Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
It's actually extremely angering to think that basically all of the poor decision making stems from our lack of testing capacity at the beginning of this crisis and our "experts" telling the government that they have it under control. The delay in getting testing capacity to at least 20k per day is why we couldn't mass test all of the care patients before sending them back, it's why we stopped testing community transmission and why we're so late to the party with track and trace.
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
I'm supportive of Boris at the moment but we were piss-poor early on. Nothing to do with hindsight. Anyone prepared to lift their eyes to the east could see what was happening. That scientists and politicians refused to pay attention is a scandal.
That having been written, from the beginning of April onwards they did get their act together. By that time the virus had spread willy-nilly and the result was 30,000 deaths, 25,000 of which were preventable. So, not great.
On the other hand, without wishing to go all 'herd immunity' (remember that?) by this time next year we may be in a better position than somewhere like, say, New Zealand. The more people are exposed to this the faster we exit it.
I am thinking more and more that people judging and ranking global governments' responses now are at least 12 possibly 18-24 months too early.
It is perfectly possible to judge governments now. You don’t ignore GCSE results because there are A Levels and Degrees to come.
And what is the government’s Covid19 GCSE result?
Quarantine: E, Fail Testing: D, Fail NHS Capacity: B, Success Trace and Isolate: E, Fail Masks: E-, Fail Protect the Vulnerable: D, Fail Avoid Undue Economic Harm: D, Fail PPE: D, Fail
Britain Failed.
OK
Not by any means saying that UK has A*s, but we've only answered questions 1-3 so far. This is not over by a long chalk would you agree on that?
We’ve tanswered most of the questions. Take just one: masks (a bugbear of mine, but a useful measure of their general incompetence).
Britain was the last big country - the very last - to ask for mask wearing on public transport. Why? Even the Americans - who began, like us, wrongly saying masks don’t work - realised their mistake some time ago, and changed advice.
It’s just shit. A big serving of shit in an entire menu of shite.
Incidentally I think this perception of our covid-response is now percolating through to the public. The government’s polling resembles a cartoon character running off a cliff. For a while, after the disaster, the legs keep whirring and gravity is ignored.
But when reality hits - Whoosh.
I wonder if Boris will make it through a full term. The backlash is going to be intense.
Nah most people aren't obsessive hypochondriac internet cranks over this.
Take mask wearing on public transport - who's even been going on public transport in the past month or so? What proportion of the nation?
Vast majority of people don't use public transport in the first place and even for those that do most people are now locked down. So vast, vast majority of people won't have been on public transport in the past month with or without any masks.
Recent visit to a general hospital - couple of days ago. Even the reception staff not bothering with masks. Likewise in the local M&S. Not sure "mask-gate" is really going to take off TBH.
I never said it would. Masks won’t bring down a government.
My point is that the confusion and failure on masks is just one reason we have such a high death toll. We have more infected people dying partly because people aren’t wearing masks where they should: as your comment shows. They aren’t even wearing them in hospitals?? It’s incredible.
I would admire our British insouciance if we were similarly shrugging off the virus elsewhere. But we’re not. We’ve fucked the economy, at the same time.
LOL
perhaps you can name all those economies booming under the present circumstances
Vietnam seems to have one of the world's lowest obesity rates. Is that why a poor country with a higher population density than the UK has had a few 100 cases and no reported deaths?
Or is it that tropical sunshine gives everyone enough vitamin D ... or is it both?
The fact that Covid-19 left Vietnam alone is incredible
Well, some of the numbers from around the world are pretty incredible. Russia, for example, has had 232,000 cases but only 2,116 deaths. You have to fugure Vladimir isn't too good at record keeping. For balance, I should say that I find some of the numbers from some of the States of America a little.....surprising.
I have no idea why C-19 appears to have left Vietnam alone. I suspect it didn't, but who knows?
The public is more willing than the politicians think to wear masks. Indeed it's in the strategy book but wasn't communicated by Johnson whatsoever.
We've had masks on "free vend" at work to give to anyone who comes on site as they have their temperature check. Uptake is much less than 10%
It could do with a push from the top in all honesty !
The messaging that it stops ill people passing it on tends to make people not to want to wear one i think. If we have a workplace with a lot of people with masks, people will think: they are ill, why are they here?
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Rate at which they were closed. Alternative opportunities for employment.
Those, as I understand it are the main bugbears. There was also the debilitating effect of the Miners Strike, where she seemed to have been spoiling for a fight, although Scargill wasn't the sharpest tool in the box.
The public is more willing than the politicians think to wear masks. Indeed it's in the strategy book but wasn't communicated by Johnson whatsoever.
We've had masks on "free vend" at work to give to anyone who comes on site as they have their temperature check. Uptake is much less than 10%
It could do with a push from the top in all honesty !
The messaging that it stops ill people passing it on tends to make people not to want to wear one i think. If we have a workplace with a lot of people with masks, people will think: they are ill, why are they here?
I know it's illogical but it's all I can think of
That messaging is/was because of the shortage. A bit like the lack of testing - wasn't "following the science" but a capacity issue.
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Rate at which they were closed. Alternative opportunities for employment.
Those, as I understand it are the main bugbears. There was also the debilitating effect of the Miners Strike, where she seemed to have been spoiling for a fight, although Scargill wasn't the sharpest tool in the box.
Neither the rate at which they were closed not the alternative opportunities for employment were worse under her premiership than before. As for the miners strike, it was Scargill and his extremist mates who were trying deliberately to wreck the economy and in the process the coal industry, since they were resisting the changes which might have made it more viable.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
Rate at which they were closed. Alternative opportunities for employment.
Those, as I understand it are the main bugbears. There was also the debilitating effect of the Miners Strike, where she seemed to have been spoiling for a fight, although Scargill wasn't the sharpest tool in the box.
This. The mining industry had been winding back for a few decades before Thatcher. So of course in absolute numbers more miners lost their jobs before her than after her. However, lets look at rationale. Thatcher warily remembered the winter of 73 and Heath's "Who Rules Britain" election which he lost. Once that utter wazzock Scargill started the strike it was used by Thatcher as the excuse needed to destroy the industry. Not run down. Destroy. The police riding into picket lines whacking anything that moved and then fitting up the victims didn't happen under other PMs...
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
It's actually extremely angering to think that basically all of the poor decision making stems from our lack of testing capacity at the beginning of this crisis and our "experts" telling the government that they have it under control. The delay in getting testing capacity to at least 20k per day is why we couldn't mass test all of the care patients before sending them back, it's why we stopped testing community transmission and why we're so late to the party with track and trace.
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
I'm supportive of Boris at the moment but we were piss-poor early on. Nothing to do with hindsight. Anyone prepared to lift their eyes to the east could see what was happening. That scientists and politicians refused to pay attention is a scandal.
That having been written, from the beginning of April onwards they did get their act together. By that time the virus had spread willy-nilly and the result was 30,000 deaths, 25,000 of which were preventable. So, not great.
On the other hand, without wishing to go all 'herd immunity' (remember that?) by this time next year we may be in a better position than somewhere like, say, New Zealand. The more people are exposed to this the faster we exit it.
I am thinking more and more that people judging and ranking global governments' responses now are at least 12 possibly 18-24 months too early.
It is perfectly possible to judge governments now. You don’t ignore GCSE results because there are A Levels and Degrees to come.
And what is the government’s Covid19 GCSE result?
Quarantine: E, Fail Testing: D, Fail NHS Capacity: B, Success Trace and Isolate: E, Fail Masks: E-, Fail Protect the Vulnerable: D, Fail Avoid Undue Economic Harm: D, Fail PPE: D, Fail
Britain Failed.
OK
Not by any means saying that UK has A*s, but we've only answered questions 1-3 so far. This is not over by a long chalk would you agree on that?
We’ve tanswered most of the questions. Take just one: masks (a bugbear of mine, but a useful measure of their general incompetence).
Britain was the last big country - the very last - to ask for mask wearing on public transport. Why? Even the Americans - who began, like us, wrongly saying masks don’t work - realised their mistake some time ago, and changed advice.
It’s just shit. A big serving of shit in an entire menu of shite.
Incidentally I think this perception of our covid-response is now percolating through to the public. The government’s polling resembles a cartoon character running off a cliff. For a while, after the disaster, the legs keep whirring and gravity is ignored.
But when reality hits - Whoosh.
I wonder if Boris will make it through a full term. The backlash is going to be intense.
Nah most people aren't obsessive hypochondriac internet cranks over this.
Take mask wearing on public transport - who's even been going on public transport in the past month or so? What proportion of the nation?
Vast majority of people don't use public transport in the first place and even for those that do most people are now locked down. So vast, vast majority of people won't have been on public transport in the past month with or without any masks.
Recent visit to a general hospital - couple of days ago. Even the reception staff not bothering with masks. Likewise in the local M&S. Not sure "mask-gate" is really going to take off TBH.
I never said it would. Masks won’t bring down a government.
My point is that the confusion and failure on masks is just one reason we have such a high death toll. We have more infected people dying partly because people aren’t wearing masks where they should: as your comment shows. They aren’t even wearing them in hospitals?? It’s incredible.
I would admire our British insouciance if we were similarly shrugging off the virus elsewhere. But we’re not. We’ve fucked the economy, at the same time.
LOL
perhaps you can name all those economies booming under the present circumstances
Vietnam seems to have one of the world's lowest obesity rates. Is that why a poor country with a higher population density than the UK has had a few 100 cases and no reported deaths?
Or is it that tropical sunshine gives everyone enough vitamin D ... or is it both?
The fact that Covid-19 left Vietnam alone is incredible
Well, some of the numbers from around the world are pretty incredible. Russia, for example, has had 232,000 cases but only 2,116 deaths. You have to fugure Vladimir isn't too good at record keeping. For balance, I should say that I find some of the numbers from some of the States of America a little.....surprising.
I have no idea why C-19 appears to have left Vietnam alone. I suspect it didn't, but who knows?
If you look what happened in South Korea at the weekend,one chap caused loads of infections. In Vietnam they had thousands return from Wuhan, just 288 infections no deaths.
There will be an interesting dynamic on public transport wrt face masks.
They as has been acknowledged, to prevent you passing the virus on to someone else. So there is an issue here because if you are wearing one and someone else isn't, then that person is being protected by you but is not doing his/her part to protect you.
I foresee some tense times ahead.
I don't think that's gotten through to the general public - I think people are mostly wearing them to protect themselves, not others.
So the reaction to seeing someone not wearing one is more "what an idiot, don't they know they're endangering themselves" than "how selfish".
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
FT's excess mortality tracker got updated. Roughly the same story as before, can split into main groups....
High (+60%ish): Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy*, Netherlands Medium (+30%ish): France, Sweden, Switzerland Low (12% to 6%): Austria, Portugal, Germany near-zero: Israel, Norway, S Africa
*Italy's stats (55%) are way out of date, only to end March.
US currently at 19% but stats a month old, and quite early in their epidemic as it spreads throughout the country.
All of Eastern Europe would be in the near-zero bracket, with phaps Romania slipping into low.
Ecuador would be in high if there were full country stats available (11500 excess deaths from the capital region alone), and possibly higher than anyone.
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
It's actually extremely angering to think that basically all of the poor decision making stems from our lack of testing capacity at the beginning of this crisis and our "experts" telling the government that they have it under control. The delay in getting testing capacity to at least 20k per day is why we couldn't mass test all of the care patients before sending them back, it's why we stopped testing community transmission and why we're so late to the party with track and trace.
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
I'm supportive of Boris at the moment but we were piss-poor early on. Nothing to do with hindsight. Anyone prepared to lift their eyes to the east could see what was happening. That scientists and politicians refused to pay attention is a scandal.
That having been written, from the beginning of April onwards they did get their act together. By that time the virus had spread willy-nilly and the result was 30,000 deaths, 25,000 of which were preventable. So, not great.
On the other hand, without wishing to go all 'herd immunity' (remember that?) by this time next year we may be in a better position than somewhere like, say, New Zealand. The more people are exposed to this the faster we exit it.
I am thinking more and more that people judging and ranking global governments' responses now are at least 12 possibly 18-24 months too early.
It is perfectly possible to judge governments now. You don’t ignore GCSE results because there are A Levels and Degrees to come.
And what is the government’s Covid19 GCSE result?
Quarantine: E, Fail Testing: D, Fail NHS Capacity: B, Success Trace and Isolate: E, Fail Masks: E-, Fail Protect the Vulnerable: D, Fail Avoid Undue Economic Harm: D, Fail PPE: D, Fail
Britain Failed.
OK
Not by any means saying that UK has A*s, but we've only answered questions 1-3 so far. This is not over by a long chalk would you agree on that?
We’ve tanswered most of the questions. Take just one: masks (a bugbear of mine, but a useful measure of their general incompetence).
Britain was the last big country - the very last - to ask for mask wearing on public transport. Why? Even the Americans - who began, like us, wrongly saying masks don’t work - realised their mistake some time ago, and changed advice.
It’s just shit. A big serving of shit in an entire menu of shite.
Incidentally I think this perception of our covid-response is now percolating through to the public. The government’s polling resembles a cartoon character running off a cliff. For a while, after the disaster, the legs keep whirring and gravity is ignored.
But when reality hits - Whoosh.
I wonder if Boris will make it through a full term. The backlash is going to be intense.
Nah most people aren't obsessive hypochondriac internet cranks over this.
Take mask wearing on public transport - who's even been going on public transport in the past month or so? What proportion of the nation?
Vast majority of people don't use public transport in the first place and even for those that do most people are now locked down. So vast, vast majority of people won't have been on public transport in the past month with or without any masks.
Recent visit to a general hospital - couple of days ago. Even the reception staff not bothering with masks. Likewise in the local M&S. Not sure "mask-gate" is really going to take off TBH.
I never said it would. Masks won’t bring down a government.
My point is that the confusion and failure on masks is just one reason we have such a high death toll. We have more infected people dying partly because people aren’t wearing masks where they should: as your comment shows. They aren’t even wearing them in hospitals?? It’s incredible.
I would admire our British insouciance if we were similarly shrugging off the virus elsewhere. But we’re not. We’ve fucked the economy, at the same time.
LOL
perhaps you can name all those economies booming under the present circumstances
Vietnam seems to have one of the world's lowest obesity rates. Is that why a poor country with a higher population density than the UK has had a few 100 cases and no reported deaths?
Or is it that tropical sunshine gives everyone enough vitamin D ... or is it both?
The fact that Covid-19 left Vietnam alone is incredible
Well, some of the numbers from around the world are pretty incredible. Russia, for example, has had 232,000 cases but only 2,116 deaths. You have to fugure Vladimir isn't too good at record keeping. For balance, I should say that I find some of the numbers from some of the States of America a little.....surprising.
I have no idea why C-19 appears to have left Vietnam alone. I suspect it didn't, but who knows?
The Russia numbers seem more indicative of a country that is on top of testing (for now) than one not keeping good records (as in Ecuador, say), or making numbers up (Iran).
It's interesting that Turkey also has good testing according to the figures, but Brazil is doing very badly. A bit of a split between the populists and strongmen there.
Vietnam, a Communist Dictatorship, is perhaps less interesting than countries where we can trust the information provided. Didn't it take decades for them to publish casualty figures from the American/civil/liberation wars?
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
This is an imperious clusterfuck, a gargantuan bunglewank of ginormous proportions. I do not see the government escaping severe censure forever.
I would treat with extreme caution, any indicator that shows the US having had a better response than Germany.
This is the economic indicator, the USA has been more ready to both spend and sacrifice it's population on the altar of the economy than others so far.
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
Spiegelhalter on R4 was interviewed about the 50,000 excess deaths which have apparently been recorded in the UK. That's a lot higher than definite COVID-19 deaths.
He thought that they might be deaths from other urgent conditions which didn't get treated in time.
Or might some of them be COVID-19 deaths that were mislabelled as flu, pneumonia, etc? We gave out an apparent message: don't bother the NHS for the moment unless you're dying ... or you have clear symptoms of COVID-19.
After all, in NY City a lot of people died at home. (They have an extra disincentive to go to hospital if you're uninsured or poorly-insured. Although a hospital is obliged to save a poor person's life, it is also allowed to send him/her home with an unpayable bill of $30,000.)
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
In absolute economic terms, yeah. I would be interested to see an actual study on this. If it was lots more, why weren't the pits kept open by the private sector?
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
This is an imperious clusterfuck, a gargantuan bunglewank of ginormous proportions. I do not see the government escaping severe censure forever.
I would treat with extreme caution, any indicator that shows the US having had a better response than Germany.
Germany's lockdown is much more draconian than the US', it makes sense that Germany's economy would suffer more
Otherwise these guesstimates look reasonable to me. Japan doing better than most, and so on.
Let's see tomorrow. I hope my foreboding is unjustified.
You think the US economy has only contracted by 2.6%?
These are just indicators. Of course they are not hard figures. But is it possible America is doing better than Germany or Italy or France, or us? Yes.
In general you would probably expect them to, they haven't locked down as much.
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
This is an imperious clusterfuck, a gargantuan bunglewank of ginormous proportions. I do not see the government escaping severe censure forever.
I would treat with extreme caution, any indicator that shows the US having had a better response than Germany.
Germany's lockdown is much more draconian than the US', it makes sense that Germany's economy would suffer more
Otherwise these guesstimates look reasonable to me. Japan doing better than most, and so on.
Let's see tomorrow. I hope my foreboding is unjustified.
You think the US economy has only contracted by 2.6%?
These are just indicators. Of course they are not hard figures. But is it possible America is doing better than Germany or Italy or France, or us? Yes.
Ah, they aren't GDP proxies? Sorry. Given how hard Trump is pushing the reopening, I guess the numbers aren't pretty there either.
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The mining communities of South Yorkshire, where I hail from, were transformed in the Thatcher years from OK places into the hopeless shit holes they remain today. I was there. I saw it. Meanwhile down South, people got rich in the financial services boom for doing nothing apart from being able to commute to London. I saw that too, because I went from one to the other. I could escape due to free uni and being academic. Loads couldn't.
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
This is an imperious clusterfuck, a gargantuan bunglewank of ginormous proportions. I do not see the government escaping severe censure forever.
I would treat with extreme caution, any indicator that shows the US having had a better response than Germany.
This is the economic indicator, the USA has been more ready to both spend and sacrifice it's population on the altar of the economy than others so far.
Fair, but all that tells us is roughly how we've responded (in absolute terms), not that we botched it (in relative terms). In any case, our economy looks very different to both Germany's and the US's.
Or might some of them be COVID-19 deaths that were mislabelled as flu, pneumonia, etc? We gave out an apparent message: don't bother the NHS for the moment unless you're dying ... or you have clear symptoms of COVID-19.
OTOH Social distancing and the lockdown will have driven down the R_t of other diseases as well, I'm sure some very unwell people die of the common cold and definitely of the flu. Cold and flu infections and deaths will have decreased too.
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
Spiegelhalter on R4 was interviewed about the 50,000 excess deaths which have apparently been recorded in the UK. That's a lot higher than definite COVID-19 deaths.
He thought that they might be deaths from other urgent conditions which didn't get treated in time.
Or might some of them be COVID-19 deaths that were mislabelled as flu, pneumonia, etc? We gave out an apparent message: don't bother the NHS for the moment unless you're dying ... or you have clear symptoms of COVID-19.
After all, in NY City a lot of people died at home. (They have an extra disincentive to go to hospital if you're uninsured or poorly-insured. Although a hospital is obliged to save a poor person's life, it is also allowed to send him/her home with an unpayable bill of $30,000.)
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
Really ?
Id suggest coal from open cast mines in low cost countries is cheaper than deep mines in the UK even after the transport costss. That's one reason why all the other pits closed after the strike.
Excoriating piece by AEP, which importantly contains the views of a leading COVID doctor.
“Boris survived because they gave him oxygen. High flow oxygen wasn’t available as a treatment option for all patients.”
“Our policy was to let the virus rip and then ‘cocoon the elderly’,” he wrote. “You don’t know whether to laugh or cry when you contrast that with what we actually did...We actively seeded this into the very population that was most vulnerable."
It's actually extremely angering to think that basically all of the poor decision making stems from our lack of testing capacity at the beginning of this crisis and our "experts" telling the government that they have it under control. The delay in getting testing capacity to at least 20k per day is why we couldn't mass test all of the care patients before sending them back, it's why we stopped testing community transmission and why we're so late to the party with track and trace.
As I've said before it's Hancock that is ultimately at fault, but our experts have been lacking in judgement on far too many occasions. Especially given that there have been successful models in other countries and not just in Asia, similar European countries/cultures have made it work a lot better but the commonality among those countries was decentralised mass testing capacity.
I'm supportive of Boris at the moment but we were piss-poor early on. Nothing to do with hindsight. Anyone prepared to lift their eyes to the east could see what was happening. That scientists and politicians refused to pay attention is a scandal.
That having been written, from the beginning of April onwards they did get their act together. By that time the virus had spread willy-nilly and the result was 30,000 deaths, 25,000 of which were preventable. So, not great.
On the other hand, without wishing to go all 'herd immunity' (remember that?) by this time next year we may be in a better position than somewhere like, say, New Zealand. The more people are exposed to this the faster we exit it.
I am thinking more and more that people judging and ranking global governments' responses now are at least 12 possibly 18-24 months too early.
It is perfectly possible to judge governments now. You don’t ignore GCSE results because there are A Levels and Degrees to come.
And what is the government’s Covid19 GCSE result?
Quarantine: E, Fail Testing: D, Fail NHS Capacity: B, Success Trace and Isolate: E, Fail Masks: E-, Fail Protect the Vulnerable: D, Fail Avoid Undue Economic Harm: D, Fail PPE: D, Fail
Britain Failed.
OK
Not by any means saying that UK has A*s, but we've only answered questions 1-3 so far. This is not over by a long chalk would you agree on that?
We’ve tanswered most of the questions. Take just one: masks (a bugbear of mine, but a useful measure of their general incompetence).
Britain was the last big country - the very last - to ask for mask wearing on public transport. Why? Even the Americans - who began, like us, wrongly saying masks don’t work - realised their mistake some time ago, and changed advice.
It’s just shit. A big serving of shit in an entire menu of shite.
Incidentally I think this perception of our covid-response is now percolating through to the public. The government’s polling resembles a cartoon character running off a cliff. For a while, after the disaster, the legs keep whirring and gravity is ignored.
But when reality hits - Whoosh.
I wonder if Boris will make it through a full term. The backlash is going to be intense.
Nah most people aren't obsessive hypochondriac internet cranks over this.
Take mask wearing on public transport - who's even been going on public transport in the past month or so? What proportion of the nation?
Vast majority of people don't use public transport in the first place and even for those that do most people are now locked down. So vast, vast majority of people won't have been on public transport in the past month with or without any masks.
Recent visit to a general hospital - couple of days ago. Even the reception staff not bothering with masks. Likewise in the local M&S. Not sure "mask-gate" is really going to take off TBH.
I never said it would. Masks won’t bring down a government.
My point is that the confusion and failure on masks is just one reason we have such a high death toll. We have more infected people dying partly because people aren’t wearing masks where they should: as your comment shows. They aren’t even wearing them in hospitals?? It’s incredible.
I would admire our British insouciance if we were similarly shrugging off the virus elsewhere. But we’re not. We’ve fucked the economy, at the same time.
LOL
perhaps you can name all those economies booming under the present circumstances
Vietnam seems to have one of the world's lowest obesity rates. Is that why a poor country with a higher population density than the UK has had a few 100 cases and no reported deaths?
Or is it that tropical sunshine gives everyone enough vitamin D ... or is it both?
The fact that Covid-19 left Vietnam alone is incredible
Well, some of the numbers from around the world are pretty incredible. Russia, for example, has had 232,000 cases but only 2,116 deaths. You have to fugure Vladimir isn't too good at record keeping. For balance, I should say that I find some of the numbers from some of the States of America a little.....surprising.
I have no idea why C-19 appears to have left Vietnam alone. I suspect it didn't, but who knows?
The Russia numbers seem more indicative of a country that is on top of testing (for now) than one not keeping good records (as in Ecuador, say), or making numbers up (Iran).
It's interesting that Turkey also has good testing according to the figures, but Brazil is doing very badly. A bit of a split between the populists and strongmen there.
Vietnam, a Communist Dictatorship, is perhaps less interesting than countries where we can trust the information provided. Didn't it take decades for them to publish casualty figures from the American/civil/liberation wars?
Russia more 'on top of testing' than Germany? Merkwurdig, Komrad!
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The mining communities of South Yorkshire, where I hail from, were transformed in the Thatcher years from OK places into the hopeless shit holes they remain today. I was there. I saw it. Meanwhile down South, people got rich in the financial services boom for doing nothing apart from being able to commute to London. I saw that too, because I went from one to the other. I could escape due to free uni and being academic. Loads couldn't.
You have no fucking clue.
1. That was ALREADY happening before Thatcher (well not the boom bit, to be fair). Surely this incontrovertible fact shouldn't be too hard to understand?
2. Where did I say that the mining communities weren't badly hit? Of course they were, as they were all over Europe.
3. None of that makes Margaret Thatcher a 'witch' does it? It wasn't her fault that economic reality meant that the mines could not be saved, as they could not be under Wilson or in the Pas de Calais. Still less was it her fault that the antics of Scargill and the brutish unions made it far, far worse.
I'd not put huge trust in the numbers from Russia or China.
Comparing other stats may be a bit tricky due to varying reporting methods but I don't think the Italians or Spaniards are going to write fictional numbers.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
A lot of the earlier closures at least in the 50s and 60s, perhaps even 70s, were the closing of old/inefficient pits in favour of fewer superpits with much more efficient machinery such as Longannet in Fife - and they did move the miners into new housing in the relevant areas, eg from Ayrshire to Fife (and indeed as a friend was telling me the other day, there was a degree of culture shock). So I don't find the argument based on raw 'numbers of mines closed by Labour' etc particularly illuminating.
Exactly as I predicted downthread. The UK not only has the worst death toll in Europe, but is on course to have the worst economic downturn, because of our botched corona response.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
Really ?
Id suggest coal from open cast mines in low cost countries is cheaper than deep mines in the UK even after the transport costss. That's one reason why all the other pits closed after the strike.
There was a BBC program in the 90s. They took a former miner from Nottingham, I think, to various places round the world. The scene when he saw the Canadian (I think) opencast mine where they were demolishing a mountain and rebuilding it behind them (as it were) stuck with me. The look on his face.
Apparently one load in one dump truck (the size of a big, big house) was more coal than his shift had ever moved in his old mine. The camera then pulled back to show the train of dump trucks rolling up to load.
They were digging from a coal seam 100s of feet high.
Spiegelhalter on R4 was interviewed about the 50,000 excess deaths which have apparently been recorded in the UK. That's a lot higher than definite COVID-19 deaths.
He thought that they might be deaths from other urgent conditions which didn't get treated in time.
Or might some of them be COVID-19 deaths that were mislabelled as flu, pneumonia, etc? We gave out an apparent message: don't bother the NHS for the moment unless you're dying ... or you have clear symptoms of COVID-19.
After all, in NY City a lot of people died at home. (They have an extra disincentive to go to hospital if you're uninsured or poorly-insured. Although a hospital is obliged to save a poor person's life, it is also allowed to send him/her home with an unpayable bill of $30,000.)
A friend of mine mother who was elderly and ill anyway died in a home with Covid symptoms (or come to that symptoms of flu or a cold). Covid was not given as the cause of death. Who knows if it was Covid or something else? There must be loads like this.
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The mining communities of South Yorkshire, where I hail from, were transformed in the Thatcher years from OK places into the hopeless shit holes they remain today. I was there. I saw it. Meanwhile down South, people got rich in the financial services boom for doing nothing apart from being able to commute to London. I saw that too, because I went from one to the other. I could escape due to free uni and being academic. Loads couldn't.
You have no fucking clue.
1. That was ALREADY happening before Thatcher (well not the boom bit, to be fair). Surely this incontrovertible fact shouldn't be too hard to understand?
2. Where did I say that the mining communities weren't badly hit? Of course they were, as they were all over Europe.
3. None of that makes Margaret Thatcher a 'witch' does it? It wasn't her fault that economic reality meant that the mines could not be saved, as they could not be under Wilson or in the Pas de Calais. Still less was it her fault that the antics of Scargill and the brutish unions made it far, far worse.
Scargill was a menace. Mining was not a long term proposition at anything like the scale of the 'good old days'. Which they weren't anyway, since toiling half your life underground and getting your lungs full of crap is no way to live. Maggie was not to blame for any of that.
However she was the PM - and a very powerful one - who presided over these communities being trashed. It was an abdication of responsibility. Maybe it kept her up at night, but I strongly sense not.
Witch? I'll take that back because it's sexist. But she was a bad un.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
In absolute economic terms, yeah. I would be interested to see an actual study on this. If it was lots more, why weren't the pits kept open by the private sector?
The ones that hadn't been closed and demolished were - RJB Mining bought the remaining functional pits in 1994. Before that they weren't for sale and once you have decomissioned the pit and demolished the buildings on the surface it isn't coming back.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
In absolute economic terms, yeah. I would be interested to see an actual study on this. If it was lots more, why weren't the pits kept open by the private sector?
The ones that hadn't been closed and demolished were - RJB Mining bought the remaining functional pits in 1994. Before that they weren't for sale and once you have decomissioned the pit and demolished the buildings on the surface it isn't coming back.
OK, but still interested in the absolute economic numbers. I suspect it was actually cheaper to transport the coal from open pit mines 10,000 miles away, rather than continue deep pit mining in the UK.
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The mining communities of South Yorkshire, where I hail from, were transformed in the Thatcher years from OK places into the hopeless shit holes they remain today. I was there. I saw it. Meanwhile down South, people got rich in the financial services boom for doing nothing apart from being able to commute to London. I saw that too, because I went from one to the other. I could escape due to free uni and being academic. Loads couldn't.
You have no fucking clue.
Blimey talk about conflicted. Didn't you get rich in the financial services and now live down south and not only down south but, utilising that financial services wealth, in one of the most desirable parts of London?
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The mining communities of South Yorkshire, where I hail from, were transformed in the Thatcher years from OK places into the hopeless shit holes they remain today. I was there. I saw it. Meanwhile down South, people got rich in the financial services boom for doing nothing apart from being able to commute to London. I saw that too, because I went from one to the other. I could escape due to free uni and being academic. Loads couldn't.
You have no fucking clue.
Blimey talk about conflicted. Didn't you get rich in the financial services and now live down south and not only down south but, utilising that financial services wealth, in one of the most desirable parts of London?
Yes, I'm your classic self-loathing champagne socialist.
The decline in the mining industry wasn;t just about economics and communities, it was about who runs Britain.
It was about whether governments could be free to deliver their mandates without intimidation and interference from powerful vested interests in organised labour.
The mining union leaders could, and did, shut the lights off when the government was of a kind it strongly opposed. It effectively had a veto over what a given administration could do.
They were never going to keep that veto.
The ordinary miners were mere cannon fodder in this struggle. They could not even vote against their leaders' activism because there were no secret ballots before 1979, Try voting against a strike in a show of hands at the pithead.
Indeed I don;t think they were balloted before the 1984 strike either.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
In absolute economic terms, yeah. I would be interested to see an actual study on this. If it was lots more, why weren't the pits kept open by the private sector?
The ones that hadn't been closed and demolished were - RJB Mining bought the remaining functional pits in 1994. Before that they weren't for sale and once you have decomissioned the pit and demolished the buildings on the surface it isn't coming back.
At the time several attempts were made to keep various pits open. All failed - they couldn't produce coal at anything like the international price.
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The mining communities of South Yorkshire, where I hail from, were transformed in the Thatcher years from OK places into the hopeless shit holes they remain today. I was there. I saw it. Meanwhile down South, people got rich in the financial services boom for doing nothing apart from being able to commute to London. I saw that too, because I went from one to the other. I could escape due to free uni and being academic. Loads couldn't.
You have no fucking clue.
Blimey talk about conflicted. Didn't you get rich in the financial services and now live down south and not only down south but, utilising that financial services wealth, in one of the most desirable parts of London?
Yes, I'm your classic self-loathing champagne socialist.
Apologies if this has already been discussed, but this long article by Lawrence Freedman on what how he UK scientific advice and government actions developed as the virus spread is really, really good. You can get a feel from just the Twitter thread, but I do recommend reading the whole article. It is, as far as I can see, completely free from any partisan bias, which makes it virtually unique.
As Mike Leavitt, a former US secretary of health and human services, observed: ‘In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist. After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.’
Thanks - fair and balanced review. Of course once this is all over its not just the UK government's response that will need to be studied, but those of Scotland, Wales and NI.
The decline in the mining industry wasn;t just about economics and communities, it was about who runs Britain.
It was about whether governments could be free to deliver their mandates without intimidation and interference from powerful vested interests in organised labour.
The mining union leaders could, and did, shut the lights off when the government was of a kind it strongly opposed. It effectively had a veto over what a given administration could do.
They were never going to keep that veto.
The ordinary miners were mere cannon fodder in this struggle. They could not even vote against their leaders' activism because there were no secret ballots before 1979, Try voting against a strike in a show of hands at the pithead.
Indeed I don;t think they were balloted before the 1984 strike either.
Actually they were - three times in fact and on each occasion voted against a stike:
The NUM had held three ballots on national strikes: 55% voted against in January 1982, and 61% voted against in October 1982 and March 1983.
Many of them still on the canvas almost 40 years later.
Witch.
Where does this utter nonsense come from? A cursory look at the figures shows that there were more mines closed, and more miners' jobs lost, in the 11 years before Margaret Thatcher became PM, than in the 11 years of her premiership. A similar look at France, or other comparable countries, shows the same trend over those decades. And yet still, now, even after all this time, the Left persist in the utterly ludicrous fantasy that closures of mines were somehow not only Margaret Thatcher's fault, but even evidence that she was a 'witch'.
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
The mining communities of South Yorkshire, where I hail from, were transformed in the Thatcher years from OK places into the hopeless shit holes they remain today. I was there. I saw it. Meanwhile down South, people got rich in the financial services boom for doing nothing apart from being able to commute to London. I saw that too, because I went from one to the other. I could escape due to free uni and being academic. Loads couldn't.
You have no fucking clue.
But I do and rather more than you.
So the Hampstead socialist act doesn't impress with someone who actually lives in South Yorkshire.
A far more pleasant place to live now than forty years ago.
Do all of the public know what vigilant means? Especially english as a second language? Could cause.. what's the word.... confusion.
The confusion in Scottish minds will come tomorrow when the English drive all the way up to the Scottish border - to moon them. Because they can. And then go to garden centres.
Sady, this trolling will have little effect, because the Scots will be at home. Being vigilant. Wondering "why can't I do that?". In a vigilant manner of thinking.
I am being very vigilant and all the better for it , no way will we follow the great unwashed down south.
I have been watching the BBC series on Thatcher on iPlayer, which is very good. I'm a Conservative but one thing I fund myself agreeing with Neil Kinnock on was that Thatcher never realised that when you closed the pits, you killed the community. Economically, you have to wonder whether the costs saved by closing the pits was more than outweighed by the extra social welfare payments, government help and subsidies caused by the closures, not to mention the social problems. My personal view was that it would have made sense to keep the pits going, even if the coal was just been bought by the Government and not used, until those communities could have been weaned off coal.
I think it's the same with the furlough scheme. You can argue that the cost of the scheme is enormous, which it is. But how much would the cost be if you let millions and millions be made redundant, pay for their welfare and all the associated problems with it and completely collapsed consumer spending at the same time?
Sir Geoffrey Howe also wondered if the Thatcher government had gone too far, iirc (and it is a long time since I read his book so it is possible I'm mixing him up with someone else). It destroyed communities in both social and economic terms.
The absurdity was that the closures were claimed to be on economic grounds. So until the final closure / mothballing of the coal power stations we were buying coal in Brazil and elsewhere, shipping it half way across the globe, dragging it a few hundred miles from port to power station AND paying a load of money in welfare, policing etc etc of the pit towns destroyed by closure of the pit whilst claiming it was cheaper...
Was it cheaper?
In absolute economic terms? We know the cost of dragging a trainload of coal across Brazil and halfway round the world and across the UK vs digging out of the pit a few miles away and a quick train ride - its LOTS more. Which means the foreign coal despite all of the economic drives from the NCB to manage costs must have been fantastically cheaper to offset the increased transport costs.
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
In absolute economic terms, yeah. I would be interested to see an actual study on this. If it was lots more, why weren't the pits kept open by the private sector?
The ones that hadn't been closed and demolished were - RJB Mining bought the remaining functional pits in 1994. Before that they weren't for sale and once you have decomissioned the pit and demolished the buildings on the surface it isn't coming back.
OK, but still interested in the absolute economic numbers. I suspect it was actually cheaper to transport the coal from open pit mines 10,000 miles away, rather than continue deep pit mining in the UK.
I'm sure that wass the case when you were dealing with Victorian mines and shunting around 16ton unbraked coal wagons. Less so when using modern deep mines and merry go round hopper wagon trains - e.g from Longannet to the local power stations. Of course the ssame trains could just as easily be filled at Hunterston quay from modern bulk cargo ships.
Do all of the public know what vigilant means? Especially english as a second language? Could cause.. what's the word.... confusion.
The confusion in Scottish minds will come tomorrow when the English drive all the way up to the Scottish border - to moon them. Because they can. And then go to garden centres.
Sady, this trolling will have little effect, because the Scots will be at home. Being vigilant. Wondering "why can't I do that?". In a vigilant manner of thinking.
Looking forward to a round of golf on Sunday with a mate- will be taunting all my Scotch mates who are stuck indoors north of the border with pics.
Dear dear Harry, your pathetic "Scotch" jibe shows you up to be a real country bumpkin with the IQ of a gerbil.
Do all of the public know what vigilant means? Especially english as a second language? Could cause.. what's the word.... confusion.
The confusion in Scottish minds will come tomorrow when the English drive all the way up to the Scottish border - to moon them. Because they can. And then go to garden centres.
Sady, this trolling will have little effect, because the Scots will be at home. Being vigilant. Wondering "why can't I do that?". In a vigilant manner of thinking.
Looking forward to a round of golf on Sunday with a mate- will be taunting all my Scotch mates who are stuck indoors north of the border with pics.
Dear dear Harry, your pathetic "Scotch" jibe shows you up to be a real country bumpkin with the IQ of a gerbil.
Hello, Malky. On a related topic, have you noticed that the use of tartan as a cheap way of indicating anything Scots, such as "tartan tax", seems to have declined? A poster on PB - can't recall who - did use it the othert day, but as "tartan and tweed" - so full marks for a proper appreciation fo cultural diversity there.
Apologies if this has already been discussed, but this long article by Lawrence Freedman on what how he UK scientific advice and government actions developed as the virus spread is really, really good. You can get a feel from just the Twitter thread, but I do recommend reading the whole article. It is, as far as I can see, completely free from any partisan bias, which makes it virtually unique.
As Mike Leavitt, a former US secretary of health and human services, observed: ‘In advance of a pandemic, anything you say sounds alarmist. After a pandemic starts, everything you’ve done is inadequate.’
Thanks - fair and balanced review. Of course once this is all over its not just the UK government's response that will need to be studied, but those of Scotland, Wales and NI.
You know the result already, it was all the SNP's fault
We’ve all moved on Malc, no need to rebut every single anti-SNP post.
Rob, we know you still dress up as Maggie, Tories on here never move on. Having had to work I need to catch up and correct the really stupid posts, would need to be retired or working for CCHQ like Carlotta to be able to reply to them all and would have no fingertips left. Back to roasting orphans you go.
Do all of the public know what vigilant means? Especially english as a second language? Could cause.. what's the word.... confusion.
The confusion in Scottish minds will come tomorrow when the English drive all the way up to the Scottish border - to moon them. Because they can. And then go to garden centres.
Sady, this trolling will have little effect, because the Scots will be at home. Being vigilant. Wondering "why can't I do that?". In a vigilant manner of thinking.
Looking forward to a round of golf on Sunday with a mate- will be taunting all my Scotch mates who are stuck indoors north of the border with pics.
Dear dear Harry, your pathetic "Scotch" jibe shows you up to be a real country bumpkin with the IQ of a gerbil.
Hello, Malky. On a related topic, have you noticed that the use of tartan as a cheap way of indicating anything Scots, such as "tartan tax", seems to have declined? A poster on PB - can't recall who - did use it the othert day, but as "tartan and tweed" - so full marks for a proper appreciation fo cultural diversity there.
Carnyx , for the majority on here the most they do know about Scotland is there is a drink called Scotch and you can get Scotch tape at the post office. Unfortunately it does not preclude them giving their expert knowledge of how stupid we are and how we sponge off England and are the only country in the world unable to be independent. PS: you will note it is the ones that go to live in England, desperate to prove how English they have become that are the worst culprits as well, nothing worse than a Scottish emigrant with an inferiority complex.
I don't get how Hancock continually said we have 100k capacity yet we're at that now or a bit below on average with the testing and the turnaround time has gone to shit.
Comments
Really, you should be ashamed of yourselves.
I have no idea why C-19 appears to have left Vietnam alone. I suspect it didn't, but who knows?
I know it's illogical but it's all I can think of
Those, as I understand it are the main bugbears. There was also the debilitating effect of the Miners Strike, where she seemed to have been spoiling for a fight, although Scargill wasn't the sharpest tool in the box.
So the reaction to seeing someone not wearing one is more "what an idiot, don't they know they're endangering themselves" than "how selfish".
High (+60%ish): Belgium, UK, Spain, Italy*, Netherlands
Medium (+30%ish): France, Sweden, Switzerland
Low (12% to 6%): Austria, Portugal, Germany
near-zero: Israel, Norway, S Africa
*Italy's stats (55%) are way out of date, only to end March.
US currently at 19% but stats a month old, and quite early in their epidemic as it spreads throughout the country.
All of Eastern Europe would be in the near-zero bracket, with phaps Romania slipping into low.
Ecuador would be in high if there were full country stats available (11500 excess deaths from the capital region alone), and possibly higher than anyone.
It's interesting that Turkey also has good testing according to the figures, but Brazil is doing very badly. A bit of a split between the populists and strongmen there.
Vietnam, a Communist Dictatorship, is perhaps less interesting than countries where we can trust the information provided. Didn't it take decades for them to publish casualty figures from the American/civil/liberation wars?
It isn't the fall that will kill us. The long term outcome depends on the coefficient of restitution...
At no point did anyone ask if saving a few bob on paper to buy coal 10,000 miles from the power station as opposed to 10 miles made any sense.
He thought that they might be deaths from other urgent conditions which didn't get treated in time.
Or might some of them be COVID-19 deaths that were mislabelled as flu, pneumonia, etc? We gave out an apparent message: don't bother the NHS for the moment unless you're dying ... or you have clear symptoms of COVID-19.
After all, in NY City a lot of people died at home. (They have an extra disincentive to go to hospital if you're uninsured or poorly-insured. Although a hospital is obliged to save a poor person's life, it is also allowed to send him/her home with an unpayable bill of $30,000.)
You have no fucking clue.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52623141
Id suggest coal from open cast mines in low cost countries is cheaper than deep mines in the UK even after the transport costss. That's one reason why all the other pits closed after the strike.
Musk would be allowed to produce in the UK freely and could have done so right throughout the lockdown.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1259945593805221891
2. Where did I say that the mining communities weren't badly hit? Of course they were, as they were all over Europe.
3. None of that makes Margaret Thatcher a 'witch' does it? It wasn't her fault that economic reality meant that the mines could not be saved, as they could not be under Wilson or in the Pas de Calais. Still less was it her fault that the antics of Scargill and the brutish unions made it far, far worse.
I'd not put huge trust in the numbers from Russia or China.
Comparing other stats may be a bit tricky due to varying reporting methods but I don't think the Italians or Spaniards are going to write fictional numbers.
The miners' strike and Fatcha...
Okaaay
Apparently one load in one dump truck (the size of a big, big house) was more coal than his shift had ever moved in his old mine. The camera then pulled back to show the train of dump trucks rolling up to load.
They were digging from a coal seam 100s of feet high.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1260235465065664514/photo/1
However she was the PM - and a very powerful one - who presided over these communities being trashed. It was an abdication of responsibility. Maybe it kept her up at night, but I strongly sense not.
Witch? I'll take that back because it's sexist. But she was a bad un.
It was about whether governments could be free to deliver their mandates without intimidation and interference from powerful vested interests in organised labour.
The mining union leaders could, and did, shut the lights off when the government was of a kind it strongly opposed. It effectively had a veto over what a given administration could do.
They were never going to keep that veto.
The ordinary miners were mere cannon fodder in this struggle. They could not even vote against their leaders' activism because there were no secret ballots before 1979, Try voting against a strike in a show of hands at the pithead.
Indeed I don;t think they were balloted before the 1984 strike either.
The NUM had held three ballots on national strikes: 55% voted against in January 1982, and 61% voted against in October 1982 and March 1983.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_miners'_strike_(1984–85)#Ballots
So the Hampstead socialist act doesn't impress with someone who actually lives in South Yorkshire.
A far more pleasant place to live now than forty years ago.
Having had to work I need to catch up and correct the really stupid posts, would need to be retired or working for CCHQ like Carlotta to be able to reply to them all and would have no fingertips left.
Back to roasting orphans you go.
PS: you will note it is the ones that go to live in England, desperate to prove how English they have become that are the worst culprits as well, nothing worse than a Scottish emigrant with an inferiority complex.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1260203080076931072