rates more than double that of the 2009-2014 cohort. And, of course, they get to grow up in a country which has visibly impoverished itself by turning off the economy for the best part of a year.
I have a real world comparison I can make between experiences in the NE vs the NE. Practically everything is better in the NE of Scotland vs the NE of England. "Better" is not the same as "good" - I have a long list of complaints against health and education up here. But an even longer list against life on Teesside.
I agree with you entirely about the impact on kids - my own included. But again again - there was no option to leave the schools fully open. None. And it is absurd revisionism to imagine it could have happened.
Of course there was an option to leave schools fully open. Sweden and many other nations around the planet did it.
It was a choice to close schools. A bad, mistaken choice.
If a school lacked enough staff for a day or a week it could close for a day or a week as an emergency measure - without resulting in every other school in the country closing, and reopening within a day or a week rather than months later.
Question - who would have been teaching these kids? So we have "a school" - and we know it wouldn't be singular - closing for "a week" and then reopening with no further issues, completely unimpeded.
Its nonsense. People would look at their colleagues and friends ancd family getting seriously ill, many ending up in completely swamped hospitals, some dying, and they would assess it was not worth the risk.
We get an uncontrolled shutdown. In schools instead of schools staying open - why do you keep saying they were closed - they would have closed, in an uncontrolled manner.
I know you disliked lockdown on ideological grounds. I disliked it on much more personal grounds as it nearly broke me. But this fantasy that you have where we just ignored the pox and carried on as normal is a fantasy.
Teachers would be teaching the kids. Same as in every other country in the planet that kept schools open.
Uncontrolled shutdowns are infinitely better as its individual schools for a couple of days, not total paralysis of every school for months on end.
I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed.
Yes, you do keep saying that. But schools were not closed. So why do you keep saying that?
Because they were closed to millions of children.
Them being open to a select few is not the same as them being open.
I believe in a universal education, open to all. Don't you?
Oh dear. Park the reframe out of the way. Being open is the same as being open. We have to have debate and political discourse based on facts. "Schools were closed" is false. Wrong. Incorrect. Not a fact.
It is a fact.
They were closed to the general public, but allowed a few in. That's closed.
Universal education is open to all, or its not universal education.
You can't be partially pregnant. Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open.
If a school opens its doors in the summer holidays to a few pupils doing activities do you count that as the school being open? 🤦♂️
I'm not going to go any further. As the husband of a teaching assistant injured whilst apparently not working in a school which wasn't open whilst looking after pupils who weren't there, I will take your usual wankery under advisement.
"Open" is an absolute. Something is, or isn't. "Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open." - is Eton not open then?
Laughable.
Don't be stupid, schools are often open out of hours or during the holidays for limited number of people to attend clubs or whatever, but that's still out of hours and they're still considered closed at that time.
My children attend clubs afterschool, such as they were in the choir afterschool in the build-up to Christmas - during the times they were there in the choir but all other pupils were not present, was the school open in your eyes? Don't be silly. Indeed they advertise themselves as being shut at that time, if I put their school address into Google Maps when its time to pick them up, Google says the premises is closed at that time. Despite the fact they're present with my children.
If Eton were the only school and pupils of other schools had no school place then yes our schooling system would be closed to everyone not at Eton.
Instead we have universal education, which is open to all. Except during Covid, when schools were closed and not open to all their pupils.
Universal education is open to all children. If not all children have an education available to them, then our schooling is closed. Its not good enough to handwave it away by saying that a select privileged few have an education so that's fine, who needs universal education - and shame on you for even suggesting it!
Again with the pitiful strawman bullshit. You do yourself no favours when you dig yourself into a pit like this.
No pit.
In this country we have universal education open to all, not a privileged few.
During Covid that was closed to most.
Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise, but for most children the school was closed to them.
Good. We have gone from: "I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed." to "Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise"
Indeed.
They were closed [to most children], because they were closed [to most children].
Our universal education system being open to a privileged few doesn't aid the majority who had the doors shut on them. In fact it just widens disparities.
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
You certainly need a rethink. We need more quantity, but we don't need lesser quality.
Every "4 bed executive style" home built helps improve our stock. We don't need "starter" homes built (which is code for cheap shit), if someone moves out of a 3 bed "starter home" and into a 4 bed "executive" home, then that frees up the pre-existing 3 bed starter home.
Or if you want more 1 bed homes, then a chain still works. Someone moves from a 3 bed to a 4 bed, that frees up someone else to move from a 1 bed to the 3 bed, which means we now have the 1 bed free.
If we built 10 million high-quality all 4+ bed homes, then we'd have an abundance of starter homes available as a result, and a much better quality of housing stock.
Yes if houses are built that are poor quality that's a problem, though that's overwhelmingly not the case and would be more the case if developers were only building "starter" homes.
Stop And Think. What is the point in building houses that the people who need housing cannot afford? And don't say "all the people in older / cheaper homes trade up leaving those" because that isn't how the market or people work.
You mention quality and "cheap shit". It is the so-called "executive homes" which are cheap shit. Ignore the vast selling price and look at the quality. They are shit. The build quality of Barratt homes is a national joke - and the others are just as bad.
We need to cut the builders out of the equation. They can't make profits hence throwing together only large cheap shit. So have Housing Associations commission them to build the homes people need and don't worry about profit.
It is how the market and people work.
Where are these mythical estates that are getting built that nobody is buying a single plot from and nobody lives in? I've never seen one, have you?
Pretty much all new houses that are getting built are getting occupied. That means other houses are getting freed up.
I own and live in a new build, its so much better quality than the house we were renting its ridiculous. Others should have the same opportunity.
You have absolute blinkers on as you ideologically support your opinion - which is fine, but you need to step away and recognise that what you think isn't necessarily what everyone thinks.
We have a massive cost of living crisis. People need somewhere to live, so they buy houses they can't afford - or more likely rent them. Most of their cash goes on housing which takes it out of circulation.
You said on another post that nobody should have to live in a flat. So thats cities finished then...
The only reason that housing is expensive is due to a shortage of housing. We need more houses. Building more houses frees up pre-existing stock as we have a higher quantity of housing.
If the quantity of housing went up sufficiently, I'd want to see a million houses a year built over the next decade, then the price of both housing and rentals would fall. Ideally as many as possible of those should be good quality three/four plus houses with gardens so everyone can afford them rather than cheap tenements to throw people into and pile them high out of the way.
If people want to live in flat in a city, they should be able to choose to do so. That's their choice. Nobody should be obliged to do so against their will when they have another choice though.
problem one, but not the only one, with building 1 m houses a year:
The Home Builders Federation estimates 2,500 brickies are needed for every 10,000 homes built. That means around 75,000 are needed to hit the Government's target of building 300,000 new homes every year by 2025. But there are only 42,000 bricklayers in home building, meaning an extra 33,000 are now needed.
So each brickie working full time can only do four houses worth of work a year?
I am not an expert but that seems unlikely to me.
How about we improve productivity, that could be a start? Remove barriers to competition too, that would help tremendously.
As a matter of interest, which 'barriers to competition' are you talking about?
For a 'traditional' two-skin brick-or-block house, I think that seems about correct, although perhaps a little on the low side. Bricklaying can be quite a slow process, especially if you don't have a helper to fetch new hods of bricks (*) or mix/fetch mortar. And those helpers would count as bricklayers too. There are also times (e.g. frosty conditions) when you cannot easily lay bricks.
Which is why different construction techniques can make a big difference. Some of the new homes being built in CW have an interior wall of pre-constructed wooden panels, complete with insulation. These are craned in and the brickies then put a brick skin on the outside of it. That's much quicker than even breeze-block construction.
As another side note, I don't see brick hods being used any more. I assume they use telescopic handlers to lift the bricks up onto scaffolding now.
Others may have their own barriers to competition they think are a priority, so they can be addressed as well, but to me the number one barrier to competition is planning consent.
Anyone who wants to build on any land zoned for housing should be able to do so, without seeking permission first - so long as whatever is built is built within predefined building codes. Which would include new construction as well as extensions, redevelopments, bulldozing and rebuilding pre-existing homes etc.
Giving permission to Barratt Homes for an entire estate then no other permission to anyone else gives Barratt Homes a monopoly position within that development to control it. Giving permission to an oligopoly of developers is not much better. Permission should exist for everyone at all times, automatically.
But your demand for one or two house developments is inherently inefficient - the trained brickies won't hjave enough tro do, or be spending their time digging foundations.
Your demand for optimal use of trained brickies requires huge developments of hundreds of houses and nothing else.
Onshore wind is the UK’s cheapest energy option by some distance. Bloody stupid that the government killed further development.
That is one area where I am fairly confident Labour will do better.
The larger, more efficient turbines can’t be used on land. Which means as turbines get larger and larger the cost cross over, where offshore is cheaper, will be reached. Some say we are there already.
Edit: anyone looking at building a wind farm on land will know that a horde of objectors will still appear. Which creates additional costs. Fish don’t vote.
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
There is an issue, most definitely. Since privatisation there has been a lot of money saved on trackside maintenance - hence the problems involved with leaves on the track. I've been amazed to travel on lines which I frequented 25 years before, and views and vistas I enjoyed then have very often been obliterated.
There is an interesting article in Modern Railways summarising the Salisbury accident report. One slice of the cheese comprised the neglect of trackside vegetation - a startling set opf photos taken at different decades. And the next slice comprised skidding on leaf mulch on the rail ...
edit: and another slice of the fromage was the fragmentation of British Raiulways, and contractorisation - split responsibilities, communications failures ...
Another photo in the same issue showed a pedestrian crossing which is causing some concern in N. Wales. The rail indfustry don't want to replace it with a footbridge. Yet the photo showed it seriously overgrown to the extent that you can't see what is coming unless you actually go onto the formation.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
I’m hearing that this new cohort is especially fucked from personal anecdotes - teacher/professor friends. But also seeing it online
It makes sense. Even a war arguably isn’t as traumatic as what we did to our own societies 2020-2022
I sincerely pray that you are right in your sunny Californian optimism
Absolutely, there has been damage inflicted on young people that will affect them the rest of their lives.
Which should be pretty bloody obvious. If I don't take my kids to school for a week as I want to take them on holiday then I'm breaking the law and can be fined, as its so crucial that children don't miss even a week of schooling - but we shut schools for months and people have a ladida its all fine attitude to it.
No its not all fine. What we did to children was terrible, unforgiveable, and all to save some people from a natural end to their life from a natural virus. It will affect children for decades to come.
There are children approaching GCSEs etc now who missed absolutely crucial formative time at school and never caught up.
I do think this is being massively overstated.
My son is now 20. As a result of the lockdowns he lost about a year from school. He had quite a lot of classes online. He remained in contact with his friends through social media. He was denied the chance to shine in both his Highers and Advanced Highers in that he did not sit proper, national exams. People will always look somewhat askance at the marks given in those years and, frankly, rightly so. He missed out in respect of debating competitions. Although he did a lot of these online the social buzz simply wasn't there. At the risk of upsetting @TSE he still got to a good University.
It was not great for him, he missed out on quite a lot, especially socially. But he coped and so far as I can see his cohort did likewise. Children from poorer backgrounds and who were less able academically will undoubtedly have suffered more. But not much more.
It would be nice if people showed as much concern for poor people in general as they do for them from the impacts of lockdown.
The lack of resilience to COVID was often a result long term structural issues - a lesser example being a lack of high quality public spaces like parks and playing fields for people living in flats, while the middle class lounged in their gardens. Obesity, education, single parents and so on - long term factors associated with poverty that all made COVID worse.
For me, the deepest inequity was the insanely high savings rates that richer people had, which subsequently fuelled inflation even while high interest rates smashed renters and mortgage holders.
You'll be pleased to know then that I do share my concern consistently and want to see ten million new houses built across the country so everyone, not just the well off, can have a house of their own with their own garden and off-road parking spaces etc.
Nobody in this country should be so poor that they are compelled to having to live in a flat.
Percentage of people living in flats:
UK 15%
Switzerland 60% Germany 57% Sweden 40%
And what percentage want to live in flats ?
What percentage want to move to NW England and live in a Barratt home adjacent to a motorway, with no public transport provision and no local services? I reckon Switzerland is a bit nicer.
The fact is we live in a densely populated country (including Scotland, with the vast majority living in cities and towns) yet have some of the least dense housing anywhere in Europe. It's infuriatingly obvious what the problem is.
Edinburgh is building detached houses inside the bypass amid a "housing crisis". The council is utterly beholden to developers who don't give a damn about increasing supply - it's in their interest to restrict it! They have suckered numpties like Barty into thinking no one will buy a flat, and the Swiss and Germans have low quality of living because they don't have a 10 square foot garden each.
I've known people who lived in a flat and then moved to a house, detached if they could.
I've known people who lived in a flat and wanted to move to a house, detached if possible.
But I've never known anyone who lived in a house who either moved to or wanted to live in a flat.
Now perhaps you can force people to live in flats and then that becomes normalised after a few generations but its not going to happen in this country.
FYI the Germans and Swiss aren't forced at gunpoint into their apartments.
I'm not sure those getting massive rent increases from leach landlords will appreciate the pearl-clutching of the "Englishman's castle" brigade.
Young people are desperate to get into their own homes, even if it's a flat like the impoverished Swiss. I, too, would like to live on a country estate with several thousand hectares, but that wouldn't do too much for housing supply.
I live in a semi (having previously lived in a flat). I am seriously considering moving back to a flat.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY. I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. <-- because they are not really affordable.
We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying. I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Back on topic, surely the positive for 2023 is the final demise of Boris Johnson as a political force. And not just the man (the legend) himself - his entire political coalition is done.
It was never that clear what “Johnsonism” even was — perhaps that was part of the secret of his “charm” — but I think a political agenda of populism, centre right on social issues, fiscally conservative but willing to open the taps to “level up”, that still could get a lot of votes. But Johnson and the Tories more generally are no longer trusted to deliver anything.
Johnsonism is telling people what they want to hear, whilst simply doing what you yourself want to do.
Back on topic, surely the positive for 2023 is the final demise of Boris Johnson as a political force. And not just the man (the legend) himself - his entire political coalition is done.
It was never that clear what “Johnsonism” even was — perhaps that was part of the secret of his “charm” — but I think a political agenda of populism, centre right on social issues, fiscally conservative but willing to open the taps to “level up”, that still could get a lot of votes. But Johnson and the Tories more generally are no longer trusted to deliver anything.
Isn't the definition of Johnsonism saying anything and offering everything that people want with no intention of delivering?
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
There is an issue, most definitely. Since privatisation there has been a lot of money saved on trackside maintenance - hence the problems involved with leaves on the track. I've been amazed to travel on lines which I frequented 25 years before, and views and vistas I enjoyed then have very often been obliterated.
There is an interesting article in Modern Railways summarising the Salisbury accident report. One slice of the cheese comprised the neglect of trackside vegetation - a startling set opf photos taken at different decades. And the next slice comprised skidding on leaf mulch on the rail ...
edit: and another slice of the fromage was the fragmentation of British Raiulways, and contractorisation - split responsibilities, communications failures ...
Another photo in the same issue showed a pedestrian crossing which is causing some concern in N. Wales. The rail indfustry don't want to replace it with a footbridge. Yet the photo showed it seriously overgrown to the extent that you can't see what is coming unless you actually go onto the formation.
I used to live in Salisbury, and know the area of that accident quite well. Thanks to a brief storm and leaves on the line, a train utterly failed to slow down and went straight through a red light into another train. I feel very sorry for the driver of that train, who was obviously at fault for the accident yet had no idea what was actually in front of him at the time.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I had a similar experience with weight and mental health. I look at some of the pictures I took of myself as lockdown ground on and its clear I was falling apart. There were also online evening drinks with friends where (although I don't remember) I would also fall apart.
Then things started to unlock. A few shafts of light but the unlocked world of shields and restrictions was also horrible - went to the pub with friends once and it was bad enough that we switched back to online. And then down came Covid and restrictions again. The most oppressive it got was that winter of 2020 where I lived in the Covid hotspot of the whole country and practically *nobody* went outside voluntarily.
Happily we moved to Scotland in February 2021 to an area that had hardly had any Covid, and was managing the pandemic better. And I was able to make the decision to wean myself off the happy pills I'd been on since the previous summer. Kept working (somehow), kept all the weight as well. 2024 is me making a Serious Effort to get this fat off.
Scotland was managing the pandemic better? Really?
But my experience was similar. I was suicidal and also spent time on the happy pills. And it was disastrous for my then-5-year-old daughter. Some sort of teaching continued for my older children, albeit online, but you can't teach a five year old online. And any sort of teaching basically stopped for about a year, even when the schools were open. But the social impact was worse. 5 year olds need other 5 year olds. And the data and anecdata I have seen is that that cohort - born 2014-2019 - are a bit fucked. Academically way behind where they should be, and SEN rates more than double that of the 2009-2014 cohort. And, of course, they get to grow up in a country which has visibly impoverished itself by turning off the economy for the best part of a year.
I have a real world comparison I can make between experiences in the NE vs the NE. Practically everything is better in the NE of Scotland vs the NE of England. "Better" is not the same as "good" - I have a long list of complaints against health and education up here. But an even longer list against life on Teesside.
I agree with you entirely about the impact on kids - my own included. But again again - there was no option to leave the schools fully open. None. And it is absurd revisionism to imagine it could have happened.
Of course there was an option to leave schools fully open. Sweden and many other nations around the planet did it.
It was a choice to close schools. A bad, mistaken choice.
If a school lacked enough staff for a day or a week it could close for a day or a week as an emergency measure - without resulting in every other school in the country closing, and reopening within a day or a week rather than months later.
Question - who would have been teaching these kids? So we have "a school" - and we know it wouldn't be singular - closing for "a week" and then reopening with no further issues, completely unimpeded.
Its nonsense. People would look at their colleagues and friends ancd family getting seriously ill, many ending up in completely swamped hospitals, some dying, and they would assess it was not worth the risk.
We get an uncontrolled shutdown. In schools instead of schools staying open - why do you keep saying they were closed - they would have closed, in an uncontrolled manner.
I know you disliked lockdown on ideological grounds. I disliked it on much more personal grounds as it nearly broke me. But this fantasy that you have where we just ignored the pox and carried on as normal is a fantasy.
Teachers would be teaching the kids. Same as in every other country in the planet that kept schools open.
Uncontrolled shutdowns are infinitely better as its individual schools for a couple of days, not total paralysis of every school for months on end.
I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed.
Yes, you do keep saying that. But schools were not closed. So why do you keep saying that?
Because they were closed to millions of children.
Them being open to a select few is not the same as them being open.
I believe in a universal education, open to all. Don't you?
Oh dear. Park the reframe out of the way. Being open is the same as being open. We have to have debate and political discourse based on facts. "Schools were closed" is false. Wrong. Incorrect. Not a fact.
It is a fact.
They were closed to the general public, but allowed a few in. That's closed.
Universal education is open to all, or its not universal education.
You can't be partially pregnant. Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open.
If a school opens its doors in the summer holidays to a few pupils doing activities do you count that as the school being open? 🤦♂️
I'm not going to go any further. As the husband of a teaching assistant injured whilst apparently not working in a school which wasn't open whilst looking after pupils who weren't there, I will take your usual wankery under advisement.
"Open" is an absolute. Something is, or isn't. "Either schools are open to all children, or they're not open." - is Eton not open then?
Laughable.
Don't be stupid, schools are often open out of hours or during the holidays for limited number of people to attend clubs or whatever, but that's still out of hours and they're still considered closed at that time.
My children attend clubs afterschool, such as they were in the choir afterschool in the build-up to Christmas - during the times they were there in the choir but all other pupils were not present, was the school open in your eyes? Don't be silly. Indeed they advertise themselves as being shut at that time, if I put their school address into Google Maps when its time to pick them up, Google says the premises is closed at that time. Despite the fact they're present with my children.
If Eton were the only school and pupils of other schools had no school place then yes our schooling system would be closed to everyone not at Eton.
Instead we have universal education, which is open to all. Except during Covid, when schools were closed and not open to all their pupils.
Universal education is open to all children. If not all children have an education available to them, then our schooling is closed. Its not good enough to handwave it away by saying that a select privileged few have an education so that's fine, who needs universal education - and shame on you for even suggesting it!
Again with the pitiful strawman bullshit. You do yourself no favours when you dig yourself into a pit like this.
No pit.
In this country we have universal education open to all, not a privileged few.
During Covid that was closed to most.
Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise, but for most children the school was closed to them.
Good. We have gone from: "I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed." to "Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise"
Lockdowns involved a difficult balancing of risks, of costs. Increased deaths from COVID vs. social and economic disruption. The thing to remember when discussing the issue with Bart is that he explicitly doesn't see increased deaths as a cost, so of course he comes to very different conclusions as to what should have been done.
Yep. Which is how we get "they were closed" and then "nobody said they were closed"
I live in a new build estate, made entirely out of three and four bed homes. No "starter" one or two bed homes have been built, no flats.
Literally every home on my road that has been sold is occupied. There's only one house on my street that's not been sold, and is thus unoccupied.
The idea that estates are being built which are not being sold is farcical - if it were true, then developers would go out of business, they need to sell whatever they build or they have no cashflow. 🤦♂️
We need more homes. Let the market decide, let people decide, if they want a semi they'll buy from developer building a semi - if they want a flat, let them go buy one there. We don't need to dictate "starter" homes or any other shit like flats, if that's not what people want. We just need to get out of the way and let millions more houses get built to resolve the shortage.
A significant player in that market - the developer - doesn't give a shit about housing supply. They would much rather restrict it by building detached houses and eating up land, allowing them to charge exorbitant prices for poor workmanship.
Imagine how more people could have been housed your estate was apartment buildings instead.
Yes but then we'd be living in an apartment. Yuck!
The only reason that developers get a say is due to our broken planning system that gives consent to developments.
Abolish the requirement for planning consent and everyone could get whatever they want built on their own land, which cuts out developments and developers altogether. Countries like Japan that have done that houses (or blocks of flat) are built mostly individually rather than as "estates" by a solitary developer.
Britain is one of the most economically unbalanced countries in the world. We can't afford to let "the market" concrete over London's green belt and let the rest of the country wither and die. We need new towns in the left behind regions and that requires government action.
There are vacant homes in the north that are being knocked down because no one wants to live there
Yes, that is what the government needs to address. Houses, streets would need to be refurbished and jobs created nearby with decent transport infrastructure, along the new towns model.
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
There is an issue, most definitely. Since privatisation there has been a lot of money saved on trackside maintenance - hence the problems involved with leaves on the track. I've been amazed to travel on lines which I frequented 25 years before, and views and vistas I enjoyed then have very often been obliterated.
There is an interesting article in Modern Railways summarising the Salisbury accident report. One slice of the cheese comprised the neglect of trackside vegetation - a startling set opf photos taken at different decades. And the next slice comprised skidding on leaf mulch on the rail ...
edit: and another slice of the fromage was the fragmentation of British Raiulways, and contractorisation - split responsibilities, communications failures ...
Another photo in the same issue showed a pedestrian crossing which is causing some concern in N. Wales. The rail indfustry don't want to replace it with a footbridge. Yet the photo showed it seriously overgrown to the extent that you can't see what is coming unless you actually go onto the formation.
It's f-all to do with privatisation: up to the 1960s linesides were a lot 'cleaner' of vegetation, as can be seen in many then-and-now photos. In the 1970s the amount of vegetation started to increase. Before 1968, this was necessary because of the risks of fires from steam trains. Over the decades, the amount of vegetation increased - and with lighter passenger trains, the perils of 'leaves on the line'. (This happened less frequently with steam trains or loco-hauled passenger trains, as the heavy loco weight tended to crush through the leaf mulch).
Incidentally, BR was also deeply fragmented and split, and the consequences were often worse than today: hence that multitude of Temporary Speed Restrictions that became permanent because the operators did not want to stop services for the engineers to do the work. Surprisingly, that situation has become much better since privatisation for interesting reasons.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
The problem for people who didn’t want us to leave the EU, who haven’t got over the referendum defeat and therefore hate Boris trying to make the case that he would be be doing worse than Sunak is that the opinion polls asking 2019 Tory voters who they’d prefer as leader constantly have him streets ahead of Sunak (and Truss when the question was asked)
My mum still thinks the sun shines out of Johnsons arse. She got Nadines book for a Chritmas present, and not as an ironic read.
Gosh that would test my filial piety.
It did! So I had to keep the conversation moving on...
I have a close cousin who creates a similar issue. He's an ardent Trumper, lives on Fox News, has the sort of views that make me tremble. Otherwise an ok guy but if he starts on politics my only viable option is to leave the room.
Back on topic, surely the positive for 2023 is the final demise of Boris Johnson as a political force. And not just the man (the legend) himself - his entire political coalition is done.
It was never that clear what “Johnsonism” even was — perhaps that was part of the secret of his “charm” — but I think a political agenda of populism, centre right on social issues, fiscally conservative but willing to open the taps to “level up”, that still could get a lot of votes. But Johnson and the Tories more generally are no longer trusted to deliver anything.
Johnsonism is telling people what they want to hear, whilst simply doing what you yourself want to do.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
IMV Carol Vorderman is becoming increasingly unhinged, and if she is not careful could tweet herself into serious legal consequences one day.
She won this one though. It is Mercer who looks increasingly unhinged. I suppose the forthcoming P45 does that to people:
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this. What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
To a rough approximation, the first bit (buy land at agricultural prices, develop it as a town, use the planning gain to pay for the infrastructure) was the business model for New Towns.
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
IMV Carol Vorderman is becoming increasingly unhinged, and if she is not careful could tweet herself into serious legal consequences one day.
She won this one though. It is Mercer who looks increasingly unhinged. I suppose the forthcoming P45 does that to people:
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this. What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
I stand by my original comment. Vorderman's already had to brave Sir Robin on other matters, and she has not learnt her lesson. I don't automatically trust anything she tweets any more.
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Your second point is a very good one. I do wonder if the never ceasing pursuit of higher GDP per capita is very appropriate. GDP ≠ (necessarily) happiness.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
She was promoted from a junior role to that of principal Secretary
£60-70k isn’t unreasonable for a senior administrator in a London based office
That's fine. Was there open competition for the job, do you think?
I have no idea. But not every job needs open competition. A role like this is broadly administrative so if she is capable of fulfilling the role efficiently and to the required standard then you don’t need to go through an entire process.
Fundamentally the MP needs to be able to trust and rely on the administrator. That’s the only thing that matters and I assume that is the case in this situation
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
IMV Carol Vorderman is becoming increasingly unhinged, and if she is not careful could tweet herself into serious legal consequences one day.
She won this one though. It is Mercer who looks increasingly unhinged. I suppose the forthcoming P45 does that to people:
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this. What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
There is an issue, most definitely. Since privatisation there has been a lot of money saved on trackside maintenance - hence the problems involved with leaves on the track. I've been amazed to travel on lines which I frequented 25 years before, and views and vistas I enjoyed then have very often been obliterated.
There is an interesting article in Modern Railways summarising the Salisbury accident report. One slice of the cheese comprised the neglect of trackside vegetation - a startling set opf photos taken at different decades. And the next slice comprised skidding on leaf mulch on the rail ...
edit: and another slice of the fromage was the fragmentation of British Raiulways, and contractorisation - split responsibilities, communications failures ...
Another photo in the same issue showed a pedestrian crossing which is causing some concern in N. Wales. The rail indfustry don't want to replace it with a footbridge. Yet the photo showed it seriously overgrown to the extent that you can't see what is coming unless you actually go onto the formation.
I used to live in Salisbury, and know the area of that accident quite well. Thanks to a brief storm and leaves on the line, a train utterly failed to slow down and went straight through a red light into another train. I feel very sorry for the driver of that train, who was obviously at fault for the accident yet had no idea what was actually in front of him at the time.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
She was promoted from a junior role to that of principal Secretary
£60-70k isn’t unreasonable for a senior administrator in a London based office
A team leader has between three and seven people reporting to them. A departmental head has between three and eight team leaders reporting to them. A senior manager will have about three or four departmental heads reporting to them. (You may use different words)
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
IMV Carol Vorderman is becoming increasingly unhinged, and if she is not careful could tweet herself into serious legal consequences one day.
She won this one though. It is Mercer who looks increasingly unhinged. I suppose the forthcoming P45 does that to people:
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this. What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Boris Johnson. How did such a man become PM? I still ponder that from time to time. Have we learnt the relevant lesson? I do hope so.
As for Covid, I've succumbed again without needing to inject myself with it. Quite mild so far thankfully.
I think I have picked up a dose too.
It isn't the disease that it was, in part it has mutated to being upper respiratory tract, and in part it is because we all have some immunity from vaccination or previous infection.
My folks went off on an anti-lockdown rant on Boxing Day. They watch too much GB News and read the Telegraph. They both have significant medical conditions and are in their Eighties, and would very likely be dead if they had caught it in 2020 or early 2021, rather than having cold turkey with their grandsons. I had to bite my tongue in the interests of Christmas peace to not point this out to them.
Both in our eighties, I sometimes regret holding the Left-ish views I do; if I was ‘conventional’ I could have an argument with our grandchildren instead of a discussion, where we agree!
It was a difficult few days having to divert my folks from politics and culture war issues to keep the peace. They have always been Conservatives but not previously so intolerant and at times racist.
Sympathy. My late father could be racist if someone from a racial minority had upset him but extremely supportive if someone from a racial minority needed support. He became Conservative in middle age, but, as his sister told him, didn’t dare ‘come our’ while his father, an ex-miner, was still alive.
There have always been lots of Conservatives who are extremely generous and unprejudiced with individuals while retaining funny ideas about collective races and countries - my mother was like that. It doesn't always matter - they can spend their whole lives being nice to people they meet, and keeping their prejudices largely to themselves.
You get the reverse too - some left-wingers who are full of sympathy for the struggle of nations, but not actually very keen on interacting sociably with individuals, especially if they turn out not to be interested in liberation struggles and just keen to go shopping.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
She was promoted from a junior role to that of principal Secretary
£60-70k isn’t unreasonable for a senior administrator in a London based office
A team leader has between three and seven people reporting to them. A departmental head has between three and eight team leaders reporting to them. A senior manager will have about three or four departmental heads reporting to them. (You may use different words)
How many people report to Felicity?
Why would I know? I assume it is the standard package for someone at her level. If she is not doing the job she is paid to do then that would be fraud.
There is a job that needs to be done. The employee needs to have a close working relationship with the MP and a high level of trust as well as being efficient and effective in the role. Provided she fulfils those criteria then why is there an issue?
I do have to giggle slightly. Why does Lineker and now Vorderman so upset some people? Because they keep challenging opinions with facts.
No, they don't. At least in the case of Vorderman. She gets *very angry* about things that sometimes turn out not to be quite as she said, and on the rare occasion she apologises, she immediately attacks the person she has apologised to again.
Linekar is just another loudmouth with opinions that are somewhat biased, and whose voice is taken with a gravity it does not warrant.
Both rarely, if ever, consider the other side of their arguments.
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Ok, having got that clarification:
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
There is an issue, most definitely. Since privatisation there has been a lot of money saved on trackside maintenance - hence the problems involved with leaves on the track. I've been amazed to travel on lines which I frequented 25 years before, and views and vistas I enjoyed then have very often been obliterated.
There is an interesting article in Modern Railways summarising the Salisbury accident report. One slice of the cheese comprised the neglect of trackside vegetation - a startling set opf photos taken at different decades. And the next slice comprised skidding on leaf mulch on the rail ...
edit: and another slice of the fromage was the fragmentation of British Raiulways, and contractorisation - split responsibilities, communications failures ...
Another photo in the same issue showed a pedestrian crossing which is causing some concern in N. Wales. The rail indfustry don't want to replace it with a footbridge. Yet the photo showed it seriously overgrown to the extent that you can't see what is coming unless you actually go onto the formation.
I used to live in Salisbury, and know the area of that accident quite well. Thanks to a brief storm and leaves on the line, a train utterly failed to slow down and went straight through a red light into another train. I feel very sorry for the driver of that train, who was obviously at fault for the accident yet had no idea what was actually in front of him at the time.
Was the driver at fault?
I think Sandpit's misspoken: afaicr the driver was just a passenger once he put the brakes on. He could have braked earlier, though, given the railhead conditions, and did get minor criticism for that. But the main causal factor was the low adhesion.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
IMV Carol Vorderman is becoming increasingly unhinged, and if she is not careful could tweet herself into serious legal consequences one day.
She won this one though. It is Mercer who looks increasingly unhinged. I suppose the forthcoming P45 does that to people:
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this. What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
IMV Carol Vorderman is becoming increasingly unhinged, and if she is not careful could tweet herself into serious legal consequences one day.
She won this one though. It is Mercer who looks increasingly unhinged. I suppose the forthcoming P45 does that to people:
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this. What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Ok, having got that clarification:
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
1) Money not being forthcoming is a choice - a bad choice - and money should be forthcoming for education and would have cost magnitudes less than lockdown did.
3) Using the logic that teachers are young, so not very high risk, the same is true with parents too. Parents tend to be younger adults. Parents of kids at school today are far, far more likely to be Millenials than Boomers. Far more likely is the price would be dead great-grandparents or grandparents. Grandparents and great-grandparents are to be cherished, but their grandchildren's or great-grandchildren's education is not something to be sacrificed to prolong their life.
4) 8th March 2021 was absolutely not the time to be opening schools, I completely agree. Schools should have been open - and remained open - from March 2020 onwards instead, with 2020 hindsight.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Had it happened, and had Boris subsequently died, then it is likely that lockdowns would not have been necessary. Simply, the population would have been so terrified, they would have locked themselves up voluntarily.
This was clearly Boris's plan all along.
Watch this. I predict this video will become iconic
Francis Collins of the NIH admits the lockdowns were possibly a tremendous mistake, because the “public health mindset” only thinks about saving lives, not about the collateral damage of closed schools, damaged economies, screwed up people
Pre-lockdown I was of a healthy weight, went to the gym four times a week, held down a full time job.
Now, long after lockdown ended, I still have a spare tyre round my gut, drink too much, struggle with anger and depression, and work only sporadically (thus paying far less tax than I did pre-lockdown).
I wouldn't be surprised if lockdowns have taken ten years off my life.
I am not entirely dissimilar. Billions more have suffered
I’ve also been reading, this morning, about the appalling impact of Covid on kids age 2-5 during lockdown - who are now going through education. They are asocial and retarded
Lockdowns might in future be seen as one of the greatest FAILURES in public health. Ironic
Interestingly, I was just reading an article about slightly older kids (9-11) in the US and how they'd made up almost all their lost academic performance.
But - of course - the US experience was very different. While schools in most places were closed, there was essentially no restrictions on meeting other kids your age in other situations.
It’s the the sociopathy of the younger cohort which is the big issue, apparently. They don’t know how to interact. They spent two years alone at a crucial age
We did this for a really really bad flu
Are kids that grow up on farms particularly prone to sociopathy?
HMG made plenty of mistakes.
But kids are pretty adaptable. German kids who went through the destruction of their families and country, and nightly bombings, and the like, turned out OK.
Sure, there were too many restrictions. And sure, it's possible there is long term damage. But kids are socialising now and their brains are pretty plastic.
Two things. Yes kids on farms are often a bit weird.
And We let down children all the time. When it suits us. Housing is out of reach, most will never own a home. Mental health services are low priority. Total lack of concern for the climate. Piling debt on debt. Massive rise in child poverty.
But it’s a disaster if we panic in a pandemic and lockdown schools for a few months?
They look a bit selective, these complaints.
Lets see for me.
1: Housing is for me the number one problem in this country that needs fixing. 2: Ironic, the claim is that there's more priorities than just healthcare and you want to talk about healthcare. 3: I care about the climate and want to address climate change with an investment in clean technologies. 4: I oppose piling debt on debt, indeed its why Brown was such a failure as we've discussed before. 5: Not true.
So housing, climate, debt and education - 4 out of 6 are priorities for me. Not a bad score.
The three biggest problems in the UK are housing, housing, and housing.
There is a shortage of accommodation in places (not everywhere). We need to build houses that communities need as opposed to houses the builders want to build. We see estates being thrown up with 4 bed + "executive style houses" where the need is affordable starter houses.
The economy is screwed at least in a big part by housing costs. Mortgages are shooting up, rents are sky high - and landlords can't make a living either. Is anyone making money? We're spending so much, but what are we getting?
We *have* to talk quality. Apartment blocks thrown up with "rapid-burn" panelling. Houses by the big housebuilders with no cavity insulation and endless snags that need fixing. We're building terrible housing.
So yes, housing, housing, housing. But not more of the same. We need a rethink.
Agree totally. There needs to be thinking outside the box, as there was after WWII, and find ways to construct cheap but quality housing. Recent attempts at alternative contstruction methods have been shut down by banks which won’t mortgage them.
Government does, of course, have the power to obtain very cheap building land.
Which is one way of building cheaper homes.
Question - what stops councils buying up land, designing a layout, putting in services, then selling the plots to recoup costs?
Obviously reposte - Woking. But in the boom times of the housing market, that would have been money for old rope.
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY. I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying. I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Labour have for some time floated the idea of giving LAs broader powers to compulsorily acquire land without paying ‘planning gain’, so ‘fair price’ might mean something very different indeed in a year’s time.
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
There is an issue, most definitely. Since privatisation there has been a lot of money saved on trackside maintenance - hence the problems involved with leaves on the track. I've been amazed to travel on lines which I frequented 25 years before, and views and vistas I enjoyed then have very often been obliterated.
There is an interesting article in Modern Railways summarising the Salisbury accident report. One slice of the cheese comprised the neglect of trackside vegetation - a startling set opf photos taken at different decades. And the next slice comprised skidding on leaf mulch on the rail ...
edit: and another slice of the fromage was the fragmentation of British Raiulways, and contractorisation - split responsibilities, communications failures ...
Another photo in the same issue showed a pedestrian crossing which is causing some concern in N. Wales. The rail indfustry don't want to replace it with a footbridge. Yet the photo showed it seriously overgrown to the extent that you can't see what is coming unless you actually go onto the formation.
I used to live in Salisbury, and know the area of that accident quite well. Thanks to a brief storm and leaves on the line, a train utterly failed to slow down and went straight through a red light into another train. I feel very sorry for the driver of that train, who was obviously at fault for the accident yet had no idea what was actually in front of him at the time.
Was the driver at fault?
I think Sandpit's misspoken: afaicr the driver was just a passenger once he put the brakes on. He could have braked earlier, though, given the railhead conditions, and did get minor criticism for that. But the main causal factor was the low adhesion.
Yeah, the RAIB is not big on assigning fault to individuals -- it tends to look at the systemic issues that might have led to a situation where one person misjudges or makes a mistake that results in an accident. In this case it feels Network Rail could do better at managing and mitigating the leaffall risks (resourcing, communication of which areas are higher risk, research into effective ways of washing leafmulch off rails, etc) and SWR should improve its driver training in how to identify, drive over, and report low adhesion sections of track, for instance.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice" 🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office. 🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs 🔹From £15-20,000 band 🔹To £40-45,000 payband
IMV Carol Vorderman is becoming increasingly unhinged, and if she is not careful could tweet herself into serious legal consequences one day.
She won this one though. It is Mercer who looks increasingly unhinged. I suppose the forthcoming P45 does that to people:
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this. What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Ok, having got that clarification:
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
1) Money not being forthcoming is a choice - a bad choice - and money should be forthcoming for education and would have cost magnitudes less than lockdown did.
3) Using the logic that teachers are young, so not very high risk, the same is true with parents too. Parents tend to be younger adults. Parents of kids at school today are far, far more likely to be Millenials than Boomers. Far more likely is the price would be dead great-grandparents or grandparents. Grandparents and great-grandparents are to be cherished, but their grandchildren's or great-grandchildren's education is not something to be sacrificed to prolong their life.
4) 8th March 2021 was absolutely not the time to be opening schools, I completely agree. Schools should have been open - and remained open - from March 2020 onwards instead, with 2020 hindsight.
It's not about whether the time was 'right' or not. As it happened, the reopening went ahead without ill effects.
The issue was, as always through the pandemic, it was being made for all the wrong reasons.
Onshore wind is the UK’s cheapest energy option by some distance. Bloody stupid that the government killed further development.
That is one area where I am fairly confident Labour will do better.
The larger, more efficient turbines can’t be used on land. Which means as turbines get larger and larger the cost cross over, where offshore is cheaper, will be reached. Some say we are there already.
Edit: anyone looking at building a wind farm on land will know that a horde of objectors will still appear. Which creates additional costs. Fish don’t vote.
No, I don’t think so. Despite significantly larger turbines being practical offshore, there’s still quite a large differential between the costs of the two things - not least because it’s easier to connect to grid (though currently U.K. costs for inshore are artificially inflated, as touched on in that article).
(And deep water offshore is more expensive still.)
Seems to be true globally (in China the differential cost is significantly greater, presumably as they allow larger inshore turbines)
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/renewables/lcoe-for-offshore-wind-now-on-par-with-coal-bnef/ … These global cost benchmarks combine a range of country-level estimates that vary according to market maturity, resource availability, project characteristics, local financing conditions and labor costs. The cheapest renewable power projects in the first half of 2023 can be found in China, achieving an LCOE of $23/MWh for best-in-class onshore wind farms, $50/MWh for offshore wind and $31/MWh for fixed-axis PV farms...
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Ok, having got that clarification:
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
1) I wasn’t claiming that Hull was unique, only that schools remained open during a period when pupils and teachers were absent and I was agreeing with the point that national closures didn’t necessarily coincide with points of maximum disruption for a school; the school I know best certainly managed to recover all of its Covid costs but I’d agree it took a while.
2) “first wave” is misleading, I should have said “biggest wave of the 2020-21 winter”
3) I think it was worth vaccinating teachers early if that was part of a strategy to keep education open with cross-party support, but that implies that there was any strategic thinking; I think your point about parents dying is unreasonable given the point you yourself make that Covid deaths were essentially among the old - school children mustn’t meet up with grandparents would have been preferable to closures (though that would have exacerbated the disadvantages for multi-generational households)
4) your points here are made with the benefit of hindsight.
We might disagree on some points but I suspect that our overall views as to the direction given to schools during the pandemic by the DfE and others in Government are pretty close. Governance of Education in England is broken (in my humble view as a Governor and parent of SLT member) and was at its worst during Covid.
The problem for people who didn’t want us to leave the EU, who haven’t got over the referendum defeat and therefore hate Boris trying to make the case that he would be be doing worse than Sunak is that the opinion polls asking 2019 Tory voters who they’d prefer as leader constantly have him streets ahead of Sunak (and Truss when the question was asked)
My mum still thinks the sun shines out of Johnsons arse. She got Nadines book for a Chritmas present, and not as an ironic read.
Gosh that would test my filial piety.
It did! So I had to keep the conversation moving on...
I have a close cousin who creates a similar issue. He's an ardent Trumper, lives on Fox News, has the sort of views that make me tremble. Otherwise an ok guy but if he starts on politics my only viable option is to leave the room.
But really, this is just how real life works. The world requires us quite often to interact with people with whom we disagreeon certain matters. As a culture, we used to be quite good at not dwelling on subjects where disagreement would make us sad. With most people, I'm sure I could find something to disagree about. But IRL, in general I prefer not to. Here is different of course - we specifically come here to talk politics. Though even here we often seek relief in other subjects.
I do have to giggle slightly. Why does Lineker and now Vorderman so upset some people? Because they keep challenging opinions with facts.
No, they don't. At least in the case of Vorderman. She gets *very angry* about things that sometimes turn out not to be quite as she said, and on the rare occasion she apologises, she immediately attacks the person she has apologised to again.
Linekar is just another loudmouth with opinions that are somewhat biased, and whose voice is taken with a gravity it does not warrant.
Both rarely, if ever, consider the other side of their arguments.
In this case it seems to be potty mouth Mercer who lost his temper. He is a minister; she is not a politician.
And whether you believe her or not is irrelevant in this case.
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Ok, having got that clarification:
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
4) your points here are made with the benefit of hindsight.
Huh? Are you saying we could only tell that the DfE had decided to reopen schools in March from the start of February with the benefit of hindsight?
It's only with hindsight we know they were drunk, but even at the time there were rumours of drug abuse.
Couple of points on this morning’s interesting discussions:
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Ok, I'll buy it. How did Hull avoid the state-mandated lockdown in March 2020 and the virus for another eight months?
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
Hull did indeed have the mandated lockdown from March through to July but infections were very low… they then had a big spike in the November, when schools were back open, which pre-dated the Kent variant. See chart.
Ok, having got that clarification:
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
4) your points here are made with the benefit of hindsight.
Huh? Are you saying we could only tell that the DfE had decided to reopen schools in March from the start of February with the benefit of hindsight?
It's only with hindsight we know they were drunk, but even at the time there were rumours of drug abuse.
That there was no talk of subsequent closures can only be said with hindsight.
It will be interesting to see how they compete with manufactured homes. For example, those made by Boxabl: https://www.boxabl.com/
My guess is that both are good choices in some situations.
Reminder: Many parts of the US can have big earthquakes, which makes brick homes less desirable.
(The US has had manufactured homes for about a century. Sears sold them for years. They had to be delivered by rail, which limited where they could be installed.
Of course, both trailers and RVs are manufactured homes, though often not considered as such. A friend of mine told me about a friend of his. This friend of a friend retired and he and his wife sold their home, bought an RV, and have been touring the US.)
Back on topic, surely the positive for 2023 is the final demise of Boris Johnson as a political force. And not just the man (the legend) himself - his entire political coalition is done.
I'd like to think so but the threat of the populist right, in various guises, across much of the developed world (and beyond) suggests it very much isn't done.
It also suggests that Johnson was symptom and not cause; it wasn't *his* coalition, though he was - for a while - the one able to forge it.
Comments
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1845839/boris-johnson-comeback-conservatives
But I suspect you, rather than the Express, are right.
"I keep saying they were closed, because they were closed."
to
"Yes it remained open for a few, nobody said otherwise"
The sound insulative properties of building under construction are fascinating.
Step into a room. Hammering, sawing, banging. Step out. Silence.
When completed, this feature vanishes.
Aliens, it must be aliens.
A big problem is the treatment of the workforce in general. Even if you treat them decently, they keep the attitudes that have been beaten into them for a long time.
It also doesn't show that people are happy to live in flats elsewhere in the world where leasehold doesn't exist - anecdotally, in the US and Australia, for example, the social preference is markedly for houses as it is in the UK - arguably even more so. It shows, however, that unlike us there was no change in 2017, because there was no Grenfell fire.
It also tries to link the cladding scandal with the leasehold system, which is rather tenuous to say the least - I think it was terrible government regulation that was far more to blame. And you get terrible apartment block management in New York just like Newcastle.
I'm no fan of leasehold at all, and there are definitely dozens of arguments to make against it, but the FT article conflates points and overreaches.
There was me thinking that lawyers and bankers might better understand language…
https://alastair-meeks.medium.com/how-did-i-do-auditing-my-predictions-for-2023-e653ca8774da
For a start, education was still happening and open to all pupils. A lot of it was online, and that was massively suboptimal, but it wasn't nothing. (It's a fair point that England put too much of its limited face to face capacity into exam years, when lower primary would have been a better use, you would need to ask the DfE about that.)
Then, despite what the famously calm neutral and detached Telegraph would have you believe, there were months of disruption to schools in Sweden.
But ultimately... The UK government was determined, even quite aggressive, in wanting to keep schools open. It failed to do so because it failed to keep infection levels low enough for that to be a viable plan.
Desire is useless without capability.
Zero onshore wind plans submitted in England since de facto ban was ‘lifted’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/dec/27/zero-onshore-wind-plans-submitted-in-england-since-de-facto-ban-was-lifted
Onshore wind is the UK’s cheapest energy option by some distance. Bloody stupid that the government killed further development.
That is one area where I am fairly confident Labour will do better.
They were closed [to most children], because they were closed [to most children].
Our universal education system being open to a privileged few doesn't aid the majority who had the doors shut on them. In fact it just widens disparities.
There does seem to be an increasing number of rail incidents involving something on the track. Perhaps the management company need to be more ruthless with trees?
Your demand for optimal use of trained brickies requires huge developments of hundreds of houses and nothing else.
Edit: anyone looking at building a wind farm on land will know that a horde of objectors will still appear. Which creates additional costs. Fish don’t vote.
There is an interesting article in Modern Railways summarising the Salisbury accident report. One slice of the cheese comprised the neglect of trackside vegetation - a startling set opf photos taken at different decades. And the next slice comprised skidding on leaf mulch on the rail ...
edit: and another slice of the fromage was the fragmentation of British Raiulways, and contractorisation - split responsibilities, communications failures ...
Another photo in the same issue showed a pedestrian crossing which is causing some concern in N. Wales. The rail indfustry don't want to replace it with a footbridge. Yet the photo showed it seriously overgrown to the extent that you can't see what is coming unless you actually go onto the formation.
PS: ah, here is the report itself.
https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/report-12-slash-2023-collision-between-passenger-trains-at-salisbury-tunnel-junction (summary)
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65367e8fe839fd000d8673a8/R122023_231024_Salisbury.pdf (big thing itself, not read it, but f the tree photo sequemnce is in this, page 50)
We (a local council ) are looking into this and it seems to be proble
As a new councillor. This has been a thing for me. I will go with resources: frameworks, funding, capability, ambition, infrastructure.
We can lay out a framework of standards for local provision but if it isn't saleable with 17% profit it isn't considered viable. His Majesty's Planning Inspectorate will tell us to do it again but cheaper.
Electricity is in short supply. There is sewage spilling into our rivers. We don't want to make it worse and we can't get Severn Trent to take any interest in improving the service they manage. They are not our friends.
As for DIY.
I am told we would need £11m per year on top of all the available government grants to produce 250 affordable homes a year, and then we wouldn't have anyone to sell them to. <-- because they are not really affordable.
We need land but we are not allowed to compulsorily purchase and definitely not below a fair price. Our projects are not ones we want to contemplate without meeting quality standards that the private sector isn't bothering with. Which makes us uncompetitive.
its annoying.
I'm aware that a change of government is immanent, and I want to be ready to take full advantage of opportunities but I cannot deal with the required infrastructure shortfall
Network Rail has a campaign of cutting down trees and vegetation, but locals are often vociferously opposed. e.g. read this bit of hilarity:
https://www.change.org/p/network-rail-stop-network-rail-chopping-down-millions-of-trees
Incidentally, BR was also deeply fragmented and split, and the consequences were often worse than today: hence that multitude of Temporary Speed Restrictions that became permanent because the operators did not want to stop services for the engineers to do the work. Surprisingly, that situation has become much better since privatisation for interesting reasons.
🔹In July he said any military (pay frozen for yrs) using foodbanks was "a personal choice"
🔹However, his wife Felicity is paid by the taxpayer in his office.
🔹They almost TRIPLED her income in just 6 yrs
🔹From £15-20,000 band
🔹To £40-45,000 payband
They didn't like me pointing this out. I wonder why?
https://twitter.com/carolvorders/status/1740317523025772694
Carol Vorderman sticks it to the man.
"Johnny Mercer now goes on to insult @FredThomasUK who served as a Royal Marine for 7 yrs becoming a Captain as "having served 5 minutes in uniform doesn't always mean that (sic) integrity the rest of us live by"
Mercer was in the Army for 11 years, so that's about 7.9 minutes by his calculation for Fred!!
It's wrong for a Minister, or any MP, to behave like this.
What has happened to the Nolan principles?"
https://twitter.com/carolvorders/status/1740306926762660233?t=xpY7Yq-GWRx4bFMK_Kr11g&s=19
The whole furore blowing up when Mercer was held to account for his failure to deliver for homeless veterans.
"In February, my opponent Mercer vowed to end veterans homelessness this year.
Instead, it INCREASED by 14%
Veterans like myself, who have served our country, out on the cold streets. I’m furious.
That is abject failure. Will he apologise?
Links below 🧵"
https://twitter.com/FredThomasUK/status/1740027154577158621?t=d_WtyJkeFIwDq0_rF-pfQQ&s=19
The legislation is still there...
Hull had its first wave in November 2020 and the schools stayed open, indeed were not allowed to close (though years groups were sometimes sent home). Schools coped and teaching and learning continued in the classroom for the majority. Personally, I would have vaccinated teachers early on in 2021 and avoided any further talk of schools closing.
On house building, theoretical productivity per annum may be irrelevant if a bricklayer can earn a good living without working every hour god sends.
Did Kingston Communications not take calls from Whitehall?
£60-70k isn’t unreasonable for a senior administrator in a London based office
Fundamentally the MP needs to be able to trust and rely on the administrator. That’s the only thing that matters and I assume that is the case in this situation
A departmental head has between three and eight team leaders reporting to them.
A senior manager will have about three or four departmental heads reporting to them.
(You may use different words)
How many people report to Felicity?
You get the reverse too - some left-wingers who are full of sympathy for the struggle of nations, but not actually very keen on interacting sociably with individuals, especially if they turn out not to be interested in liberation struggles and just keen to go shopping.
There is a job that needs to be done. The employee needs to have a close working relationship with the MP and a high level of trust as well as being efficient and effective in the role. Provided she fulfils those criteria then why is there an issue?
She said “X’s pay has gone up” and forgot to add “because she has been promoted”.
That’s a misleading and partial use of facts.
Linekar is just another loudmouth with opinions that are somewhat biased, and whose voice is taken with a gravity it does not warrant.
Both rarely, if ever, consider the other side of their arguments.
The URL says it all.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12491459/Carol-Vorderman-forced-humiliating-climbdown-deletes-tweets-claiming-Greg-Hands-involved-granting-25m-PPE-contract-lifestyle-firm-Tory-MP-demands-apology.html
1) Everywhere had a big spike in November 2020. Most schools stayed open. This was extremely difficult, not least because the money needed to keep them open and pay for supply teachers, disinfectant etc was promised but only rarely forthcoming. The disruption inside them was also extensive, particularly with classes losing members and/or whole groups. The damage of dogmatically keeping them open for all students rather than showing some flexibility on this point to keep things going as well as possible probably did more damage in the long run than full closures would have done.
2) Your own figures show a biggish spike in March in Hull. As nationally, this was likely underreported due to the inadequacy of the testing regime. I don't think you can say 'November was the first wave.'
3) It wasn't just about vaccinating teachers, as I patiently made clear at the time. In fact, although teachers were at fairly high risk of exposure they were at comparatively low risk of dying as due to our government's longstanding incompetence they tend to be quite a bit younger than the average population. The issue was with in school transmission sending it rampaging through the community. My exact words were 'it's no use having teachers vaccinated so we can reopen schools if the price of that is dead parents.'
4) Finally, since schools were actually reopened well in advance of the vaccine programme getting anywhere near most teachers, never mind children, following a decision by the drunken weirdos of the DfE to reopen on 8th March come what may (a decision which was taken at the start of February and leaked to The Times) and there was never any serious talk of closing them again, your argument on 'vaccinating early in 2021' fails anyway.
I think! The report's here:
https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/report-12-slash-2023-collision-between-passenger-trains-at-salisbury-tunnel-junction
But Kohli is still in.
It is yet another example of Sunakism: promise a lot, then fail to deliver and be very tetchy when exposed.
3) Using the logic that teachers are young, so not very high risk, the same is true with parents too. Parents tend to be younger adults. Parents of kids at school today are far, far more likely to be Millenials than Boomers. Far more likely is the price would be dead great-grandparents or grandparents. Grandparents and great-grandparents are to be cherished, but their grandchildren's or great-grandchildren's education is not something to be sacrificed to prolong their life.
4) 8th March 2021 was absolutely not the time to be opening schools, I completely agree. Schools should have been open - and remained open - from March 2020 onwards instead, with 2020 hindsight.
NEW THREAD WITH A FIRST AVAILABLE
https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/nick-ferrari/minister-vows-end-veterans-homelessness/
The issue was, as always through the pandemic, it was being made for all the wrong reasons.
(And deep water offshore is more expensive still.)
Seems to be true globally (in China the differential cost is significantly greater, presumably as they allow larger inshore turbines)
https://www.powerengineeringint.com/renewables/lcoe-for-offshore-wind-now-on-par-with-coal-bnef/
… These global cost benchmarks combine a range of country-level estimates that vary according to market maturity, resource availability, project characteristics, local financing conditions and labor costs. The cheapest renewable power projects in the first half of 2023 can be found in China, achieving an LCOE of $23/MWh for best-in-class onshore wind farms, $50/MWh for offshore wind and $31/MWh for fixed-axis PV farms...
2) “first wave” is misleading, I should have said “biggest wave of the 2020-21 winter”
3) I think it was worth vaccinating teachers early if that was part of a strategy to keep education open with cross-party support, but that implies that there was any strategic thinking; I think your point about parents dying is unreasonable given the point you yourself make that Covid deaths were essentially among the old - school children mustn’t meet up with grandparents would have been preferable to closures (though that would have exacerbated the disadvantages for multi-generational households)
4) your points here are made with the benefit of hindsight.
We might disagree on some points but I suspect that our overall views as to the direction given to schools during the pandemic by the DfE and others in Government are pretty close. Governance of Education in England is broken (in my humble view as a Governor and parent of SLT member) and was at its worst during Covid.
With most people, I'm sure I could find something to disagree about. But IRL, in general I prefer not to.
Here is different of course - we specifically come here to talk politics. Though even here we often seek relief in other subjects.
He is a minister; she is not a politician.
And whether you believe her or not is irrelevant in this case.
It's only with hindsight we know they were drunk, but even at the time there were rumours of drug abuse.
It will be interesting to see how they compete with manufactured homes. For example, those made by Boxabl: https://www.boxabl.com/
My guess is that both are good choices in some situations.
Reminder: Many parts of the US can have big earthquakes, which makes brick homes less desirable.
(The US has had manufactured homes for about a century. Sears sold them for years. They had to be delivered by rail, which limited where they could be installed.
Of course, both trailers and RVs are manufactured homes, though often not considered as such. A friend of mine told me about a friend of his. This friend of a friend retired and he and his wife sold their home, bought an RV, and have been touring the US.)
It also suggests that Johnson was symptom and not cause; it wasn't *his* coalition, though he was - for a while - the one able to forge it.