I hope Mr Martin has not recently taken out a big dividend from Wetherspoon's. It's important to make sure that this pain sharing, not pain transferring.
It's strange because in the long term, Wetherspoons will be mobbed silly.
Maybe it's something to do with all the preparations that have been done in the interim, such as constructing new thousand-bed hospitals?
That and the very quiet streets. The lockdown appears (at least where I'm) to be widely observed.
This was Ferguson's most interesting comment: Ferguson said community testing and contact tracing wasn’t included as a possible strategy in the original modelling because not enough tests were available. He said the UK should have the testing capacity “within a few weeks” to copy what South Korea has done and aggressively test and trace the general population.
How will they control the panic buying of antibody test kits?
HMG setting a bad example by buying 3.5 million of the bloody things.
Not really. Panic buying is buying stuff you won't be able to immediately need or use. I have no doubt that if they work HMG will be needing and using every one of those tests. Indeed I would suggest they should make sure they have enough before allowing a single unit to be sold to the wider public.
What I liked about it was the spirit - the egalitarianism, the rejection of business as usual and of being relaxed about inequality - not necessarily all of the actual polices.
I hope that under Starmer we keep the spirit and modernise the offering.
Well, you did say "self-aggrandizement", which I didn`t comment on but now see that you dropped it in to irritate me.
Having read your original post a few times, I think this was one of your "provocative kinabalu posts" designed to produce a response from some of us. The sort of thing you do when you have time on your hands, you know.
In line with its reputation as the "Start-Up Nation", Israel's high-tech sector is coming up with new applications to help in the fight against Covid-19.
From this week, a start-up called Vocalis Health is working with hospitals and the defence ministry to sample the voices of people who have tested positive - through a mobile app - to see if these samples show a "vocal fingerprint" that would help detect the virus in others. Artificial intelligence will be used to analyse the samples.
Another new app that has come online, called "The Shield" ("Hamagen" in Hebrew), can instantly tell people if they have crossed paths with someone known to have contracted the coronavirus. It was launched by the health ministry and takes location data from the user's phone to compare it to data on the known movements of confirmed cases in the two weeks before their diagnosis. If there is an overlap, the user is told and asked if they want to report their exposure.
The ministry promises that information shared is secure. But computer-privacy experts warn that the terms of use for the Shield app are far-reaching and allow the sharing of information with "the proper authorities".
Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service was controversially instructed to track the phones of infected people and send messages to those who had been in contact with them, ordering them to self-quarantine.
Spain’s deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo has tested positive for coronavirus, according to the BBC. It comes after she was hospitalised on Sunday with a respiratory infection.
Spain’s deputy prime minister Carmen Calvo has tested positive for coronavirus. It comes after she was hospitalised on Sunday with a respiratory infection.
Calvo tested positive for the virus in a test performed on Tuesday after previously testing negative, but one more test was performed because the last one proved inconclusive, the government said in a statement.
It added that Calvo, who was born in 1957, was doing well and receiving medical treatment.
I don’t think it’s too bad of Jezza to say this really?
It was great to hear. Indeed I wish to post my own little tribute on this the last day (effectively) of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a moment which IMO should be marked with generosity of spirit towards a man who, whilst not everybody’s cup of tea, has made a notable contribution to the political drama of recent years.
He never wanted to lead the party and even less did he wish to become PM. Like the National Lottery, he is all about Good Causes. A thirst for power and prestige is not in the DNA. Yet he answered the call from colleagues to stand in 2015, and when the membership offered him the LOTO baton, he took it and ran. Despite a reluctance to be “primus inter pares” – preferring “et generis paribus” - he offered himself up as The Man in not one general election but TWO. In the first of these he came closer than any socialist ever has to attaining power in modern Britain. This is perhaps his most enduring legacy. He showed that it was possible for a socialist to win a UK general election so long as the socialist was not him (an easy fix going forwards).
GE19? Still running but straight into a buzz-saw. “Get Brexit Done”. “Boris”. “Parliament versus The People.” Could any Opposition Leader have held up against that? Sadly not. You can do nothing with the Zeitgeist except submit to it. Ask John Major. So let us not dwell on this. The result looks poor but Labour DID win the argument (witness the Tory conversion to anti-Austerity) and they DID move the Overton Window (that radical manifesto can never be unwritten).
But the biggest Corbyn positive lies not in his impact on political debate, welcome though it has been, but in his persona and character. Good (progressive) causes, as noted, and a holding to principle, not self-aggrandizement and opportunism. In an era where the very idea of placing duty over desire is sniggered at, where the meaning of the term “public service” has been all but forgotten, we have had in Jeremy Corbyn a politician to remind us, and this is why all of us here on PB.com should wish him well as he exits the stage today. Regardless of our politics, we can award him the following epithet - the two little words which best sum up his career. He served.
He served his constituency, the Left in general, his party, and – yes – his country.
Thank you, Jeremy. Stay safe now.
Good piece, though the "Good Causes" he supported were not a lottery. Any group of people (immediately labelled by him and his like as a "community") which he could define as being "victims" (in his head) of western liberal democracies (esp USA, but also UK) counted. This led to him being regarded as being unfit for office, particularly PM.
He has left a Labour Party tainted by more than whiff of "not patriotic" and also a party whose values have been revealed as being at odds with the working class conservatives whose votes the party have relied on forever.
These voters (which you disparagingly call WWC) saw the light at the last GE and held their noses and voted for the Conservatives. Now the spell is broken and these voters will not need to hold their noses next time.
This is the legacy he leaves. Sorry.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
It goes a bit further than that though.Enfield Southgate, Bedford, Warwick & Leamington, Croydon Central, Brighton Kemptown, Portsmouth South , the four Bristol seats , Hove, Cardiff North, Sheffield Hallam - are not seats I would normally expect to see Labour winning - or even close to winning - in a year producing a big Tory majority. With the exception of Bristol South , Labour was a distand second - or third - in such seats in 1987 - and even 1992.
I don’t think it’s too bad of Jezza to say this really?
It was great to hear. Indeed I wish to post my own little tribute on this the last day (effectively) of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a moment which IMO should be marked with generosity of spirit towards a man who, whilst not everybody’s cup of tea, has made a notable contribution to the political drama of recent years.
He never wanted to lead the party and even less did he wish to become PM. Like the National Lottery, he is all about Good Causes. A thirst for power and prestige is not in the DNA. Yet he answered the call from colleagues to stand in 2015, and when the membership offered him the LOTO baton, he took it and ran. Despite a reluctance to be “primus inter pares” – preferring “et generis paribus” - he offered himself up as The Man in not one general election but TWO. In the first of these he came closer than any socialist ever has to attaining power in modern Britain. This is perhaps his most enduring legacy. He showed that it was possible for a socialist to win a UK general election so long as the socialist was not him (an easy fix going forwards).
GE19? Still running but straight into a buzz-saw. “Get Brexit Done”. “Boris”. “Parliament versus The People.” Could any Opposition Leader have held up against that? Sadly not. You can do nothing with the Zeitgeist except submit to it. Ask John Major. So let us not dwell on this. The result looks poor but Labour DID win the argument (witness the Tory conversion to anti-Austerity) and they DID move the Overton Window (that radical manifesto can never be unwritten).
But the biggest Corbyn positive lies not in his impact on political debate, welcome though it has been, but in his persona and character. Good (progressive) causes, as noted, and a holding to principle, not self-aggrandizement and opportunism. In an era where the very idea of placing duty over desire is sniggered at, where the meaning of the term “public service” has been all but forgotten, we have had in Jeremy Corbyn a politician to remind us, and this is why all of us here on PB.com should wish him well as he exits the stage today. Regardless of our politics, we can award him the following epithet - the two little words which best sum up his career. He served.
He served his constituency, the Left in general, his party, and – yes – his country.
Thank you, Jeremy. Stay safe now.
Good piece, though the "Good Causes" he supported were not a lottery. Any group of people (immediately labelled by him and his like as a "community") which he could define as being "victims" (in his head) of western liberal democracies (esp USA, but also UK) counted. This led to him being regarded as being unfit for office, particularly PM.
He has left a Labour Party tainted by more than whiff of "not patriotic" and also a party whose values have been revealed as being at odds with the working class conservatives whose votes the party have relied on forever.
These voters (which you disparagingly call WWC) saw the light at the last GE and held their noses and voted for the Conservatives. Now the spell is broken and these voters will not need to hold their noses next time.
This is the legacy he leaves. Sorry.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
More London orbit seats will probably fall to Labour in the coming decade. It’s just the repositioning of the two parties. Those Durham and Northumberland seats were always going to fall sooner or later.
Equally there is every reason to think Labour’s collapse in the North and Wales still has a fair way to go yet.
Well - Labour increased its majority in Cardiff North in 2019 - and held on to Gower despite losing there in 2015.
As an expert in the field, I get very frustrated with some of the nonsense that gets spouted under the banner of XR. It's not all of them by any means, but certainly there are hypocrites and loons in the movement. And I do worry about the risk of alienating people from the issue, which so far has happened surprisingly little.
But I can't argue with their results so far. They've achieved far more than people like me have by calmly talking about the evidence. Sad but true. They are in credit at the moment.
So, I take it you're a big fan of Jem Bendell and the Deep Adaptation crowd then?
Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.
In a sense, at least XR are "optimists" enough that they think something can still be done to prevent catastrophic climate change and we just need to get cracking with it...
Presumably if you encountered someone offering qualified praise for the Muslim Council for Britain, you would reply "So, I take it you're a big fan of Islamic State".
Apologies wink was supposed to be a signal of irony...
But he does seem to have built up a bit of a cult following, is capable of getting funding, and operates on a very different model to XR. Different message too.
I was curious what you make of him, as a professional in the field with an academic angle. It strikes me that where XR have been successful largely aligns with your interests (getting people to take climate change seriously and potentially moving civil society towards enacting steps that might do something about it) and you've been lucky that their more extreme members, who depart from conventional science, haven't, as far as I can see, been quite so successful in the areas where they're misaligned with you. Politicians may pay more attention to messaging and opinion polls than to a scientific evidence base, but 'twas ever thus - and climate change academia still seems a place where a lot of level-headed scientists are pursuing careful, evidence-based approaches; they don't seem to be being purged or defunded en masse for "insufficient radicalism" to make way for politically-driven activist types who spout scientifically illiterate prophecies in the hope of capturing the public's or politicians' attention.
The "Deep Adaptation" crowd, with their pessimism that the most damaging levels of climate change can be avoided and suggested switch of effort to surviving our new reality, seem more fundamentally at odds with you (as I was sarcastically attempting to suggest). Their strategy of trying to gain a foothold within academia is interesting too - in ten years' time, how many geography departments will have bright young radical academics with PhDs in an autoethnographic account of my preparations to survive the imminent climate apocalpyse or similar? I meet quite a few young graduates on the humanities/social science side of things for whom this message seems to resonate.
Sense of humour deficit on my part - my bad! Probably spill-over from my irritation with the blind spot here over seeing any nuance about the Labour left.
Honestly though, I know almost nothing about him. In my professional life, I don't encounter him, or anyone who subscribes to that philosophy. Despite being politically engaged, I have avoided being too political in connection with my research because I recognise that my expertise on climate change does not make me an expert on what should be done about it. To the extent that I act on it, it is more about people in my field setting a good example. I haven't taken an intercontinental flight in years, which is rare among scientists, and I annoy colleagues by saying that right-wingers are right to call us hypocrites, and that we should stop our idle chatter about population control until we are prepared to make far more drastic changes in our own lives.
I very much agree with your first paragraph. I haven't seen macro-politics play any role in the peer-review process. The closest I have experienced was when a high-profile colleague got upset, for purely scientific reasons, about a paper I was coauthor on, and complained that climate change deniers might try to make capital out of it. Even then though, he made it clear that he didn't want the paper withdrawn - he just wanted the satisfaction of us telling him we were wrong!
On your second paragraph, because what foothold they have gained is not in respectable enough circles to be relevant to me, I find it hard to comment. Maybe I need to be more aware of this. So far all of my PhD students have been very level headed, and when I get my Masters students to debate geoengineering (for example), they stick to rational arguments.
All I would say is that I don't accept that any realistic anthropogenic climate change could threaten the survival of the human species, except indirectly via geopolitics. It is very serious, and it is worth taking very painful measures to prevent, including coordinated abandonment of economic growth as a goal if necessary (said without any expertise in economics). But when I hear people being outright apocalyptic about climate change, I cringe.
It’s almost as if social distancing is an effective way to mitigate a pandemic...
We have only been doing it for a few days, and suddenly he Governement expert says that the peak will be reached in 2-3 weeks and the NHS can cope no problem. The gravity of what he has said seems to be passing people by.
I don’t think it’s too bad of Jezza to say this really?
It was great to hear. Indeed I wish to post my own little tribute on this the last day (effectively) of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a moment which IMO should be marked with generosity of spirit towards a man who, whilst not everybody’s cup of tea, has made a notable contribution to the political drama of recent years.
He never wanted to lead the party and even less did he wish to become PM. Like the National Lottery, he is all about Good Causes. A thirst for power and prestige is not in the DNA. Yet he answered the call from colleagues to stand in 2015, and when the membership offered him the LOTO baton, he took it and ran. Despite a reluctance to be “primus inter pares” – preferring “et generis paribus” - he offered himself up as The Man in not one general election but TWO. In the first of these he came closer than any socialist ever has to attaining power in modern Britain. This is perhaps his most enduring legacy. He showed that it was possible for a socialist to win a UK general election so long as the socialist was not him (an easy fix going forwards).
GE19? Still running but straight into a buzz-saw. “Get Brexit Done”. “Boris”. “Parliament versus The People.” Could any Opposition Leader have held up against that? Sadly not. You can do nothing with the Zeitgeist except submit to it. Ask John Major. So let us not dwell on this. The result looks poor but Labour DID win the argument (witness the Tory conversion to anti-Austerity) and they DID move the Overton Window (that radical manifesto can never be unwritten).
But the biggest Corbyn positive lies not in his impact on political debate, welcome though it has been, but in his persona and character. Good (progressive) causes, as noted, and a holding to principle, not self-aggrandizement and opportunism. In an era where the very idea of placing duty over desire is sniggered at, where the meaning of the term “public service” has been all but forgotten, we have had in Jeremy Corbyn a politician to remind us, and this is why all of us here on PB.com should wish him well as he exits the stage today. Regardless of our politics, we can award him the following epithet - the two little words which best sum up his career. He served.
He served his constituency, the Left in general, his party, and – yes – his country.
Thank you, Jeremy. Stay safe now.
Good piece, though the "Good Causes" he supported were not a lottery. Any group of people (immediately labelled by him and his like as a "community") which he could define as being "victims" (in his head) of western liberal democracies (esp USA, but also UK) counted. This led to him being regarded as being unfit for office, particularly PM.
He has left a Labour Party tainted by more than whiff of "not patriotic" and also a party whose values have been revealed as being at odds with the working class conservatives whose votes the party have relied on forever.
These voters (which you disparagingly call WWC) saw the light at the last GE and held their noses and voted for the Conservatives. Now the spell is broken and these voters will not need to hold their noses next time.
This is the legacy he leaves. Sorry.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
Ah but they'll all return to the fold - the incumbency factor which is so critical to Labour holding all.. oops both.. their gains doesn't apply to Tories.
It didn’t apply to Labour in Kensington either, which should have been a cakewalk after Grenfell.
Admittedly, having Emma Dent Coad as candidate may have been a drawback.
The misdirected Tactical Voting campaign cost her that seat.
It’s almost as if social distancing is an effective way to mitigate a pandemic...
From that article: "His comments come as a team at the University of Oxford released provisional findings of a different model that they say shows that up to half the UK population could already have been infected. The model is based on different assumptions to those of Ferguson and others involved in advising the UK government. Most importantly, it assumes that most people who contract the virus don’t show symptoms and that very few need to go to hospital. “I don’t think that’s consistent with the observed data,” Ferguson told the committee."
We don't currently know which model is nearest the truth because we haven't done enough testing.
If we've got lots of antibody test kits becoming available, the first priority should be the NHS and other critical workers, and then some random testing to calibrate the models with some reliable figures. Maybe that is the plan, and there will also be enough to make widely available.
Add workers in care homes to that list.
There are a lot of cases and they are not getting attention.
Prof Peacock told the committee there are "two different models", with one possible model being a test that is ordered via Amazon and performed at home before being sent back to see whether someone tests positive or negative for coronavirus.
Another "might require you to go somewhere like Boots because it requires a blood prick", she added.
I presume the easy way to stop stockpiling if you have to provide things like ID to buy one, as they need that to be able to know who in order to process it anyway....and I bet the government want to know all sort of demographic info.
BTW COVID-19 is more likely to kill middle-aged PB-ers if they have raised blood sugar. So do what Tom Watson ex-MP did to eliminate his diabetes.
I think the NHS ought to offer free tests to the more at-risk categories, followed by others. Useful in planning how to deal with future peaks. Or if 50% of us really have had it, maybe we can relax a bit.
Where do you think your PPE is going to come from?
According to a report in Der Spiegel, the G7 ministers have not so far been able to agree on a joint statement because of Pompeo’s insistence that it should refer to the disease as the “Wuhan virus”, a suggestion that was rejected by other members of the group of prosperous democracies.
Asked about the disagreement this morning, Pompeo did not answer directly, but did not deny it.
“I always think about these meetings, the right answer is to make sure we have the same message coming out of it,” he said. “I’m confident that when you hear the other six foreign ministers speak, they will have a common understanding of what we talked about today, and we will talk about the things that we have agreement on.”
Donald Trump has called the disease the “China virus”. Although the president has not used the phrase in his last couple of appearances, the administration is clearly still seeking to emphasise Chinese culpability.
“The Chinese Communist Party poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated,” Pompeo said this morning.
So, roughly speaking, we might say that getting COVID-19 is like packing a year’s worth of risk into a week or two. Which is why it’s important to spread out the infections to avoid the NHS being overwhelmed.
I don’t think it’s too bad of Jezza to say this really?
It was great to hear. Indeed I wish to post my own little tribute on this the last day (effectively) of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a moment which IMO should be marked with generosity of spirit towards a man who, whilst not everybody’s cup of tea, has made a notable contribution to the political drama of recent years.
He never wanted to lead the party and even less did he wish to become PM. Like the National Lottery, he is all about Good Causes. A thirst for power and prestige is not in the DNA. Yet he answered the call from colleagues to stand in 2015, and when the membership offered him the LOTO baton, he took it and ran. Despite a reluctance to be “primus inter pares” – preferring “et generis paribus” - he offered himself up as The Man in not one general election but TWO. In the first of these he came closer than any socialist ever has to attaining power in modern Britain. This is perhaps his most enduring legacy. He showed that it was possible for a socialist to win a UK general election so long as the socialist was not him (an easy fix going forwards).
GE19? Still running but straight into a buzz-saw. “Get Brexit Done”. “Boris”. “Parliament versus The People.” Could any Opposition Leader have held up against that? Sadly not. You can do nothing with the Zeitgeist except submit to it. Ask John Major. So let us not dwell on this. The result looks poor but Labour DID win the argument (witness the Tory conversion to anti-Austerity) and they DID move the Overton Window (that radical manifesto can never be unwritten).
But the biggest Corbyn positive lies not in his impact on political debate, welcome though it has been, but in his persona and character. Good (progressive) causes, as noted, and a holding to principle, not self-aggrandizement and opportunism. In an era where the very idea of placing duty over desire is sniggered at, where the meaning of the term “public service” has been all but forgotten, we have had in Jeremy Corbyn a politician to remind us, and this is why all of us here on PB.com should wish him well as he exits the stage today. Regardless of our politics, we can award him the following epithet - the two little words which best sum up his career. He served.
He served his constituency, the Left in general, his party, and – yes – his country.
Thank you, Jeremy. Stay safe now.
Good piece, though the "Good Causes" he supported were not a lottery. Any group of people (immediately labelled by him and his like as a "community") which he could define as being "victims" (in his head) of western liberal democracies (esp USA, but also UK) counted. This led to him being regarded as being unfit for office, particularly PM.
He has left a Labour Party tainted by more than whiff of "not patriotic" and also a party whose values have been revealed as being at odds with the working class conservatives whose votes the party have relied on forever.
These voters (which you disparagingly call WWC) saw the light at the last GE and held their noses and voted for the Conservatives. Now the spell is broken and these voters will not need to hold their noses next time.
This is the legacy he leaves. Sorry.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
Ah but they'll all return to the fold - the incumbency factor which is so critical to Labour holding all.. oops both.. their gains doesn't apply to Tories.
It didn’t apply to Labour in Kensington either, which should have been a cakewalk after Grenfell.
Admittedly, having Emma Dent Coad as candidate may have been a drawback.
The misdirected Tactical Voting campaign cost her that seat.
True. Even so, she almost squeaked through. Lost by 150 votes.
Even with North Kensington, you still have a lot of smart bits to it. Not a natural Labour constituency.
How will they control the panic buying of antibody test kits?
HMG setting a bad example by buying 3.5 million of the bloody things.
Not really. Panic buying is buying stuff you won't be able to immediately need or use. I have no doubt that if they work HMG will be needing and using every one of those tests. Indeed I would suggest they should make sure they have enough before allowing a single unit to be sold to the wider public.
How will they control the panic buying of antibody test kits?
HMG setting a bad example by buying 3.5 million of the bloody things.
Not really. Panic buying is buying stuff you won't be able to immediately need or use. I have no doubt that if they work HMG will be needing and using every one of those tests. Indeed I would suggest they should make sure they have enough before allowing a single unit to be sold to the wider public.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
It goes a bit further than that though.Enfield Southgate, Bedford, Warwick & Leamington, Croydon Central, Brighton Kemptown, Portsmouth South , the four Bristol seats , Hove, Cardiff North, Sheffield Hallam - are not seats I would normally expect to see Labour winning - or even close to winning - in a year producing a big Tory majority. With the exception of Bristol South , Labour was a distand second - or third - in such seats in 1987 - and even 1992.
You’re not taking into account shifting demography and social attitudes. Cardiff North is where all the lecturers at Cardiff, Cardiff Met and South Wales live. Sheffield Hallam, Brighton and Hove, Portsmouth, Bristol are all palaces with a substantial university element. Warwick and Leamington is very middle-class Blairite.
Let me put this in context for you. Cardiff North is Labour’s eleventh safest seat in Wales, almost exactly the midpoint in terms of seats. Three of the ten ahead are in Cardiff, and two in Swansea. The others are Aberavon, Ogmore, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Cynon Valley and Merthyr. The safest of them all is Cardiff Central. This shows incredibly starkly the churn going on, because that was a Liberal Democrat seat less than five years ago. Think about this as well - Cardiff Central is safer, by a long way, than Llanelli or Torfaen, both of which have been Labour since 1922 or earlier and both of which are semi marginal.
Now, pitching to Liberal Democrat voters has obvious attractions (ask David Cameron). But if you pitch only to Liberal Democrat style voters, based on very middle class issues e.g. transgender rights, the environment, Palestine newsflash - you will struggle to win many seats because - amazingly - small parties don’t have many voters.
Blair’s genius was he combined that message with a realistic message about incomes, housing and public services. His delivery fell short, but voters from all sections of society could relate to it. With Corbyn, he just came across as an idiot.
I don’t think it’s too bad of Jezza to say this really?
It was great to hear. Indeed I wish to post my own little tribute on this the last day (effectively) of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a moment which IMO should be marked with generosity of spirit towards a man who, whilst not everybody’s cup of tea, has made a notable contribution to the political drama of recent years.
He never wanted to lead the party and even less did he wish to become PM. Like the National Lottery, he is all about Good Causes. A thirst for power and prestige is not in the DNA. Yet he answered the call from colleagues to stand in 2015, and when the membership offered him the LOTO baton, he took it and ran. Despite a reluctance to be “primus inter pares” – preferring “et generis paribus” - he offered himself up as The Man in not one general election but TWO. In the first of these he came closer than any socialist ever has to attaining power in modern Britain. This is perhaps his most enduring legacy. He showed that it was possible for a socialist to win a UK general election so long as the socialist was not him (an easy fix going forwards).
GE19? Still running but straight into a buzz-saw. “Get Brexit Done”. “Boris”. “Parliament versus The People.” Could any Opposition Leader have held up against that? Sadly not. You can do nothing with the Zeitgeist except submit to it. Ask John Major. So let us not dwell on this. The result looks poor but Labour DID win the argument (witness the Tory conversion to anti-Austerity) and they DID move the Overton Window (that radical manifesto can never be unwritten).
But the biggest Corbyn positive lies not in his impact on political debate, welcome though it has been, but in his persona and character. Good (progressive) causes, as noted, and a holding to principle, not self-aggrandizement and opportunism. In an era where the very idea of placing duty over desire is sniggered at, where the meaning of the term “public service” has been all but forgotten, we have had in Jeremy Corbyn a politician to remind us, and this is why all of us here on PB.com should wish him well as he exits the stage today. Regardless of our politics, we can award him the following epithet - the two little words which best sum up his career. He served.
He served his constituency, the Left in general, his party, and – yes – his country.
Thank you, Jeremy. Stay safe now.
Good piece, though the "Good Causes" he supported were not a lottery. Any group of people (immediately labelled by him and his like as a "community") which he could define as being "victims" (in his head) of western liberal democracies (esp USA, but also UK) counted. This led to him being regarded as being unfit for office, particularly PM.
He has left a Labour Party tainted by more than whiff of "not patriotic" and also a party whose values have been revealed as being at odds with the working class conservatives whose votes the party have relied on forever.
These voters (which you disparagingly call WWC) saw the light at the last GE and held their noses and voted for the Conservatives. Now the spell is broken and these voters will not need to hold their noses next time.
This is the legacy he leaves. Sorry.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
Ah but they'll all return to the fold - the incumbency factor which is so critical to Labour holding all.. oops both.. their gains doesn't apply to Tories.
It didn’t apply to Labour in Kensington either, which should have been a cakewalk after Grenfell.
Admittedly, having Emma Dent Coad as candidate may have been a drawback.
The misdirected Tactical Voting campaign cost her that seat.
True. Even so, she almost squeaked through. Lost by 150 votes.
Even with North Kensington, you still have a lot of smart bits to it. Not a natural Labour constituency.
She and her opponent suffered almost equally from the Gyimah effect - she was down 4.3% (much less than nationwide) the Tory vote down 3.9% (against the national trend).
Hard to be believe somebody who wasn’t an utter arsehole would have lost the seat.
A bit of light Relief The Civil Guard denounces a person for breaching the state of alarm while walking a chicken in Lanzarote. The complaint was motivated by the broadcast of a video after the start of the state of alarm on the 14th, as reported by the armed institute in a press release. The agents were able to fully identify the person who appeared in the video, a 51-year-old citizen and neighbor of the referred Lanzarote town, who was finally located yesterday and administratively denounced.
None of the 3.5m tests for general public for key staff only
Timsons workers will be happy.
5th time today
I know.
I'm not surprised its not for general sale - yet. The demand would be ridiculous and the apartheid system of the tested not had its vs the had its would cause mayhem.
As an expert in the field, I get very frustrated with some of the nonsense that gets spouted under the banner of XR. It's not all of them by any means, but certainly there are hypocrites and loons in the movement. And I do worry about the risk of alienating people from the issue, which so far has happened surprisingly little.
But I can't argue with their results so far. They've achieved far more than people like me have by calmly talking about the evidence. Sad but true. They are in credit at the moment.
So, I take it you're a big fan of Jem Bendell and the Deep Adaptation crowd then?
Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.
In a sense, at least XR are "optimists" enough that they think something can still be done to prevent catastrophic climate change and we just need to get cracking with it...
Presumably if you encountered someone offering qualified praise for the Muslim Council for Britain, you would reply "So, I take it you're a big fan of Islamic State".
Apologies wink was supposed to be a signal of irony...
But he does seem to have built up a bit of a cult following, is capable of getting funding, and operates on a very different model to XR. Different message too.
I was curious what you make of him, as a professional in the field with an academic angle. It strikes me that where XR have been successful largely aligns with your interests (getting people to take climate change seriously and potentially moving civil society towards enacting steps that might do something about it) and you've been lucky that their more extreme members, who depart from conventional science, haven't, as far as I can see, been quite so successful in the areas where they're misaligned with you. Politicians may pay more attention to messaging and opinion polls than to a scientific evidence base, but 'twas ever thus - and climate change academia still seems a place where a lot of level-headed scientists are pursuing careful, evidence-based approaches; they don't seem to be being purged or defunded en masse for "insufficient radicalism" to make way for politically-driven activist types who spout scientifically illiterate prophecies in the hope of capturing the public's or politicians' attention.
The "Deep Adaptation" crowd, with their pessimism that the most damaging levels of climate change can be avoided and suggested switch of effort to surviving our new reality, seem more fundamentally at odds with you (as I was sarcastically attempting to suggest). Their strategy of trying to gain a foothold within academia is interesting too - in ten years' time, how many geography departments will have bright young radical academics with PhDs in an autoethnographic account of my preparations to survive the imminent climate apocalpyse or similar? I meet quite a few young graduates on the humanities/social science side of things for whom this message seems to resonate.
Sense of humour deficit on my part - my bad! Probably spill-over from my irritation with the blind spot here over seeing any nuance about the Labour left.
Honestly though, I know almost nothing about him. In my professional life, I don't encounter him, or anyone who subscribes to that philosophy. Despite being politically engaged, I have avoided being too political in connection with my research because I recognise that my expertise on climate change does not make me an expert on what should be done about it. To the extent that I act on it, it is more about people in my field setting a good example. I haven't taken an intercontinental flight in years, which is rare among scientists, and I annoy colleagues by saying that right-wingers are right to call us hypocrites, and that we should stop our idle chatter about population control until we are prepared to make far more drastic changes in our own lives.
I very much agree with your first paragraph. I haven't seen macro-politics play any role in the peer-review process. The closest I have experienced was when a high-profile colleague got upset, for purely scientific reasons, about a paper I was coauthor on, and complained that climate change deniers might try to make capital out of it. Even then though, he made it clear that he didn't want the paper withdrawn - he just wanted the satisfaction of us telling him we were wrong!
On your second paragraph, because what foothold they have gained is not in respectable enough circles to be relevant to me, I find it hard to comment. Maybe I need to be more aware of this. So far all of my PhD students have been very level headed, and when I get my Masters students to debate geoengineering (for example), they stick to rational arguments.
All I would say is that I don't accept that any realistic anthropogenic climate change could threaten the survival of the human species, except indirectly via geopolitics. It is very serious, and it is worth taking very painful measures to prevent, including coordinated abandonment of economic growth as a goal if necessary (said without any expertise in economics). But when I hear people being outright apocalyptic about climate change, I cringe.
I think the species would survive, as it would also after a nuclear war, but it may not be nice to be in that group. A lot of humanity lives in coastal cities, which would be badly affected by rising sea levels. Climate change will adversely affect food crops. Some areas will be too hot to go outside. Surely we should do some small things to stop that happening?
Ohhhh new look slogans for the press conference today. Gone full Venezuela. Looks like somebodies kids have been busy with a crafting project during the lockdown.
As an expert in the field, I get very frustrated with some of the nonsense that gets spouted under the banner of XR. It's not all of them by any means, but certainly there are hypocrites and loons in the movement. And I do worry about the risk of alienating people from the issue, which so far has happened surprisingly little.
But I can't argue with their results so far. They've achieved far more than people like me have by calmly talking about the evidence. Sad but true. They are in credit at the moment.
So, I take it you're a big fan of Jem Bendell and the Deep Adaptation crowd then?
Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress. Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.
In a sense, at least XR are "optimists" enough that they think something can still be done to prevent catastrophic climate change and we just need to get cracking with it...
Presumably if you encountered someone offering qualified praise for the Muslim Council for Britain, you would reply "So, I take it you're a big fan of Islamic State".
Apologies wink was supposed to be a signal of irony...
But he does seem to have built up a bit of a cult following, is capable of getting funding, and operates on a very different model to XR. Different message too.
I was curious what you make of him, as a professional in the field with an academic angle. It strikes me that where XR have been successful largely aligns with your interests (getting people to take climate change seriously and potentially moving civil society towards enacting steps that might do something about it) and you've been lucky that their more extreme members, who depart from conventional science, haven't, as far as I can see, been quite so successful in the areas where they're misaligned with you. Politicians may pay more attention to messaging and opinion polls than to a scientific evidence base, but 'twas ever thus - and climate change academia still seems a place where a lot of level-headed scientists are pursuing careful, evidence-based approaches; they don't seem to be being purged or defunded en masse for "insufficient radicalism" to make way for politically-driven activist types who spout scientifically illiterate prophecies in the hope of capturing the public's or politicians' attention.
The "Deep Adaptation" crowd, with their pessimism that the most damaging levels of climate change can be avoided and suggested switch of effort to surviving our new reality, seem more fundamentally at odds with you (as I was sarcastically attempting to suggest). Their strategy of trying to gain a foothold within academia is interesting too - in ten years' time, how many geography departments will have bright young radical academics with PhDs in an autoethnographic account of my preparations to survive the imminent climate apocalpyse or similar? I meet quite a few young graduates on the humanities/social science side of things for whom this message seems to resonate.
Sense of humour deficit on my part - my bad! Probably spill-over from my irritation with the blind spot here over seeing any nuance about the Labour left.
Honestly though, I know almost nothing about him. In my professional life, I don't encounter him, or anyone who subscribes to that philosophy. Despite being politically engaged, I have avoided being too political in connection with my research because I recognise that my expertise on climate change does not make me an expert on what should be done about it. To the extent that I act on it, it is more about people in my field setting a good example. I haven't taken an intercontinental flight in years, which is rare among scientists, and I annoy colleagues by saying that right-wingers are right to call us hypocrites, and that we should stop our idle chatter about population control until we are prepared to make far more drastic changes in our own lives.
I very much agree with your first paragraph. I haven't seen macro-politics play any role in the peer-review process. The closest I have experienced was when a high-profile colleague got upset, for purely scientific reasons, about a paper I was coauthor on, and complained that climate change deniers might try to make capital out of it. Even then though, he made it clear that he didn't want the paper withdrawn - he just wanted the satisfaction of us telling him we were wrong!
On your second paragraph, because what foothold they have gained is not in respectable enough circles to be relevant to me, I find it hard to comment. Maybe I need to be more aware of this. So far all of my PhD students have been very level headed, and when I get my Masters students to debate geoengineering (for example), they stick to rational arguments.
All I would say is that I don't accept that any realistic anthropogenic climate change could threaten the survival of the human species, except indirectly via geopolitics. It is very serious, and it is worth taking very painful measures to prevent, including coordinated abandonment of economic growth as a goal if necessary (said without any expertise in economics). But when I hear people being outright apocalyptic about climate change, I cringe.
I think the species would survive, as it would also after a nuclear war, but it may not be nice to be in that group. A lot of humanity lives in coastal cities, which would be badly affected by rising sea levels. Climate change will adversely affect food crops. Some areas will be too hot to go outside. Surely we should do some small things to stop that happening?
Yes small things and big things.
Small things: e.g. individually stopping taking intercontinental flights, which I did a few years ago Big things: e.g. if "green growth" is insufficient, coordinated abandonment of economic growth as a goal
You don't have to be worried about human extinction to be talking about these things.
I don’t think it’s too bad of Jezza to say this really?
It was great to hear. Indeed I wish to post my own little tribute on this the last day (effectively) of Jeremy Corbyn. It’s a moment which IMO should be marked with generosity of spirit towards a man who, whilst not everybody’s cup of tea, has made a notable contribution to the political drama of recent years.
He never wanted to lead the party and even less did he wish to become PM. Like the National Lottery, he is all about Good Causes. A thirst for power and prestige is not in the DNA. Yet he answered the call from colleagues to stand in 2015, and when the membership offered him the LOTO baton, he took it and ran. Despite a reluctance to be “primus inter pares” – preferring “et generis paribus” - he offered himself up as The Man in not one general election but TWO. In the first of these he came closer than any socialist ever has to attaining power in modern Britain. This is perhaps his most enduring legacy. He showed that it was possible for a socialist to win a UK general election so long as the socialist was not him (an easy fix going forwards).
GE19? Still running but straight into a buzz-saw. “Get Brexit Done”. “Boris”. “Parliament versus The People.” Could any Opposition Leader have held up against that? Sadly not. You can do nothing with the Zeitgeist except submit to it. Ask John Major. So let us not dwell on this. The result looks poor but Labour DID win the argument (witness the Tory conversion to anti-Austerity) and they DID move the Overton Window (that radical manifesto can never be unwritten).
But the biggest Corbyn positive lies not in his impact on political debate, welcome though it has been, but in his persona and character. Good (progressive) causes, as noted, and a holding to principle, not self-aggrandizement and opportunism. In an era where the very idea of placing duty over desire is sniggered at, where the meaning of the term “public service” has been all but forgotten, we have had in Jeremy Corbyn a politician to remind us, and this is why all of us here on PB.com should wish him well as he exits the stage today. Regardless of our politics, we can award him the following epithet - the two little words which best sum up his career. He served.
He served his constituency, the Left in general, his party, and – yes – his country.
Thank you, Jeremy. Stay safe now.
Good piece, though the "Good Causes" he supported were not a lottery. Any group of people (immediately labelled by him and his like as a "community") which he could define as being "victims" (in his head) of western liberal democracies (esp USA, but also UK) counted. This led to him being regarded as being unfit for office, particularly PM.
He has left a Labour Party tainted by more than whiff of "not patriotic" and also a party whose values have been revealed as being at odds with the working class conservatives whose votes the party have relied on forever.
These voters (which you disparagingly call WWC) saw the light at the last GE and held their noses and voted for the Conservatives. Now the spell is broken and these voters will not need to hold their noses next time.
This is the legacy he leaves. Sorry.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
More London orbit seats will probably fall to Labour in the coming decade. It’s just the repositioning of the two parties. Those Durham and Northumberland seats were always going to fall sooner or later.
Equally there is every reason to think Labour’s collapse in the North and Wales still has a fair way to go yet.
Well - Labour increased its majority in Cardiff North in 2019 - and held on to Gower despite losing there in 2015.
Byron Davies has no doubt that Theresa May not supporting the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon cost him his seat in 2017.
Teachers on here: do we know how the GCSE gradings are going to work? I`m hearing something about an exam board algorythm. Should my daughter be doing any work now, or after the Easter "hols", or is this it?
But it is very hard to arrive at an accurate figure.
Four years after the H1N1 flu epidemic of 2009, experts still didn't have any clear idea: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/ There is very substantial heterogeneity in published estimates of case fatality risk for H1N1pdm09, ranging from <1 to >10,000 per 100,000 infections (Figure 3). Large differences were associated with the choice of case definition (denominator). Because influenza virus infections are typically mild and self-limiting, and a substantial proportion of infections are subclinical and do not require medical attention, it is challenging to enumerate all symptomatic cases or infections.2, 45 In 2009, some of the earliest available information on fatality risk was provided by estimates based primarily on confirmed cases. However, because most H1N1pdm09 infections were not laboratory-confirmed, the estimates based on confirmed cases were up to 500 times higher than those based on symptomatic cases or infections (Figure 3). The consequent uncertainty about the case fatality risk — and hence about the severity of H1N1pdm09 — was problematic for risk assessment and risk communication during the period when many decisions about control and mitigation measures were being made....
Teachers on here: do we know how the GCSE gradings are going to work? I`m hearing something about an exam board algorythm. Should my daughter be doing any work now, or after the Easter "hols", or is this it?
At this moment, nobody knows. We have had general statements but no actual details. My advice would be to keep working in case work from this point on is allowed to be graded. That is also the instruction I have had from SLT.
Teachers on here: do we know how the GCSE gradings are going to work? I`m hearing something about an exam board algorythm. Should my daughter be doing any work now, or after the Easter "hols", or is this it?
At this moment, nobody knows. We have had general statements but no actual details. My advice would be to keep working in case work from this point on is allowed to be graded. That is also the instruction I have had from SLT.
But what if she has already covered the syllabus for each subject and the final term was just to be devoted to exam revision?
So the past few days the UK government have radically expanded NHS capacity, setting up a giant field hospital, secured millions of these anti-body tests (that nobody else has), just about to green light a load of companies to mass produce ventilators, launched a scheme that has 100,000s of people volunteering to help.
The Imperial egg-head thinks the government measures should now enable the NHS to cope through the worst of it.
But apparently they are utterly shit, no idea what they are doing, can't cope.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
It goes a bit further than that though.Enfield Southgate, Bedford, Warwick & Leamington, Croydon Central, Brighton Kemptown, Portsmouth South , the four Bristol seats , Hove, Cardiff North, Sheffield Hallam - are not seats I would normally expect to see Labour winning - or even close to winning - in a year producing a big Tory majority. With the exception of Bristol South , Labour was a distand second - or third - in such seats in 1987 - and even 1992.
You’re not taking into account shifting demography and social attitudes. Cardiff North is where all the lecturers at Cardiff, Cardiff Met and South Wales live. Sheffield Hallam, Brighton and Hove, Portsmouth, Bristol are all palaces with a substantial university element. Warwick and Leamington is very middle-class Blairite.
Let me put this in context for you. Cardiff North is Labour’s eleventh safest seat in Wales, almost exactly the midpoint in terms of seats. Three of the ten ahead are in Cardiff, and two in Swansea. The others are Aberavon, Ogmore, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Cynon Valley and Merthyr. The safest of them all is Cardiff Central. This shows incredibly starkly the churn going on, because that was a Liberal Democrat seat less than five years ago. Think about this as well - Cardiff Central is safer, by a long way, than Llanelli or Torfaen, both of which have been Labour since 1922 or earlier and both of which are semi marginal.
Now, pitching to Liberal Democrat voters has obvious attractions (ask David Cameron). But if you pitch only to Liberal Democrat style voters, based on very middle class issues e.g. transgender rights, the environment, Palestine newsflash - you will struggle to win many seats because - amazingly - small parties don’t have many voters.
Blair’s genius was he combined that message with a realistic message about incomes, housing and public services. His delivery fell short, but voters from all sections of society could relate to it. With Corbyn, he just came across as an idiot.
But it also raises the question as to why these Blairite areas were prepared to vote for Corbyn.Labour has been a distant third in seats such as Enfield Southgate, Hove and Portsmouth South until fairly recent years. The first two seats saw Labour lose its deposit at by elections held in December 1984 and November 1973 respectively - yet both now appear fairly safe. Labour came from third place to win Portsmouth South in 2017 , and in defiance of initial forecasts held on quite comfortably in 2019 with an increased majority. Why has this happened?. I recall Ted Rowlands defeating Donald Box in March 1966 to narrowly win Cardiff North for Labour for the very first time. The seat was much bigger at that time , and much more fertile territory for Labour - yet Michael Roberts won it back for the Tories in 1970. Why are these seats no longer prepared to elect Tory MPs in the way that was normal until recently? What has alienated voters there from the Tory party? I have never doubted that Corbyn was really unpopular with the white working class. How far his retirement from the scene - and the disappearance of Brexit as a big issue - will bring about a return to the status quo ante will not become clear for some time.
Teachers on here: do we know how the GCSE gradings are going to work? I`m hearing something about an exam board algorythm. Should my daughter be doing any work now, or after the Easter "hols", or is this it?
At this moment, nobody knows. We have had general statements but no actual details. My advice would be to keep working in case work from this point on is allowed to be graded. That is also the instruction I have had from SLT.
But what if she has already covered the syllabus for each subject and the final term was just to be devoted to exam revision?
She should be asking for exam papers and working through them.
It has not been one way traffic though - even in 2019 Labour won a significant number of seats in London and the wider South which were Tory in 2015, 2010 and even 2005. Indeed Canterbury remained Tory in 1997!
Holding Canterbury and gaining Putney is a poor exchange for losing four of seven seats in Durham, two of five in Cleveland, one of two in Northumberland, three of seven in Lancashire and five of six in North Wales.
It goes a bit further than that though.Enfield Southgate, Bedford, Warwick & Leamington, Croydon Central, Brighton Kemptown, Portsmouth South , the four Bristol seats , Hove, Cardiff North, Sheffield Hallam - are not seats I would normally expect to see Labour winning - or even close to winning - in a year producing a big Tory majority. With the exception of Bristol South , Labour was a distand second - or third - in such seats in 1987 - and even 1992.
You’re not taking into account shifting demography and social attitudes. Cardiff North is where all the lecturers at Cardiff, Cardiff Met and South Wales live. Sheffield Hallam, Brighton and Hove, Portsmouth, Bristol are all palaces with a substantial university element. Warwick and Leamington is very middle-class Blairite.
Let me put this in context for you. Cardiff North is Labour’s eleventh safest seat in Wales, almost exactly the midpoint in terms of seats. Three of the ten ahead are in Cardiff, and two in Swansea. The others are Aberavon, Ogmore, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Cynon Valley and Merthyr. The safest of them all is Cardiff Central. This shows incredibly starkly the churn going on, because that was a Liberal Democrat seat less than five years ago. Think about this as well - Cardiff Central is safer, by a long way, than Llanelli or Torfaen, both of which have been Labour since 1922 or earlier and both of which are semi marginal.
Now, pitching to Liberal Democrat voters has obvious attractions (ask David Cameron). But if you pitch only to Liberal Democrat style voters, based on very middle class issues e.g. transgender rights, the environment, Palestine newsflash - you will struggle to win many seats because - amazingly - small parties don’t have many voters.
Blair’s genius was he combined that message with a realistic message about incomes, housing and public services. His delivery fell short, but voters from all sections of society could relate to it. With Corbyn, he just came across as an idiot.
But it also raises the question as to why these Blairite areas were prepared to vote for Corbyn.Labour has been a distant third in seats such as Enfield Southgate, Hove and Portsmouth South until fairly recent years. The first two seats saw Labour lose its deposit at by elections held in December 1984 and November 1973 respectively - yet both now appear fairly safe. Labour came from third place to win Portsmouth South in 2017 , and in defiance of initial forecasts held on quite comfortably in 2019 with an increased majority. Why has this happened?. I recall Ted Rowlands defeating Donald Box in March 1966 to narrowly win Cardiff North for Labour for the very first time. The seat was much bigger at that time , and much more fertile territory for Labour - yet Michael Roberts won it back for the Tories in 1970. Why are these seats no longer prepared to elect Tory MPs in the way that was normal until recently? What has alienated voters there from the Tory party? I have never doubted that Corbyn was really unpopular with the white working class. How far his retirement from the scene - and the disappearance of Brexit as a big issue - will bring about a return to the status quo ante will not become clear for some time.
It is not ‘these voters.’ Cardiff North has a very different social profile from even 15 years ago. Just as Cannock has, to give you another example.
You really get the feel that the Boris Derangment Syndrome in some is so great they are rooting for this to go really south just so they can pin it on him and be able to say see he is utterly shit.
So the past few days the UK government have radically expanded NHS capacity, setting up a giant field hospital, secured millions of these anti-body tests (that nobody else has), just about to green light a load of companies to mass produce ventilators, launched a scheme that has 100,000s of people volunteering to help.
But apparently they are utterly shit.
They arent utterly shit but words need to turn into deeds quick. Some people need the promised cash quick the new tests are long overdue. This week isnt even up on last week
They were also too slow off the mark initially.
You see the difference between me and you is i dont have a problem praising their recent lockdown actions you dont see anything but positives apparently
Climatically, socially, economically, or in terms of our choice of pizza toppings?
Given climate change, high house prices forcing youngsters to stay living with their parents and currency devaluations, one could argue the first three of those have/are happened/happening.
So the past few days the UK government have radically expanded NHS capacity, setting up a giant field hospital, secured millions of these anti-body tests (that nobody else has), just about to green light a load of companies to mass produce ventilators, launched a scheme that has 100,000s of people volunteering to help.
But apparently they are utterly shit.
They arent utterly shit but words need to turn into deeds quick. Some people need the promised cash quick the new tests are long overdue. This week isnt even up on last week
They were also too slow off the mark initially.
You see the difference between me and you is i dont have a problem praising their recent lockdown actions you dont see anything but positives apparently
Errhhh...do you read my posts....
I said from the beginning the "herd immunity", I didn't think that was a good idea.
I said the way they changed the test procedure for only hospital admissions was totally wrong. I have said from day one, we should do a funnelled approach like South Korea. We should have drive through testing.
I said the comms were shit. I said why haven't the government being running scare ads.
I could go on.
But some in the media refuse to give literally an ounce of credit. And we know most of these decisions aren't Boris, it is the team behind the egg-heads.
The past few days it has got to a ludicrous stage where they literally asked how many extra people had he killed.
You really get the feel that the Boris Derangment Syndrome in some is so great they are rooting for this to go really south just so they can pin it on him and be able to say see he is utterly shit.
Shades of Orwells comments about some people practically crying over the result of El Alamein. And not for joy.
So the past few days the UK government have radically expanded NHS capacity, setting up a giant field hospital, secured millions of these anti-body tests (that nobody else has), just about to green light a load of companies to mass produce ventilators, launched a scheme that has 100,000s of people volunteering to help.
The Imperial egg-head thinks the government measures should now enable the NHS to cope through the worst of it.
But apparently they are utterly shit, no idea what they are doing, can't cope.
I'm not a Boris fan, and probably never will be, but I can admit that I think he's doing quite well under what must be extraordinarily difficult circumstances. I wouldn't want to be in his boots.
More widely I'm impressed by the response of the government and public sector, and to be fair many private businesses and other organisations. I've no doubt that the next few months are going to be very dificult, but I'm confident that many lives will be saved too.
You really get the feel that the Boris Derangment Syndrome in some is so great they are rooting for this to go really south just so they can pin it on him and be able to say see he is utterly shit.
Shades of Orwells comments about some people practically crying over the result of El Alamein. And not for joy.
Well, a lot of his soldiers were pretty annoyed that Montgomery had the victory that Wavell was denied because his forces were stripped from him in a futile attempt to defend Crete.
So the past few days the UK government have radically expanded NHS capacity, setting up a giant field hospital, secured millions of these anti-body tests (that nobody else has), just about to green light a load of companies to mass produce ventilators, launched a scheme that has 100,000s of people volunteering to help.
But apparently they are utterly shit.
They arent utterly shit but words need to turn into deeds quick. Some people need the promised cash quick the new tests are long overdue. This week isnt even up on last week
They were also too slow off the mark initially.
You see the difference between me and you is i dont have a problem praising their recent lockdown actions you dont see anything but positives apparently
Errhhh...do you read my posts....
I said from the beginning the "herd immunity", I didn't think that was a good idea.
I said the way they changed the test procedure for only hospital admissions was totally wrong. I have said from day one, we should do a funnelled approach like South Korea. We should have drive through testing.
I said the comms were shit. I said why haven't the government being running scare ads.
You really get the feel that the Boris Derangment Syndrome in some is so great they are rooting for this to go really south just so they can pin it on him and be able to say see he is utterly shit.
Shades of Orwells comments about some people practically crying over the result of El Alamein. And not for joy.
Well, a lot of his soldiers were pretty annoyed that Montgomery had the victory that Wavell was denied because his forces were stripped from him in a futile attempt to defend Crete.
I think you'll find that the Army was just fine with kicking Rommel's arse. Soldiers like nothing so much as victory.
Orwell was referring to certain regressives who quite literally preferred German victories to what they saw as victories for Churchill.
Crete was perfectly defensible - if the clown in charge had bothered to read the detailed ULTRA based reports given him. They gave him the entire German plan - pretty much down to how many spare pocket handkerchiefs the paratroops would be carrying and what colours.
This included the detail that since the German parachute design was particularly stupid, they would be landing armed only with pistols. Everything else, including rifles would be in parachuted containers.
Maybe they know something ... but to be honest I still think there is worse to come. Have to agree about the press questions tonight. A level of negativity and whinginess to rival PB at its worst.
Comments
The lockdown appears (at least where I'm) to be widely observed.
This was Ferguson's most interesting comment:
Ferguson said community testing and contact tracing wasn’t included as a possible strategy in the original modelling because not enough tests were available.
He said the UK should have the testing capacity “within a few weeks” to copy what South Korea has done and aggressively test and trace the general population.
Having read your original post a few times, I think this was one of your "provocative kinabalu posts" designed to produce a response from some of us. The sort of thing you do when you have time on your hands, you know.
From this week, a start-up called Vocalis Health is working with hospitals and the defence ministry to sample the voices of people who have tested positive - through a mobile app - to see if these samples show a "vocal fingerprint" that would help detect the virus in others. Artificial intelligence will be used to analyse the samples.
Another new app that has come online, called "The Shield" ("Hamagen" in Hebrew), can instantly tell people if they have crossed paths with someone known to have contracted the coronavirus. It was launched by the health ministry and takes location data from the user's phone to compare it to data on the known movements of confirmed cases in the two weeks before their diagnosis. If there is an overlap, the user is told and asked if they want to report their exposure.
The ministry promises that information shared is secure. But computer-privacy experts warn that the terms of use for the Shield app are far-reaching and allow the sharing of information with "the proper authorities".
Israel’s Shin Bet internal security service was controversially instructed to track the phones of infected people and send messages to those who had been in contact with them, ordering them to self-quarantine.
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Would we accept that here?
Calvo tested positive for the virus in a test performed on Tuesday after previously testing negative, but one more test was performed because the last one proved inconclusive, the government said in a statement.
It added that Calvo, who was born in 1957, was doing well and receiving medical treatment.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8151133/Families-beg-Britons-stick-lockdown-rules-losing-loved-ones-killer-coronavirus.html
Honestly though, I know almost nothing about him. In my professional life, I don't encounter him, or anyone who subscribes to that philosophy. Despite being politically engaged, I have avoided being too political in connection with my research because I recognise that my expertise on climate change does not make me an expert on what should be done about it. To the extent that I act on it, it is more about people in my field setting a good example. I haven't taken an intercontinental flight in years, which is rare among scientists, and I annoy colleagues by saying that right-wingers are right to call us hypocrites, and that we should stop our idle chatter about population control until we are prepared to make far more drastic changes in our own lives.
I very much agree with your first paragraph. I haven't seen macro-politics play any role in the peer-review process. The closest I have experienced was when a high-profile colleague got upset, for purely scientific reasons, about a paper I was coauthor on, and complained that climate change deniers might try to make capital out of it. Even then though, he made it clear that he didn't want the paper withdrawn - he just wanted the satisfaction of us telling him we were wrong!
On your second paragraph, because what foothold they have gained is not in respectable enough circles to be relevant to me, I find it hard to comment. Maybe I need to be more aware of this. So far all of my PhD students have been very level headed, and when I get my Masters students to debate geoengineering (for example), they stick to rational arguments.
All I would say is that I don't accept that any realistic anthropogenic climate change could threaten the survival of the human species, except indirectly via geopolitics. It is very serious, and it is worth taking very painful measures to prevent, including coordinated abandonment of economic growth as a goal if necessary (said without any expertise in economics). But when I hear people being outright apocalyptic about climate change, I cringe.
"His comments come as a team at the University of Oxford released provisional findings of a different model that they say shows that up to half the UK population could already have been infected. The model is based on different assumptions to those of Ferguson and others involved in advising the UK government.
Most importantly, it assumes that most people who contract the virus don’t show symptoms and that very few need to go to hospital. “I don’t think that’s consistent with the observed data,” Ferguson told the committee."
We don't currently know which model is nearest the truth because we haven't done enough testing.
There are a lot of cases and they are not getting attention.
https://youtu.be/KxtGJsnLgSc
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/hba1c-meters/a1c-now.html
BTW COVID-19 is more likely to kill middle-aged PB-ers if they have raised blood sugar. So do what Tom Watson ex-MP did to eliminate his diabetes.
I think the NHS ought to offer free tests to the more at-risk categories, followed by others. Useful in planning how to deal with future peaks. Or if 50% of us really have had it, maybe we can relax a bit.
According to a report in Der Spiegel, the G7 ministers have not so far been able to agree on a joint statement because of Pompeo’s insistence that it should refer to the disease as the “Wuhan virus”, a suggestion that was rejected by other members of the group of prosperous democracies.
Asked about the disagreement this morning, Pompeo did not answer directly, but did not deny it.
“I always think about these meetings, the right answer is to make sure we have the same message coming out of it,” he said. “I’m confident that when you hear the other six foreign ministers speak, they will have a common understanding of what we talked about today, and we will talk about the things that we have agreement on.”
Donald Trump has called the disease the “China virus”. Although the president has not used the phrase in his last couple of appearances, the administration is clearly still seeking to emphasise Chinese culpability.
“The Chinese Communist Party poses a substantial threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated,” Pompeo said this morning.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2020/mar/25/coronavirus-live-news-india-lockdown-italy-cases-restrictions-uk-us-outbreak-australia-china-hubei-latest-updates?page=with:block-5e7b82608f0878a2a48aa096#block-5e7b82608f0878a2a48aa096
So, roughly speaking, we might say that getting COVID-19 is like packing a year’s worth of risk into a week or two. Which is why it’s important to spread out the infections to avoid the NHS being overwhelmed.
https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-covid-represent-4539118e1196
Even with North Kensington, you still have a lot of smart bits to it. Not a natural Labour constituency.
Let me put this in context for you. Cardiff North is Labour’s eleventh safest seat in Wales, almost exactly the midpoint in terms of seats. Three of the ten ahead are in Cardiff, and two in Swansea. The others are Aberavon, Ogmore, Rhondda Cynon Taff, Cynon Valley and Merthyr. The safest of them all is Cardiff Central. This shows incredibly starkly the churn going on, because that was a Liberal Democrat seat less than five years ago. Think about this as well - Cardiff Central is safer, by a long way, than Llanelli or Torfaen, both of which have been Labour since 1922 or earlier and both of which are semi marginal.
Now, pitching to Liberal Democrat voters has obvious attractions (ask David Cameron). But if you pitch only to Liberal Democrat style voters, based on very middle class issues e.g. transgender rights, the environment, Palestine newsflash - you will struggle to win many seats because - amazingly - small parties don’t have many voters.
Blair’s genius was he combined that message with a realistic message about incomes, housing and public services. His delivery fell short, but voters from all sections of society could relate to it. With Corbyn, he just came across as an idiot.
Hobby Lobby founder reportedly told employees a message from God informed his decision to leave stores open amid the coronavirus outbreak
https://www.businessinsider.com/hobby-lobby-reportedly-leaving-stores-open-message-from-god-2020-3
Hard to be believe somebody who wasn’t an utter arsehole would have lost the seat.
The Civil Guard denounces a person for breaching the state of alarm while walking a chicken in Lanzarote. The complaint was motivated by the broadcast of a video after the start of the state of alarm on the 14th, as reported by the armed institute in a press release. The agents were able to fully identify the person who appeared in the video, a 51-year-old citizen and neighbor of the referred Lanzarote town, who was finally located yesterday and administratively denounced.
https://twitter.com/itvnews/status/1242785081057513474
I'm not surprised its not for general sale - yet. The demand would be ridiculous and the apartheid system of the tested not had its vs the had its would cause mayhem.
Surely we should do some small things to stop that happening?
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1242855116849336320
Small things: e.g. individually stopping taking intercontinental flights, which I did a few years ago
Big things: e.g. if "green growth" is insufficient, coordinated abandonment of economic growth as a goal
You don't have to be worried about human extinction to be talking about these things.
https://twitter.com/10DowningStreet/status/1242858855635341312?s=20
But it is very hard to arrive at an accurate figure.
Four years after the H1N1 flu epidemic of 2009, experts still didn't have any clear idea:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809029/
There is very substantial heterogeneity in published estimates of case fatality risk for H1N1pdm09, ranging from <1 to >10,000 per 100,000 infections (Figure 3). Large differences were associated with the choice of case definition (denominator). Because influenza virus infections are typically mild and self-limiting, and a substantial proportion of infections are subclinical and do not require medical attention, it is challenging to enumerate all symptomatic cases or infections.2, 45 In 2009, some of the earliest available information on fatality risk was provided by estimates based primarily on confirmed cases. However, because most H1N1pdm09 infections were not laboratory-confirmed, the estimates based on confirmed cases were up to 500 times higher than those based on symptomatic cases or infections (Figure 3). The consequent uncertainty about the case fatality risk — and hence about the severity of H1N1pdm09 — was problematic for risk assessment and risk communication during the period when many decisions about control and mitigation measures were being made....
Were the press constantly this negative during the war?
Borrelli has fever today. He is at home.
We got two new men reading the numbers.
Currently positive: 57.521 (+3.491) including 3.489 (+93) in UCI
Deaths: 7.503 (+683)
Healed: 9.362 (+1.036)
Total new cases +5.210
The Imperial egg-head thinks the government measures should now enable the NHS to cope through the worst of it.
But apparently they are utterly shit, no idea what they are doing, can't cope.
I recall Ted Rowlands defeating Donald Box in March 1966 to narrowly win Cardiff North for Labour for the very first time. The seat was much bigger at that time , and much more fertile territory for Labour - yet Michael Roberts won it back for the Tories in 1970. Why are these seats no longer prepared to elect Tory MPs in the way that was normal until recently? What has alienated voters there from the Tory party?
I have never doubted that Corbyn was really unpopular with the white working class. How far his retirement from the scene - and the disappearance of Brexit as a big issue - will bring about a return to the status quo ante will not become clear for some time.
Going to do revaluation really fast
They were also too slow off the mark initially.
You see the difference between me and you is i dont have a problem praising their recent lockdown actions you dont see anything but positives apparently
I said from the beginning the "herd immunity", I didn't think that was a good idea.
I said the way they changed the test procedure for only hospital admissions was totally wrong. I have said from day one, we should do a funnelled approach like South Korea. We should have drive through testing.
I said the comms were shit. I said why haven't the government being running scare ads.
I could go on.
But some in the media refuse to give literally an ounce of credit. And we know most of these decisions aren't Boris, it is the team behind the egg-heads.
The past few days it has got to a ludicrous stage where they literally asked how many extra people had he killed.
More widely I'm impressed by the response of the government and public sector, and to be fair many private businesses and other organisations. I've no doubt that the next few months are going to be very dificult, but I'm confident that many lives will be saved too.
Indeed they are rapidly becoming the bad guys in this
Orwell was referring to certain regressives who quite literally preferred German victories to what they saw as victories for Churchill.
Crete was perfectly defensible - if the clown in charge had bothered to read the detailed ULTRA based reports given him. They gave him the entire German plan - pretty much down to how many spare pocket handkerchiefs the paratroops would be carrying and what colours.
This included the detail that since the German parachute design was particularly stupid, they would be landing armed only with pistols. Everything else, including rifles would be in parachuted containers.