Relatedly, the GOP are apparently going door-to-door in swing states, while Dems are sticking to online and phone operations to avoid spreading the rona.
That's lower growth than the previous month and the UK is still down 11% on the year. I'm happy the economy is growing but the hyperbole we saw in the predictions last week must be highlighted: this is adequate not world-beating.
I made a mental note specifically when I read that last week to look out for what we got today.
What was predicted ?
I would have to delve through the posts but the tone was - strongest levels of growth in Europe if not hlobally and that the figures would be stunning with the UK at the very forefront of global growth.
I rather like the hamburger scene in Falling Down, I've never seen the movie I must admit but seen that scene before on YouTube. I always hated it when it was 10:31 and a certain burger restaurant insists they won't do breakfast too.
Apropos of nothing they do end up offering to sort out his breakfast afterall.
I should probably watch the rest of the movie at some point.
The movie is really good.
Bizarrely, the thing that I think is most similar to it would be one of Stewart Lee's best sets, where he has the audience unsure of whether the joke is at their expense or someone else's and they don't know if they ought to be laughing.
On topic. It's easy to blame Leavers, but it's worth remembering that May was a Remainer. It was May who made the decision to choose restricting immigration as the first principle of her Brexit policy. It was May who decided to play the whole issue as an opportunity for partisan advantage, rather than a defining event for the country as a whole. It was May who explicitly created division.
Also, where were the Remainers that free trade Leavers might have allied with? With some notable exceptions, as a group they chose to repudiate the referendum result rather than accept it. Remainers refused to accept the chance to take most of what they wanted, in a practical sense, in favour of holding out for what they wanted in identity terms.
My assumption in the aftermath of the referendum was that pragmatic people on both sides would ensure continued Single Market membership, the Norway option, as a compromise.
But the populist nonsense that is Brexit also exists on the other side, and there simply aren't enough pragmatic people left. We're in dire trouble.
As you say the Tories ruled out single market membership immediately and refused to compromise on that. The idea that a compromise deal involving single market membership was proposed to Remainers and they rejected it is pure revisionism. That simply never happened.
It was there in the indicative votes, but some fools decided to hold out for a second referendum and didn't vote for it.
That's lower growth than the previous month and the UK is still down 11% on the year. I'm happy the economy is growing but the hyperbole we saw in the predictions last week must be highlighted: this is adequate not world-beating.
I made a mental note specifically when I read that last week to look out for what we got today.
That's absolutely not the case, these are very good figures. I'd be curious to see you quote what you noted that says otherwise.
Also worth noting that these are for July which was pre-EOTHO. When Max wrote last week about the data he has seen and about the success of the EOTHO scheme that was for August. The ONS won't publish that data for another month.
So next time you make mental notes you might want to note a bit more about what is being written.
Err incorrect he specifically pointed to the data being released today.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
That's lower growth than the previous month and the UK is still down 11% on the year. I'm happy the economy is growing but the hyperbole we saw in the predictions last week must be highlighted: this is adequate not world-beating.
I made a mental note specifically when I read that last week to look out for what we got today.
That's absolutely not the case, these are very good figures. I'd be curious to see you quote what you noted that says otherwise.
Also worth noting that these are for July which was pre-EOTHO. When Max wrote last week about the data he has seen and about the success of the EOTHO scheme that was for August. The ONS won't publish that data for another month.
So next time you make mental notes you might want to note a bit more about what is being written.
I have just been through a redundancy process that saw our company lay-off over 40 people - over 10% of the workforce. That is the real world. One day you might like to engage with it.
Relatedly, the GOP are apparently going door-to-door in swing states, while Dems are sticking to online and phone operations to avoid spreading the rona.
It's really, really hard to know what the impact of differences like this is going to be.
"“It’s Trump, Trump, Trump,” said Gloria Lee Snover, chair of the Northampton County Republican Party. When she has signed up voters, she added, “They’re like, ‘Oh, I want to be in the Trump party.’ It’s kind of funny. ... I’m like, ‘You mean the Republican Party?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, yeah.’”
I rather like the hamburger scene in Falling Down, I've never seen the movie I must admit but seen that scene before on YouTube. I always hated it when it was 10:31 and a certain burger restaurant insists they won't do breakfast too.
Apropos of nothing they do end up offering to sort out his breakfast afterall.
I should probably watch the rest of the movie at some point.
The movie is really good.
Bizarrely, the thing that I think is most similar to it would be one of Stewart Lee's best sets, where he has the audience unsure of whether the joke is at their expense or someone else's and they don't know if they ought to be laughing.
On topic. It's easy to blame Leavers, but it's worth remembering that May was a Remainer. It was May who made the decision to choose restricting immigration as the first principle of her Brexit policy. It was May who decided to play the whole issue as an opportunity for partisan advantage, rather than a defining event for the country as a whole. It was May who explicitly created division.
Also, where were the Remainers that free trade Leavers might have allied with? With some notable exceptions, as a group they chose to repudiate the referendum result rather than accept it. Remainers refused to accept the chance to take most of what they wanted, in a practical sense, in favour of holding out for what they wanted in identity terms.
My assumption in the aftermath of the referendum was that pragmatic people on both sides would ensure continued Single Market membership, the Norway option, as a compromise.
But the populist nonsense that is Brexit also exists on the other side, and there simply aren't enough pragmatic people left. We're in dire trouble.
As you say the Tories ruled out single market membership immediately and refused to compromise on that. The idea that a compromise deal involving single market membership was proposed to Remainers and they rejected it is pure revisionism. That simply never happened.
(Collectively) remainers definitely had the chance for common market 2.0 during the indicative votes and probably also in the final month or two of the May premiership, although not sure how that would have played out.
To have got a majority, it just needed the tiggers and LDs to vote for it, not even any more Tories (Clark, Gauke, Hunt, Hammond, Gyriah, Greening, Grieve, Liddington, Rudd and Stewart all abstained and I am sure would all prefer it to what we have now).
Pretty disgraceful from the LDs and Tiggers as was said at the time by many remainers on here.
I had a dream that I had a meeting with Donald Trump at a Trump Hotel, and they insisted I couldn't take my phone into the meeting and they had to hold onto it, then at the end of the meeting they wouldn't give the phone back, Trump sent a smug-looking flunky to say, "we're a hotel, we don't offer the service of looking after phones".
That sounds really creepy. I'm glad I don't have dreams like that.
That's lower growth than the previous month and the UK is still down 11% on the year. I'm happy the economy is growing but the hyperbole we saw in the predictions last week must be highlighted: this is adequate not world-beating.
I made a mental note specifically when I read that last week to look out for what we got today.
That's absolutely not the case, these are very good figures. I'd be curious to see you quote what you noted that says otherwise.
Also worth noting that these are for July which was pre-EOTHO. When Max wrote last week about the data he has seen and about the success of the EOTHO scheme that was for August. The ONS won't publish that data for another month.
So next time you make mental notes you might want to note a bit more about what is being written.
Please answer the point, are they world beating, or not?
Relatedly, the GOP are apparently going door-to-door in swing states, while Dems are sticking to online and phone operations to avoid spreading the rona.
It's really, really hard to know what the impact of differences like this is going to be.
Reminds me of Labour's ground game in 2015 (hello IOS) and the Tories giving up the fight by going online.
Tory ground game in 2017 was weird. Deliver this house, stop head 4 houses up then the next three and only a couple on the other side of the road. 2017 Lib Dem and 2019 Tory were much more traditional. Corbyn wasn't getting into Downing St on my watch
The strategy in 2017 and 2019 was only to target Tory voters or those who might be wavering towards the Tories and ignore others.
In 2015 too there was also Tory door to door canvassing even with the online presence.
Remember in 2000 it was Democrats and Unions going door to door which got Gore so close in the EC and won him the popular vote, if you ignore your groundgame you risk a lower turnout of your potential supporters
That's lower growth than the previous month and the UK is still down 11% on the year. I'm happy the economy is growing but the hyperbole we saw in the predictions last week must be highlighted: this is adequate not world-beating.
I made a mental note specifically when I read that last week to look out for what we got today.
What was predicted ?
Bloomberg consensus forecast was 6.7% so reality of 6.6% was a mild disappointment. Industrial production and construction were both stronger than expected but services underperformed (6.1% vs 7.0% consensus). For me the surprise was that core areas of business services like professional/technical and administrative services didn't perform better, these sectors are still well adrift of pre-Covid levels. The overall GDP outturn was better than I had expected, thanks to IP and construction, while services growth was more or less as I had expected. Overall the UK economy is growing at record levels but that reflects the record plunge in April. I would award it a B-.
That's lower growth than the previous month and the UK is still down 11% on the year. I'm happy the economy is growing but the hyperbole we saw in the predictions last week must be highlighted: this is adequate not world-beating.
I made a mental note specifically when I read that last week to look out for what we got today.
What was predicted ?
I would have to delve through the posts but the tone was - strongest levels of growth in Europe if not hlobally and that the figures would be stunning with the UK at the very forefront of global growth.
BBC stated it is the strongest growth in Europe
Strongest growth in the world is the claim that was made, "world beating".
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
I'm not sure our competition has yet released GDP figures, non?
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
I think the govt have made a mess of this. The latest measures will see the public turn against them. The problem is, no one in the HofC (except Steve Baker and Desmond Swayne?) suggested, or is suggesting, doing anything differently.
We are back to the 2010-2015 era when the two main parties were squabbling over how to best to continue EU membership and mass immigration while a large minority, which ended up being a small majority, of the country didn't want either
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
If I was Sunak, I would be bricking myself at those numbers. The rebound is clearly slowing and about to run out well, well below the pre-crisis levels.
And that's before we factor in Hatt Mancock's new job destroying regulations, set to smash the Christmas restaurant trade to bits.
Sunak wants to hit an economy like that with tax increases?
He will likely retire and go to the Lords, he is 66 now and has been the local MP for 28 years and Boris could win a small majority in 2024 and the Tories still lose Chingford and Woodford Green.
The Tories did well to hold it in 2019 but if Starmer is going to get any swing at all next time he should win it, it is only 13th now on the Labour target list and just needs a 1.3% swing for Labour to take it which all the polls show he has now got at minimum
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
There is no way that the mayor's office and the GLA are going to survive the next four years as they are currently constituted. The government will remove more and more pwers from them. It has nothing to lose as it has already lost London.
The sensible plan would be to negotiate as many FTAs as possible and simply extend the transition period. The Japan deal proves that approach could work I think.
Why would they have us back? And then crash out again in 2030s, rejoin 2040s, when would it end?
* Introducing some kind of associate membership with the EU, which has clearly defined entry and exit paths, is something the UK-EU could sign up to in the future, and act as a template for other countries, but I don't see why they would want us back as full members.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
Most countries don't publish monthly GDP data so we don't know. I would expect the UK's Q3 GDP growth to be the highest in the G7 on a quarter on quarter basis but the lowest on a year on year basis*. What we do know for sure is that the drop in GDP in Q2 was the largest of any major economy. If we recover sharply in Q3 but remain adrift of pre-Covid levels by more than other major economies I would not class that as a win. * I think Spain could end up down by more than us after Q3, but they are not in the G7.
That's lower growth than the previous month and the UK is still down 11% on the year. I'm happy the economy is growing but the hyperbole we saw in the predictions last week must be highlighted: this is adequate not world-beating.
I made a mental note specifically when I read that last week to look out for what we got today.
What was predicted ?
Bloomberg consensus forecast was 6.7% so reality of 6.6% was a mild disappointment. Industrial production and construction were both stronger than expected but services underperformed (6.1% vs 7.0% consensus). For me the surprise was that core areas of business services like professional/technical and administrative services didn't perform better, these sectors are still well adrift of pre-Covid levels. The overall GDP outturn was better than I had expected, thanks to IP and construction, while services growth was more or less as I had expected. Overall the UK economy is growing at record levels but that reflects the record plunge in April. I would award it a B-.
The housing market is going full guns. Presumably a combination of pent up demand and people making Covid related lifestyle choices. Happy to take good economic news where I can but would worry that the willingness and ability of people to make big purchases will be curtailed when redundancies hit. A falling property market in itself has negative consequences given how leveraged people are.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
There is no way that the mayor's office and the GLA are going to survive the next four years as they are currently constituted. The government will remove more and more pwers from them. It has nothing to lose as it has already lost London.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
But best in Europe via the BBC
Fair enough - but that was not the claim that was made
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
An app, that is much more likely to be used by young people, would certainly help...
Germany too had problems implementing a track and trace app and did a U-turn in the tracking method to implement. The "Corona-Warn" app was eventually released in mid-June. WTF is going on in the UK so that 3 months after Germany finally got the app working, the UK still has no widely available app. That is a disgrace.
Is there any data on whether the German app actually did any good? We have one here but I doubt enough people are using it to make a dent, and you don't hear much about it any more.
One thing I heard about contact tracing is that it's kind of happening in a participatory way anyhow even without the official tracers. If you're diagnosed, and you might have infected a friend or colleague, you tend to want to check with them before you give their personal details to a contact tracer. But once your friend hears they might have got the rona, they go and get themselves tested without waiting for the contact tracers to call them.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
But best in Europe via the BBC
Fair enough - but that was not the claim that was made
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
But best in Europe via the BBC
Fair enough - but that was not the claim that was made
To be fair, I did not make any claim
I don't think anyone did, I think its a straw man.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
But best in Europe via the BBC
Fair enough - but that was not the claim that was made
To be fair, I did not make any claim
No, you did not - but I was responding to another user, I apologise if you got caught in that chain.
Still, growth trajectory slowing is not a massive confidence boost bearing in mind what awaits us. Still I will credit the Tories with restoring growth
I’ve never, in my entire life, had a canvasser knock on my door. I feel deprived.
Do you live in a marginal seat or marginal council ward? If not that is why
So Gallowgate's vote is worth less than the vote of someone who lives in a marginal. Worth less in an economic sense. Parties think that is is not worthwhile using up their resources knocking on his door.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
I agree, I think today's news is alright and certainly the right direction of travel. It can certainly be spun a few was as there isn't a "right level" of growth to be sought other than just make back what's been lost ASAP. The figures would be a good base to grow from if the economy wasn't being put on partial hold again but no one could have predicted that.
My point was just to understand how different the figures are from what we were led to expect last week which is why I'd rather leave it to @MaxPB to fish them out rather than a) trying to recall the detail (the thrust was definitely "global leader") or b) wade through his comments.
The only reason I bring it up is that this poster indicated his predictions were based on transacitonal data, not opinion or anecdote but actual analysis so I was keen to see how it panned out.
I'm just trying to understand why (or indeed if), the outcome is different from the prediction. It might turn out my recollection is wrong - I don't think it is as I well recall the thrust of the prediction but I'd like to be sure.
He will likely retire and go to the Lords, he is 66 now and has been the local MP for 28 years and Boris could win a small majority in 2024 and the Tories still lose Chingford and Woodford Green.
The Tories did well to hold it in 2019 but if Starmer is going to get any swing at all next time he should win it, it is only 13th now on the Labour target list and just needs a 1.3% swing for Labour to take it which all the polls show he has now got at minimum
After all this constitutional crisis and a possible indyref2, Adonis is going to be disappointed
Even Starmer is against being in the EU
Even the LDs under Davey have now switched to soft Brexit rather than No Brexit so I think no UK wide party is still committed to rejoin the EU (the SNP are also willing to accept EEA).
In fact I think the SDLP are the only party in the Commons still committed to reverse Brexit if they can
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Gramsci was precisely the name that sprang to mind while reading it - the right has finally cottoned on to the concept of cultural hegemony, and its originators don't like to share!
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
A quantitative and qualitative boost in testing is necessary. I just wish this government, instead of distractions of moonshots, would stick to what's important: we need to do much more of what we are doing and we need to do it much better.
But their "moonshot" is the quantitive and qualitive boost you are asking for. And it is important. Whether it is deliverable is another question.
After all this constitutional crisis and a possible indyref2, Adonis is going to be disappointed
Even Starmer is against being in the EU
In don't agree with him but I don't think you can assess whether his view is sensible until we have left the EU in the practical as well as the legal sense. We are still in it for all day to day purposes like buying oranges and selling stuff made in factories.
After January 2021 I think the campaign will gather pace. The idea that SKS is against the EU is for the birds. It is not a practical policy for a Labour leader now. If and when it is he would support it.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
But best in Europe via the BBC
Fair enough - but that was not the claim that was made
To be fair, I did not make any claim
No, you did not - but I was responding to another user, I apologise if you got caught in that chain.
Still, growth trajectory slowing is not a massive confidence boost bearing in mind what awaits us. Still I will credit the Tories with restoring growth
"Growth tractetory slowing" is not an issue considering this is a rebound. Percentages don't work in the way you seem to think they do. When something rebounds you expect the initial bounceback to be highest rate then for it to slow down.
Another way of looking at it is that in June we lost 1/4 of what we had lost net by end of May. In July we regained 1/3rd of what we'd lost net by end of June.
If August MoM figure were to be "just" 6% then the growth trajectory would still be slowing but we would in that month have regained half of what we'd lost net by end of July. If September were then "just" 4% then we would have regained 80% that month. If October were then "just" 2% then we would have regained 100% of what we'd lost. That is a wildly optimistic scenario not a prediction.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
But best in Europe via the BBC
It's impossible to make that claim about the GDP numbers because no other major European country publishes GDP on a monthly basis. The PMI surveys are better in the UK than in the other European countries covered (although only 5 EU countries are covered). Is it likely that UK GDP will grow more strongly quarter on quarter in Q3 than in other major economies? Yes, because it has further to recover after Q2. But there is no way to make that claim based on the data currently available.
He will likely retire and go to the Lords, he is 66 now and has been the local MP for 28 years and Boris could win a small majority in 2024 and the Tories still lose Chingford and Woodford Green.
The Tories did well to hold it in 2019 but if Starmer is going to get any swing at all next time he should win it, it is only 13th now on the Labour target list and just needs a 1.3% swing for Labour to take it which all the polls show he has now got at minimum
Will you be standing in his place?
If I got elected to council by then I might try and get a seat to fight at the next general election but as it would be first time probably a Labour inner city seat, normally you have to earn your spurs first before getting a safe seat for your party or a marginal to fight.
In any case being the first Tory candidate to lose Chingford since WW2 does not have much appeal, even if on current swing there is not much you can do about it
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
Most countries don't publish monthly GDP data so we don't know. I would expect the UK's Q3 GDP growth to be the highest in the G7 on a quarter on quarter basis but the lowest on a year on year basis*. What we do know for sure is that the drop in GDP in Q2 was the largest of any major economy. If we recover sharply in Q3 but remain adrift of pre-Covid levels by more than other major economies I would not class that as a win. * I think Spain could end up down by more than us after Q3, but they are not in the G7.
If. Very hard to predict at the moment but it may be having a services dominated economy means that we bounce back a little better than most. We might only be down 20 years of the alleged effects of Brexit instead of 40. Which would be good(ish), I suppose.
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
An app, that is much more likely to be used by young people, would certainly help...
Germany too had problems implementing a track and trace app and did a U-turn in the tracking method to implement. The "Corona-Warn" app was eventually released in mid-June. WTF is going on in the UK so that 3 months after Germany finally got the app working, the UK still has no widely available app. That is a disgrace.
Bluetooth advertisments to determine proximity for contact tracing are a waste of time. None of these apps seems to be having much luck anywhere in the world.
Even if you have the right hardware and software, and it's operating properly, you need about 60% of the population using the app. The highest usage rates at the moment are around 25%, most countries are in single digits, and many of those countries are seeing a drop in usage as time passes.
If you want to use mobile phones to trace contacts then scoop up mobile signalling data from the carriers.
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
I have a bridge to sell you. The foundations of our democracy are multi party free OMOV elections, and freedom of thought, political campaigning and opinion. All intact last time I looked.
It's good news for sure but I wouldn't call it world beating.
Growth trajectory is down, this month was lower than June
That's not the way it works, especially considering these are month on month figures not year on year ones.
As you get closer to being back to 100% there is less room to catch up so you would expect the MoM growth figures to slow down even if there is a v-shaped recovery. If we had 6.6% growth again in August and September then by end of September the UK economy would be ~100.3% of its pre-COVID amount. The recession would have been eliminated completely.
I'm glad you acknowledge it isn't world-beating.
Who says it isn't?
Who grew faster in July?
The claim was that it was world beating, the fact you keep doing your usual answer another question thing, means we both know they aren't.
You're being silly now.
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Thanks for the acknowledgement Philip. Not world beating and growth trajectory has slowed.
But best in Europe via the BBC
Fair enough - but that was not the claim that was made
To be fair, I did not make any claim
No, you did not - but I was responding to another user, I apologise if you got caught in that chain.
Still, growth trajectory slowing is not a massive confidence boost bearing in mind what awaits us. Still I will credit the Tories with restoring growth
"Growth tractetory slowing" is not an issue considering this is a rebound. Percentages don't work in the way you seem to think they do. When something rebounds you expect the initial bounceback to be highest rate then for it to slow down.
Another way of looking at it is that in June we lost 1/4 of what we had lost net by end of May. In July we regained 1/3rd of what we'd lost net by end of June.
If August MoM figure were to be "just" 6% then the growth trajectory would still be slowing but we would in that month have regained half of what we'd lost net by end of July. If September were then "just" 4% then we would have regained 80% that month. If October were then "just" 2% then we would have regained 100% of what we'd lost. That is a wildly optimistic scenario not a prediction.
We'll see how that recovery is going in the months to come, they can be credited with restoring growth but they are putting that at risk with furlough and No Deal both coming down the track
I’ve never, in my entire life, had a canvasser knock on my door. I feel deprived.
Do you live in a marginal seat or marginal council ward? If not that is why
So Gallowgate's vote is worth less than the vote of someone who lives in a marginal. Worth less in an economic sense. Parties think that is is not worthwhile using up their resources knocking on his door.
Exactly, the only reason the tories canvas safevseats is to find new members and deliverers, the presence of an active Lib Dem campaign in council elections tends to wake them up though.
I’ve never, in my entire life, had a canvasser knock on my door. I feel deprived.
You are. I've had several, not all of them for the SNP (although speaking to them seems to take the longest, funnily enough. Such an anxious decision...)
10,000 cases today in France, hardly any in Sweden. Which country has mandatory mask wearing ?
Maybe this is proof that Sumption, Hitchens, Toadmeister, etc, were right all along.
I was wondering what the consensus was on the Swedish approach now the dust has settled a little. It was ridiculed on here through most of our lockdown
Compare the deaths per million in sweden with its comparable neighbours' death rates.
The problem is that this is the wrong metric to use in the middle of an ongoing pandemic.
As far as I can see, most of the available evidence says that Sweden took a big upfront hit in terms of the death-toll, and has now pretty much reached herd immunity. Thus they have very few current cases and no increasing trend.
They may have made the wrong or right decision based on the data at the time to do this, if Neil Ferguson et-al had been correct about it needing 60% of the population to have had it to reach immunity, they would have had a huge deathtoll. As it is, it seems that 25-30% is enough for immunity (as evidenced by the fact that where-ever this virus crops up, it goes wild till it hits about 25% of the population, then starts fading away), so in hindsight they have lucked out to having the correct strategy.
This is all fairly straightforward to see in lots of publicly available date to people who can both read graphs and add up, unfortunately such people are badly under-represented in most governments. It explains a good deal (e.g. why London doesn't have much evidence for a second wave, and Manchester does - London was well on it's way to 25% by the time lockdown occurred, Manchester wasn't), and it fits pretty well with almost all the observable facts. (The lack of antibodies in populations you would expect to have them is a bit odd, but it looks increasingly likely that the explanation is that it's fairly common for the body to shift mild Covid infections via other immune responses without generating antibodies - we only test for anti-bodies because it's much easier than say fishing for T-cells)
The logical thing for us to do now is to dump most of the restrictions and follow the Swedish example - six months of life as normal apart from shielding for the vulnerable, and this would be over and done with.
Instead, our politicians are obviously intent on doubling down on failure, with no apparent endgame in sight, and perhaps even worse, almost no-one attempting to keep them to account. I've heard countless interviews where ministers have been accused of not locking down hard enough or fast enough, but hardly heard a single question asking "how exactly do you plan to get out of this mess?" or "is the increasing deathtoll for other untreated diseases not going to dwarf the Covid total?"
The reason that the virus stops at 20-25% is that as it goes wild, people stay home. Lockdowns happen because they hear ambulances and are scared.
An assertion without evidence. At its peak in London, there were plenty of media stories about crowded parks, illegal parties and raves, and the rest.
That's a fair comment.
But can I point you to @edmundintokyo's link to the Apple mobility data. Arizona saw had a lockdown that was reversed in early May. Activity - according to Apple - renewed as people went back about their day-to-day business.
But then as CV19 cases rose, it dropped again. Indeed, public transport usage in Arizona is doing worse now than in California.
People react to increased risk. If you hear sirens, you stay home.
Judging by the traffic jams and busy streets here in Germany I'd say things are close back to normal.
The OP made the valid point that the infection rate dropped away much more quickly than we might have expected among an uninfected population, and I don't expect your assertion will be the principal cause. I still reckon it'll be some combination of resistance/immunity being more widespread plus that many of the 'new cases' being found now were actually infected way back in the spring.
I hope you're right.
However, I'd point out that in "enclosed" situations, like the choir or the fishing vessel, you saw over 80% of people infected. This does not suggest that 75% or so of the population has natural immunity.
I hypothesise that many in the community have a natural immunity to low viral doses. That it why it seems to tail off when people keep their distance and wear masks, but you can still get 80% infections in high viral content spaces like choirs, boats and ICU units.
I’ve never, in my entire life, had a canvasser knock on my door. I feel deprived.
Do you live in a marginal seat or marginal council ward? If not that is why
So Gallowgate's vote is worth less than the vote of someone who lives in a marginal. Worth less in an economic sense. Parties think that is is not worthwhile using up their resources knocking on his door.
Under FPTP no, under PR maybe, so he might have got a knock in the European elections or if he lived in London, Scotland and Wales when the Mayoral and Assembly and Scottish Parliament elections were up but otherwise no
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
An app, that is much more likely to be used by young people, would certainly help...
Germany too had problems implementing a track and trace app and did a U-turn in the tracking method to implement. The "Corona-Warn" app was eventually released in mid-June. WTF is going on in the UK so that 3 months after Germany finally got the app working, the UK still has no widely available app. That is a disgrace.
Based on their record in 2020 I would be quite content if the UK government just held ad hoc 5pm Covid-19 briefings a day after every new announcement by the German government. The content would be repetitive, each time amounting to no more than saying "We're having what they're having, based on what they announced yesterday". It's been obvious for many months that they're far better at this than our administration, so why not just trust them to do the right thing instead of always going out of our way to do things differently and inevitably worse?
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
What they're dismantling, if anything, is the left-wing establishment that has infiltrated so many of our institutions. That's what they were elected to do by our, y'know, Parliamentary democracy.
Isn't the quiet man thing a bit of a misnomer nowadays? Feels like I'm never done hearing iDS burbling away on radio & tv producing a stream of self-contradicting & mendacious inanity.
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
An app, that is much more likely to be used by young people, would certainly help...
Germany too had problems implementing a track and trace app and did a U-turn in the tracking method to implement. The "Corona-Warn" app was eventually released in mid-June. WTF is going on in the UK so that 3 months after Germany finally got the app working, the UK still has no widely available app. That is a disgrace.
Is there any data on whether the German app actually did any good? We have one here but I doubt enough people are using it to make a dent, and you don't hear much about it any more.
One thing I heard about contact tracing is that it's kind of happening in a participatory way anyhow even without the official tracers. If you're diagnosed, and you might have infected a friend or colleague, you tend to want to check with them before you give your details to a contact tracer. But once you're friend hears they might have got the rona, they go and get themselves tested without waiting for the contact tracers to call them.
Of course. Track and trace is meant to find contacts whom the infected does not know. Things like going back to the restaurant records to find the phone numbers of those who ate at the restaurant at the same time. WHich is the kind of thing the app is supposted to pick up.
As to the app. I don't know the details, but to a certain extent the idea is that the program just runs in the background and is not conspicuous until someone tests positive. Looking up the figures 18 million have downloaded the app, around 20% of the population, although a few people will have downloaded the app a couple of times. There is no figure of how many positives have been captured by the app, but around 270 000 people have been informed that they should be tested. So not great figres, but not pointless either.
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
What they're dismantling, if anything, is the left-wing establishment that has infiltrated so many of our institutions. That's what they were elected to do by our, y'know, Parliamentary democracy.
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
A quantitative and qualitative boost in testing is necessary. I just wish this government, instead of distractions of moonshots, would stick to what's important: we need to do much more of what we are doing and we need to do it much better.
But their "moonshot" is the quantitive and qualitive boost you are asking for. And it is important. Whether it is deliverable is another question.
Your question indicates the problem I am alluding to. Stick to deliverables.
This is Business as Usual work: refine and improve the system so each day and each week the number of tests and effectiveness of tests improves.
If Johnson needs a metaphor, I would point him to the Berlin Airlift and not on the moon landings. The focus was relentlessly on daily tonnage outputs with operational efficiency and tip top maintenance of equipment as inputs.
Rejoining the EU in the next decade is for the birds.
You'd have though so. But I think it was one of the SeanTs who pointed out that Brexit could go so badly that rejoin is a viable manifesto plan for the 2024 election. In which case 2029 is possible.
Had the May and Johnson carefully planted the UK just outside the EU stockade, some variant of EEA with some controls on movement of people, it's likely that would have stuck. Divergence would have happened, as the EU 27 got closer together. Maybe Sweden and some others would have joined us. There are good structural reasons why they didn't go that path, maybe they had no choice even in Autumn 2016. But it would have created a Brexit that stuck, because nobody would really have had much pragmatic cause for complaint.
The Brexit on offer is much more problematic. Even if it works overall (hmm...) the effect on some individuals and sectors will be horrible. There will be people with very valid complaints and Brejoin will be the answer to their problems- even if it comes with horrible strings attached.
Meanwhile the geography and demography won't go away. There's a Brexit Bulge generation; they grew up in the 1950s, were the main source of Out votes in 1975 and Leave votes in 2016. With great respect, they won't be voting forever and there's not much reason to think that the generations below them will become less cosmopolitan as they age.
More voters think Brexit is a bad idea than a good one- and that's before any chickens come home to roost. And Starmer? He's a smart lawyer. He'll ask the public what they think about Brejoin if/when he knows what their answer will be. That's likely to happen, but now is not the time.
I've been canvassed once, by the Labour Party. I was asked who I'd voted for last time and I said the Tories - and the guy made a note on his clipboard and said they wouldn't knock on my door again. They stuck to their word.
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
An app, that is much more likely to be used by young people, would certainly help...
Germany too had problems implementing a track and trace app and did a U-turn in the tracking method to implement. The "Corona-Warn" app was eventually released in mid-June. WTF is going on in the UK so that 3 months after Germany finally got the app working, the UK still has no widely available app. That is a disgrace.
Based on their record in 2020 I would be quite content if the UK government just held ad hoc 5pm Covid-19 briefings a day after every new announcement by the German government. The content would be repetitive, each time amounting to no more than saying "We're having what they're having, based on what they announced yesterday". It's been obvious for many months that they're far better at this than our administration, so why not just trust them to do the right thing instead of always going out of our way to do things differently and inevitably worse?
(One of?) The first US briefing was very much like that. Fauci was beaming and looking like an idiot saying "look the Australians have already done the work, isnt that great, we dont have to do any work ourselves, we can just use their systems". Obviously above harshly paraphrased but thats how it came across.
He will likely retire and go to the Lords, he is 66 now and has been the local MP for 28 years and Boris could win a small majority in 2024 and the Tories still lose Chingford and Woodford Green.
The Tories did well to hold it in 2019 but if Starmer is going to get any swing at all next time he should win it, it is only 13th now on the Labour target list and just needs a 1.3% swing for Labour to take it which all the polls show he has now got at minimum
Will you be standing in his place?
If I got elected to council by then I might try and get a seat to fight at the next general election but as it would be first time probably a Labour inner city seat, normally you have to earn your spurs first before getting a safe seat for your party or a marginal to fight.
In any case being the first Tory candidate to lose Chingford since WW2 does not have much appeal, even if on current swing there is not much you can do about it
Actually, I tell a lie, when Chingford was part of Epping constituency from 1945 until 1970 Labour won it in 1945, 1964 and 1966, though it also included Harlow at that time
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
What they're dismantling, if anything, is the left-wing establishment that has infiltrated so many of our institutions. That's what they were elected to do by our, y'know, Parliamentary democracy.
I thought they were elected to deliver their flagship policy - the wonderful oven ready Brexit deal that the PM now says is shit and worth breaking the law to avoid implementing?
I've been canvassed once, by the Labour Party. I was asked who I'd voted for last time and I said the Tories - and the guy made a note on his clipboard and said they wouldn't knock on my door again. They stuck to their word.
Best wishes to Nichomar for a speedy & sustained recovery!
Re: politics, here on Left Coast of USA, seems Mother Nature is working overtime at the moment trying to convince swing voters that climate change is the Real Deal and NOT just a enviro-commie plot.
Here in Seattle, the good news is that our late summer September heat wave (record temps +90c in Western Washington, very unseasonable). Today the smoke wasn't too bad in the city, much worse east of the mountains AND to the south. But today (Friday) shifting air patterns mean smoke from CA & OR is streaming into Puget Sound and will hang around through the weekend.
The bad news is that the air is filled with smoke from hundreds of forest fires raging from California northward, mostly in the woods and grasslands east of the Cascades, but some in central Puget Sound. For in addition to high temperatures, there has also been very low humidity AND gusty winds. The result: a single spark can set off a conflagration.
In WA State alone, many homes have been destroyed and whole communities devastated. In the Eastern WA hamlet of Malden just south of Spokane, one big brush fire destroyed 80 percent of the buildings. Closer to Seattle, fires across Pierce County (Tacoma) have torched number of homes, often with little warning as fires spring up then get fanned by the winds.
But the worst at the moment is this sad news yesterday, that a one-year-old little boy was killed and his parents suffered third-degree burns while trying to flee the flames; sheriff's deputies found the family on the bank of the Columbia River, not far from their burnt-out car.
It is hard to comprehend the speed at which fires can erupt and spread in current conditions. One moment your worst problem is the smoke, the next you could be forced to jump up and flee for your life.
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
What they're dismantling, if anything, is the left-wing establishment that has infiltrated so many of our institutions. That's what they were elected to do by our, y'know, Parliamentary democracy.
Calling something a left-wing establishment because you do not like it for some reason is not the same as it being a left-wing establishment.
However, let's look at the government's decision to by-pass Parliament through reducing its ability to question ministers and scrutinise ministerial decsions. In what way is Parliament a left-wing establishment?
Rejoining the EU in the next decade is for the birds.
You'd have though so. But I think it was one of the SeanTs who pointed out that Brexit could go so badly that rejoin is a viable manifesto plan for the 2024 election. In which case 2029 is possible.
Had the May and Johnson carefully planted the UK just outside the EU stockade, some variant of EEA with some controls on movement of people, it's likely that would have stuck. Divergence would have happened, as the EU 27 got closer together. Maybe Sweden and some others would have joined us. There are good structural reasons why they didn't go that path, maybe they had no choice even in Autumn 2016. But it would have created a Brexit that stuck, because nobody would really have had much pragmatic cause for complaint.
The Brexit on offer is much more problematic. Even if it works overall (hmm...) the effect on some individuals and sectors will be horrible. There will be people with very valid complaints and Brejoin will be the answer to their problems- even if it comes with horrible strings attached.
Meanwhile the geography and demography won't go away. There's a Brexit Bulge generation; they grew up in the 1950s, were the main source of Out votes in 1975 and Leave votes in 2016. With great respect, they won't be voting forever and there's not much reason to think that the generations below them will become less cosmopolitan as they age.
More voters think Brexit is a bad idea than a good one- and that's before any chickens come home to roost. And Starmer? He's a smart lawyer. He'll ask the public what they think about Brejoin if/when he knows what their answer will be. That's likely to happen, but now is not the time.
Do you think the EU would have us back as full members?
I’ve never, in my entire life, had a canvasser knock on my door. I feel deprived.
Do you live in a marginal seat or marginal council ward? If not that is why
So Gallowgate's vote is worth less than the vote of someone who lives in a marginal. Worth less in an economic sense. Parties think that is is not worthwhile using up their resources knocking on his door.
Exactly, the only reason the tories canvas safevseats is to find new members and deliverers, the presence of an active Lib Dem campaign in council elections tends to wake them up though.
Indeed, although the Tories won over 60% in Epping Forest last December at the general election in my ward they got only 32% in the local elections last May and the LDs got 63%
I've been canvassed once, by the Labour Party. I was asked who I'd voted for last time and I said the Tories - and the guy made a note on his clipboard and said they wouldn't knock on my door again. They stuck to their word.
I hope he gave you a disapproving look.
He looked bored actually. I was surprised they didn't ask more questions like "why" or "what might make you change your vote" etc, especially considering it was an extremely marginal seat.
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
What they're dismantling, if anything, is the left-wing establishment that has infiltrated so many of our institutions. That's what they were elected to do by our, y'know, Parliamentary democracy.
The Tories have been in power 10 years!
Half the time with the Lib Dems, less than 3 years with any majority of their own. Now that they have received a thumping mandate, it should be exercised to the fullest.
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
An app, that is much more likely to be used by young people, would certainly help...
Germany too had problems implementing a track and trace app and did a U-turn in the tracking method to implement. The "Corona-Warn" app was eventually released in mid-June. WTF is going on in the UK so that 3 months after Germany finally got the app working, the UK still has no widely available app. That is a disgrace.
Based on their record in 2020 I would be quite content if the UK government just held ad hoc 5pm Covid-19 briefings a day after every new announcement by the German government. The content would be repetitive, each time amounting to no more than saying "We're having what they're having, based on what they announced yesterday". It's been obvious for many months that they're far better at this than our administration, so why not just trust them to do the right thing instead of always going out of our way to do things differently and inevitably worse?
This is a bit like the advice about eating well. For decades the main message has been "eat more fruit veg and fibre, don't eat too much meat and don't eat/drink too many calories". But that message is boring, so it rarely gets repeated.
The tabloid press however jumps on any unscientific fad diet* as the latest advice on nutrition. Then one month later they publish another fad diet, with the long term result that many people think the scientific advice is changing all the time
*I once had a colleague who followed a popular diet, where you should not mix food groups. A result was that she did not eat tomatoes, because that was in all three food groups. I consider a diet which forbids tomatoes on a health basis is a bit silly.
Much of the best advice on COV2 is now boring and old hat (wash hands, distancing, wearing masks properly when indoors and near other people, keep a list of people in a location on a given date) but it works.
I've been canvassed once, by the Labour Party. I was asked who I'd voted for last time and I said the Tories - and the guy made a note on his clipboard and said they wouldn't knock on my door again. They stuck to their word.
IF you were a savvy, old-school partisan, you'd have invited him in for a spot of tea, then spent next half hour keeping him from knocking on other doors.
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
I have a bridge to sell you. The foundations of our democracy are multi party free OMOV elections, and freedom of thought, political campaigning and opinion. All intact last time I looked.
The foundation of our democracy is actually the rule of law. All else springs from that. Without it, there is no guarantee of anything else.
An excellent article indeed - it all sounds very exciting!
Even in today's revolting climate this article is a bit breathlessly overdone. You wouldn't notice from reading it that we have OMOV elections and a parliamentary democracy or that the Gramsci tactics have not mostly come from the centre right.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
The article, correctly, points out that the current government is in the process of dismantlling our current Parliamentary democracy. We will see what it is replaced with.
What they're dismantling, if anything, is the left-wing establishment that has infiltrated so many of our institutions. That's what they were elected to do by our, y'know, Parliamentary democracy.
Calling something a left-wing establishment because you do not like it for some reason is not the same as it being a left-wing establishment.
However, let's look at the government's decision to by-pass Parliament through reducing its ability to question ministers and scrutinise ministerial decsions. In what way is Parliament a left-wing establishment?
I don't want to bore people with my family circumstances but I think that they are a good example of the problems. My daughter went to the restaurant (now closed) in Glasgow on Wednesday night. Yesterday she met her brother's girlfriend in another restaurant in Dundee for 3 hours without masks. Today that girlfriend will have gone into school...
What can we draw from this? The most obvious point is that my daughter has a much better social life than me but more fundamentally and generally track and trace is just never going to keep up with these contacts and possible trails of infection. It's just impossible. T&T may identify some of the potential infection and thus reduce the R number but it cannot be the answer. It's always going to be too slow.
I think its this conclusion which has driven the government to the mass testing talked about yesterday. It is logistically challenging and frighteningly expensive but nothing else is going to work.
A quantitative and qualitative boost in testing is necessary. I just wish this government, instead of distractions of moonshots, would stick to what's important: we need to do much more of what we are doing and we need to do it much better.
But their "moonshot" is the quantitive and qualitive boost you are asking for. And it is important. Whether it is deliverable is another question.
Your question indicates the problem I am alluding to. Stick to deliverables.
This is Business as Usual work: refine and improve the system so each day and each week the number of tests and effectiveness of tests improves.
If Johnson needs a metaphor, I would point him to the Berlin Airlift and not on the moon landings. The focus was relentlessly on daily tonnage outputs with operational efficiency and tip top maintenance of equipment as inputs.
Tunner was one of those logistical geniuses that made the US almost unbeatable. The new test, however, would be a qualitative improvement on anything we have or could have at the moment in terms of speed. And as I was trying to point out with my domestic example speed is absolutely of the essence here. People, young people in particular, don't sit about wondering.
Comments
https://www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/2020/09/11/cummings-and-johnson-are-breaking-down-the-entire-notion-of
Jeez. America is so f**ked.
To have got a majority, it just needed the tiggers and LDs to vote for it, not even any more Tories (Clark, Gauke, Hunt, Hammond, Gyriah, Greening, Grieve, Liddington, Rudd and Stewart all abstained and I am sure would all prefer it to what we have now).
Pretty disgraceful from the LDs and Tiggers as was said at the time by many remainers on here.
In 2015 too there was also Tory door to door canvassing even with the online presence.
Remember in 2000 it was Democrats and Unions going door to door which got Gore so close in the EC and won him the popular vote, if you ignore your groundgame you risk a lower turnout of your potential supporters
Who grew faster in July?
Makes me think of Mr Garrison and South Park.
The Tories did well to hold it in 2019 but if Starmer is going to get any swing at all next time he should win it, it is only 13th now on the Labour target list and just needs a 1.3% swing for Labour to take it which all the polls show he has now got at minimum
This is good news, but its far too early to count chickens. We need to see what August, September then the rest of the year and early next year brings. I don't think anyone is saying we're out of the woods yet, but todays news is reassuring.
Shaun can still win!
* Introducing some kind of associate membership with the EU, which has clearly defined entry and exit paths, is something the UK-EU could sign up to in the future, and act as a template for other countries, but I don't see why they would want us back as full members.
Even Starmer is against being in the EU
* I think Spain could end up down by more than us after Q3, but they are not in the G7.
One thing I heard about contact tracing is that it's kind of happening in a participatory way anyhow even without the official tracers. If you're diagnosed, and you might have infected a friend or colleague, you tend to want to check with them before you give their personal details to a contact tracer. But once your friend hears they might have got the rona, they go and get themselves tested without waiting for the contact tracers to call them.
Would you do notice is that a good number of elites who have been very used to getting their way are having their noses put out of joint by actual people with actual opinions.
Nor would you notice that but for the extremes and contradictions of the Labour party we could now have a soft Brexit and a centre left government.
Still, growth trajectory slowing is not a massive confidence boost bearing in mind what awaits us. Still I will credit the Tories with restoring growth
My point was just to understand how different the figures are from what we were led to expect last week which is why I'd rather leave it to @MaxPB to fish them out rather than a) trying to recall the detail (the thrust was definitely "global leader") or b) wade through his comments.
The only reason I bring it up is that this poster indicated his predictions were based on transacitonal data, not opinion or anecdote but actual analysis so I was keen to see how it panned out.
I'm just trying to understand why (or indeed if), the outcome is different from the prediction. It might turn out my recollection is wrong - I don't think it is as I well recall the thrust of the prediction but I'd like to be sure.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-54107329?fbclid=IwAR3W7BgaazcobTj22fA2vC3bUQPVSJD3QEuYbFvGTt2dmOw0aTvYI_Grcuc
In fact I think the SDLP are the only party in the Commons still committed to reverse Brexit if they can
Utter drivel as usual
Assuming the UK holds together.
After January 2021 I think the campaign will gather pace. The idea that SKS is against the EU is for the birds. It is not a practical policy for a Labour leader now. If and when it is he would support it.
Another way of looking at it is that in June we lost 1/4 of what we had lost net by end of May. In July we regained 1/3rd of what we'd lost net by end of June.
If August MoM figure were to be "just" 6% then the growth trajectory would still be slowing but we would in that month have regained half of what we'd lost net by end of July. If September were then "just" 4% then we would have regained 80% that month. If October were then "just" 2% then we would have regained 100% of what we'd lost. That is a wildly optimistic scenario not a prediction.
In any case being the first Tory candidate to lose Chingford since WW2 does not have much appeal, even if on current swing there is not much you can do about it
Even if you have the right hardware and software, and it's operating properly, you need about 60% of the population using the app. The highest usage rates at the moment are around 25%, most countries are in single digits, and many of those countries are seeing a drop in usage as time passes.
If you want to use mobile phones to trace contacts then scoop up mobile signalling data from the carriers.
Feels like I'm never done hearing iDS burbling away on radio & tv producing a stream of self-contradicting & mendacious inanity.
Safe for different parties though.
Conservative and unionist MPs were purged for not swearing fealty to BoZo and Dom.
Dissent will not be tolerated.
As to the app. I don't know the details, but to a certain extent the idea is that the program just runs in the background and is not conspicuous until someone tests positive. Looking up the figures 18 million have downloaded the app, around 20% of the population, although a few people will have downloaded the app a couple of times. There is no figure of how many positives have been captured by the app, but around 270 000 people have been informed that they should be tested.
So not great figres, but not pointless either.
This is Business as Usual work: refine and improve the system so each day and each week the number of tests and effectiveness of tests improves.
If Johnson needs a metaphor, I would point him to the Berlin Airlift and not on the moon landings. The focus was relentlessly on daily tonnage outputs with operational efficiency and tip top maintenance of equipment as inputs.
It also allows me to link to my great hero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_H._Tunner
Faster faster please!
Had the May and Johnson carefully planted the UK just outside the EU stockade, some variant of EEA with some controls on movement of people, it's likely that would have stuck. Divergence would have happened, as the EU 27 got closer together. Maybe Sweden and some others would have joined us. There are good structural reasons why they didn't go that path, maybe they had no choice even in Autumn 2016. But it would have created a Brexit that stuck, because nobody would really have had much pragmatic cause for complaint.
The Brexit on offer is much more problematic. Even if it works overall (hmm...) the effect on some individuals and sectors will be horrible. There will be people with very valid complaints and Brejoin will be the answer to their problems- even if it comes with horrible strings attached.
Meanwhile the geography and demography won't go away. There's a Brexit Bulge generation; they grew up in the 1950s, were the main source of Out votes in 1975 and Leave votes in 2016. With great respect, they won't be voting forever and there's not much reason to think that the generations below them will become less cosmopolitan as they age.
More voters think Brexit is a bad idea than a good one- and that's before any chickens come home to roost. And Starmer? He's a smart lawyer. He'll ask the public what they think about Brejoin if/when he knows what their answer will be. That's likely to happen, but now is not the time.
Re: politics, here on Left Coast of USA, seems Mother Nature is working overtime at the moment trying to convince swing voters that climate change is the Real Deal and NOT just a enviro-commie plot.
Here in Seattle, the good news is that our late summer September heat wave (record temps +90c in Western Washington, very unseasonable). Today the smoke wasn't too bad in the city, much worse east of the mountains AND to the south. But today (Friday) shifting air patterns mean smoke from CA & OR is streaming into Puget Sound and will hang around through the weekend.
The bad news is that the air is filled with smoke from hundreds of forest fires raging from California northward, mostly in the woods and grasslands east of the Cascades, but some in central Puget Sound. For in addition to high temperatures, there has also been very low humidity AND gusty winds. The result: a single spark can set off a conflagration.
In WA State alone, many homes have been destroyed and whole communities devastated. In the Eastern WA hamlet of Malden just south of Spokane, one big brush fire destroyed 80 percent of the buildings. Closer to Seattle, fires across Pierce County (Tacoma) have torched number of homes, often with little warning as fires spring up then get fanned by the winds.
But the worst at the moment is this sad news yesterday, that a one-year-old little boy was killed and his parents suffered third-degree burns while trying to flee the flames; sheriff's deputies found the family on the bank of the Columbia River, not far from their burnt-out car.
It is hard to comprehend the speed at which fires can erupt and spread in current conditions. One moment your worst problem is the smoke, the next you could be forced to jump up and flee for your life.
However, let's look at the government's decision to by-pass Parliament through reducing its ability to question ministers and scrutinise ministerial decsions. In what way is Parliament a left-wing establishment?
The tabloid press however jumps on any unscientific fad diet* as the latest advice on nutrition. Then one month later they publish another fad diet, with the long term result that many people think the scientific advice is changing all the time
*I once had a colleague who followed a popular diet, where you should not mix food groups. A result was that she did not eat tomatoes, because that was in all three food groups. I consider a diet which forbids tomatoes on a health basis is a bit silly.
Much of the best advice on COV2 is now boring and old hat (wash hands, distancing, wearing masks properly when indoors and near other people, keep a list of people in a location on a given date) but it works.