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Covid-19 and a prolonged lockdown have bought us few good things. There are some, though:-
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First - and that doesn't happen often.
Meanwhile Donald Trump tweets "OLD GLORY is to be revered, cherished, and flown high...We should be standing up straight and tall, ideally with a salute, or a hand on heart. There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag - NO KNEELING!" and, in two moments of special eloquence, "LAW AND ORDER!" and "I want LAW & ORDER!"
Essentially there are three ways of maintaining or improving standards:
1. We can accept anything, including low-standard stuff, but label it in a way that enables consumers to choose higher standards - this worked well for eggs, where the highest welfare free range eggs have almost driven caged effs off the market. But the US is very wary of labelling, which they consider to be discriminatory, and there are practical difficulties in putting everything on a label that consumers migh tlike to know.
2. We can accept anything, but put a big tariff on it, thereby protecting British agriculture. This is generally the NFU position, but it means that even high-standard, high-welfare imnports are kept out too. It's not as though all British farming was better than all foreign farming - it isn't.
3. We can have differential tariffs - high for cheap and nasty stuff, low for high-quality stuff. The Government seems to be thinking about this at the moment. Historically there have been problems getting this accepted by the WTO, but we could have a high general tariff and then a differential one agreed with the US in a free trade deal. The snag is that tariffs can be changed very easily, and once the principle of accepting any old imports is accepted, this or future governments can lower the tariffs; moreover, it does open up to hard-sell marketing by low-quality importers to establish themselves on UK supermarket shelves.
4. We can make high quality a condition in any free trade agreement. This is what the cross-party EFRA Select Committee favours, and a proposal for this sparked the first big revolt of this Parliament, with 22 Conservative MPs supporting it. It's likely to be proposed again bvy the Lords.
Exactly what is high quality is debatable, of course, but intensive farming with massive use of antibiotics and cleansing agents to reduce the risks is not what most people in Britain seem to want. If the Government wants to get a lasting trade deal that doesn't cause huge controversy, they would be well-advised to go for option 4.
https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1202137
"You cannot sing Rule Britannia to a virus"
Quote of the year.
https://bylinetimes.com/2020/06/05/beyond-exceptional-the-etonian-english-imperialism-at-the-heart-of-a-deadly-covid-19-crisis
Wow! He's now chief scientific adviser at the Department for Education; according to the Daily Mail he "has influence in the departments of Education, Environment and Treasury"; and "he shares with Dominic Cummings a desire for radical thinking". It certainly sounds like it. Another thing he shares with Cummings is that David Cameron has called him potty:
"Tim (Leunig's) most controversial policy idea – until today – was to pull all Government support from 'failed' Northern cities and encourage the inhabitants to migrate South. 'Barmy,' said a furious David Cameron, who was Tory leader when Dr Leunig floated it in a think-tank report in 2008. 'Rubbish from start to finish.' "
Hypocrite!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52954305
London anti-racism protests leave 27 officers hurt
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-52954899
you also appear to believe the EU doesnt permit chemicals, intensive farming and animal cruelty.
I won't be buying chlorine washed chicken, so i won't be eating chlorine diluted chicken s***! No one else should have to either.
Our food standards are by no means perfect for some of the reasons you have highlighted, but they are on the whole lot more rigorous than those of the US Food and Drug Administration.
There are quite a few statues of old white imperialists around our cities which should go the same way.
John McCain's dead.
The whole argument on food is once again being driven by scare mongering rumour and half truths.
I state the truth
You are caustic
He/She is pejorative
But does fit the pattern the military top bods are disgusted with Trump.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/06/us/politics/trump-biden-republicans-voters.html
#hypocrisy
"We need to talk about Trump"?
https://twitter.com/DeAnna4Congress/status/1269629348367269888
But how we laughed when the statues of Sadam and Gadaffi fell.
Its amazing how people are willing to excuse this sort of behaviour.
https://twitter.com/vivamjm/status/1269569793398620160
The thread is terrifyingly clear on what is about to happen.
They were ahead of the game.
I saw them live, btw.
Grade II listed. I hope the vandals are arrested and prosecuted.
In these dark times the DUP admitting they should have voted for Theresa May's deal was a moment of real joy.
The DUP now know what Peter Robinson felt liked when he found his wife had cheated on him.
What these people may be unaware of is that there were a number of debates over this statue a few years ago and the clinching argument against removal came from the descendants of slaves, who found it actually stimulated interest in and concern for the links of Bristol to the slave trade, and were afraid that removing it would just erase them from common memory.
I would have preferred to see it taken down in an orderly way by the appropriate authorities, certainly, and a country that had come to terms with its past would have removed it decades ago, but this is better than letting it stand another day.
https://twitter.com/OwenJones84/status/1092724461558792192?s=20
Positives 1326 a good number, especially given the hefty expansion in testing the last week or so. In hospitals down to 292 (from 35k tests).
The first is that tariffs are essentially a tax on the customer, and therefore undesirable.
The second is that under option 4 you are going to have to ban all sorts of food from all sorts of European countries. For example, aiui if you want to stop pig castration you will have to ban Danish bacon. How does all that work, and how will it be 'nuanced' past the EU?
Very difficult to navigate.
I think there's a broader debate here, in that in many respects organic food - which has long used welfare and 'greenness' as tools for emotional marketing - is actually worse.
We also need to deal with areas where Europe is very backward, such as opposition to GM farming,
Usual caveats - weekend (also Scotland recorded zero, but as Sturgeon pointed out, may not actually be the case)
My comment re: Saddam and Gadaffi was excessively flippant, although a vague similarity I feel does exist.
It's also what happened to all the statues of king emperors and viceroys in Delhi after India got rid of the Raj. They didn't blow them up, they put them all together in a park of historical curiosities.
I wouldn't advocate doing this in a really thoroughgoing fashion - trying to erase the legacy of the slave owners from the landscape would indeed risk a full-scale war on history, given that some group or another in society could find good reason to be offended by most of the major figures of the past, if they were minded to do so - but it could be a useful means of disposing of the most contentious monuments?
Alternatively, leave it where it is and raise an equally prominent statue of a slave, facing it from the other side of the road.
https://twitter.com/bellacaledonia/status/1269644007048609792?s=20
You cannot simply erase history.
What could possibly go wrong?
Is there not something rather strange and indeed disturbing about a bunch of white people dictating what non-white people should think and feel and taking violent action on their behalf?
The hypocrisy would be amusing if it wasn’t alarming.
Surely a reasonable statement rather than a foolish one.
*Yes, I realise there's a dispute over this.