But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
It's behind the paywall so I could only read the first few sentences. But the idea that the various countries of the UK are not European is so self-evidently stupid AF that it could only have appeared in the Tory press. The UK, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandis, Ireland are all essentially the same. Where we differ it is narcissism of small differences stuff, trivial cultural differences that can create a barrier to understanding but don't mean we actually differ - like language. The countries to the south and east start to be a bit different, but not much. Then we have those various offshoots of European culture, the settler colonies of the new world. They obviously have many similarities to the mother country (the most British country I have ever spent time in is Barbados, for instance). But their status as former colonies also marks them as different and over time those differences have tended to grow. The largest and most successful of our former settler colonies, the US, is completely different from us, much more culturally distinct than say the Netherlands is. Even the most superficially similar, eg New Zealand, is probably more distinct from us than European Ireland is. But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
If Scotland joined the EU they would get the benefits from the EU FTA. 🤦🏻♂️
You're making the same failed arguments you made when you voted and supported Remain. It doesn't work.
But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
I don't disagree with the facts, but with the conclusion drawn from them.
If not the European nations, alike in linguistics, law, standard of living, religion, demographics, history, technological development, economic system, and even sporting preferences, who *are* our peers?
We're much closer as peers with Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Which is why there are 2.5x more British emigrants living across the Anglosphere than the EU.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
If there's no legal SindyrefII after the Scottish voters vote for it then you are signing the death warrant for the union. Is that what you really want?
Almost every Tory here recognises that, for good reason.
Given we're on the brink of getting a trade deal with the EU I'm curious why you think Scexit would mean tariffs rather than a trade deal - whether that be a bilateral England/Scotland deal or Scotland joining the EU and seeing the EU's tariff free trade deal applying to them automatically.
No, allowing an indyref2 when Yes would likely win is the death knell for the Union, if you stop an indyref2 and respect the once in a generation 2014 result then there is zero chance of a legal Yes win.
Catalonia remains part of Spain 3 years after the Spanish government prevented the Catalan government from holding a legal independence referendum.
The UK government has made clear 2014 was a once in a generation vote
As I have pointed out even a UK and EU trade deal will likely not be completely tariff free, we would have needed to stay in the Single Market and Customs Union to have completely tariff free trade with the EU and full access for our services to the EU without restriction.
No Deal of course means heavy tariffs on EU exports to the UK and UK exports to the EU
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
If there's no legal SindyrefII after the Scottish voters vote for it then you are signing the death warrant for the union. Is that what you really want?
Almost every Tory here recognises that, for good reason.
Given we're on the brink of getting a trade deal with the EU I'm curious why you think Scexit would mean tariffs rather than a trade deal - whether that be a bilateral England/Scotland deal or Scotland joining the EU and seeing the EU's tariff free trade deal applying to them automatically.
The latter presumably depends on whether the UK-EU FTA has a clause to automatically extend it to new EU members?
But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
It's what people perceive themselves to be and we Remainers never even tried making any sort of argument. My sixth form history teacher in 1992 mentioned in an unguarded moment around the time of the Danish referendum how he regretted voting remain in 1975 now that the (soon to be) EU was becoming an increasingly political project. As embarrassed by it as I am now, a couple of years earlier I had persuaded my folks to let me apply for a blue passport in my own name (back then you could be included on your mother's passport) before the new ones were introduced. This stuff matters. We Remainers only ever dealt with the economic consequences of leaving not the identity consequences of staying in. We won the economic argument but didn't even bother with the identity politics angle. Not everyone went on the journey from teenage Euroscepticism to Europilia that I did.
People see the badges of an emergent EU identity. They see the increasing ubiquity of the EU flag hanging next to a national flag in parliaments and on embassies, they hear the EU anthem on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at half-time, they understand what a constitution is (however much it is rebadged), they spend Euros on holiday, they read what happened during the Eurozone crisis, and, yes, they see (all jokes aside) the name of the EU symbolically above the name of their country on their passports. That stuff matters. As much as we liked to say the EU was something new and unique, that didn't challenge our national institutions or identity, if it looks like a country and sounds like a country people will think its supposed to be a new country of which we were citizens. That was never faced up to and met head on - rather than any attempt to positively sell such matters they were essentially ignored, laughed at ("Blue Passports!" is now basically a punchline) or treated as a trade off for prosperity. As a result, since Maastricht, the identity politics aspect of the Remain case was very weak indeed and, as we have seen, identity politics matter very much. It's no good just saying "well, it's not a problem for the Irish/Greeks/Germans/Dutch - we must be racist/stupid" etc etc because, for obvious reasons, insulting your electorate doesn't win votes.
This was going to happen one day because no-one (Blair mostly) faced up to these uncomfortable political optics. With the identity stuff we treated peple like mugs. If we had won in 2016, then what? Would people committed to Leave have just shrugged and let it go? Hardly. 2014 hasn't settled anything long term in Scotland - hell 2016 didn't settle very much in the UK as a whole. Unless we did a lot better selling the EU to the English and Welsh people (as well as not insignificant numbers in Scotland an NI) then this was going to happen, if not now, then later. Whoever took over from Cameron in 2020 would have been dealing with a UKIP as motivated and probably stronger than it had been in 2015.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
I don't disagree with the facts, but with the conclusion drawn from them.
If not the European nations, alike in linguistics, law, standard of living, religion, demographics, history, technological development, economic system, and even sporting preferences, who *are* our peers?
We're much closer as peers with Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Which is why there are 2.5x more British emigrants living across the Anglosphere than the EU.
That's not what the word "peers" means. That's like saying my kids are my peers because we spend so much time together. They're not. Other middle-aged men, who I may or may not know, are my peers.
Australians, Canadians etc are not our children they are our 'cousins'. Our peers.
No, they are not our peers. Their geographies and economies are completely different to our own. France and Germany, for example, are much more of a match to the UK in terms of population, economy and geography. You can argue that, as our ex-colonies, Australia, New Zealand and Canada are close to us in certain and special ways, but they are not our peers.
quite tenuous... I prefer the analysis of 1. Blair's Iraq War - demolishing trust in politicians 2. Accession of the Eastern European nations to the EU will few limits on numbers (which I was generally in favour of BTW) 3. A recession in 2009 that saw UK public services and incomes squeezed to the limits 4. A lacklustre Remain campaign dominated by the Conservatice modernising wing which was not helped by piss poor Labour support.... maybe then I would buy into the Arab Spring having a part......(assisted by N Farage et al...)
no mention of Red Buses from me...
The most interesting part of it is the unstated assumption that Brexit isn't a positive development.
Some things don't need to be said.
When all is said and done I think it is, Brexit is going about as well as could have been hoped for. We have a trade deal about to be signed with Europe and we've rolled over trade deals with all our other major partners too - the only way is up from here.
The EU is a dysfunctional institution. Once we've gotten out of it then we can build steadily a new path rather than facing these old arguments that have torn us asunder for the past four decades.
LOL
Ah, the disdainful LOL of the Remainer.
Some of us are going to knuckle down to make sure that new path is a reality. Underpinned by the knowledge that the democratic process has been greatly enhanced: both by getting out from under an EU that has a deep distrust of democracy - because those pesky voters use it to thwart their Project - and proving that the voters DO have a voice to which politicans must listen.
Not my problem that such things mean so little to you.
Not my problem that you appear to believe you can read minds, and consistently demonstrate you can't.
The LOL was at the notion that somehow all political argument over this would cease.
Of course it won't but what would be nice - given neither the announcement of a deal nor its broad substance will be at all surprising - is if debate could be focused on the substance of it. What does it mean for us? What is the likely path from here?
But I predict a load of puerile card game tosh along the lines of "blinking" or "capitulating" or - and this would be the absolute pits - "Boris hung tough and got us a great deal through his chutzpah and iron resolution".
I have quite a robust constitution but I'm not sure I can bear too much of that.
I think that for the next umpteen decades we will continue to make lots of little arrangement with the EU on every topic under the sun (customs, standards, travel, etc) to make life easier for both sides each time creeping millimetre by millimetre back to where we started (although not formally).
Could well be, yes. Not the worst outcome if so. I certainly don't like the look of the alternative fork which has now become a possibility. "We're not really a European nation. We're England!". That one.
When it comes down to it, England is more European than everything else.
Then why is the British diaspora overwhelmingly in the anglophone world? There are more Brits in Australia alone than the entire EU. "Global Britain" as lived by ordinary monolingual Brits is anglophone - its the "elites" and commentariat who have enjoyed the advantages of second homes in Europe and European jobs.
Because counting expats is a rubbish measure. It tells you about the preferences of the small percentage (5% or so?) who, for whatever reason, choose to go and live in another country. They really aren't a representative sample.
But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
It's behind the paywall so I could only read the first few sentences. But the idea that the various countries of the UK are not European is so self-evidently stupid AF that it could only have appeared in the Tory press. The UK, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandis, Ireland are all essentially the same. Where we differ it is narcissism of small differences stuff, trivial cultural differences that can create a barrier to understanding but don't mean we actually differ - like language. The countries to the south and east start to be a bit different, but not much. Then we have those various offshoots of European culture, the settler colonies of the new world. They obviously have many similarities to the mother country (the most British country I have ever spent time in is Barbados, for instance). But their status as former colonies also marks them as different and over time those differences have tended to grow. The largest and most successful of our former settler colonies, the US, is completely different from us, much more culturally distinct than say the Netherlands is. Even the most superficially similar, eg New Zealand, is probably more distinct from us than European Ireland is. But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
We are not "essentially the same" that is complete codswallop.
Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
If Scotland joined the EU they would get the benefits from the EU FTA. 🤦🏻♂️
You're making the same failed arguments you made when you voted and supported Remain. It doesn't work.
Even an EU FTA means some tariffs on UK and EU trade, No Deal means heavy tariffs
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
If Scotland joined the EU they would get the benefits from the EU FTA. 🤦🏻♂️
You're making the same failed arguments you made when you voted and supported Remain. It doesn't work.
Even an EU FTA means some tariffs on UK and EU trade, No Deal means heavy tariffs
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
quite tenuous... I prefer the analysis of 1. Blair's Iraq War - demolishing trust in politicians 2. Accession of the Eastern European nations to the EU will few limits on numbers (which I was generally in favour of BTW) 3. A recession in 2009 that saw UK public services and incomes squeezed to the limits 4. A lacklustre Remain campaign dominated by the Conservatice modernising wing which was not helped by piss poor Labour support.... maybe then I would buy into the Arab Spring having a part......(assisted by N Farage et al...)
no mention of Red Buses from me...
The most interesting part of it is the unstated assumption that Brexit isn't a positive development.
Some things don't need to be said.
When all is said and done I think it is, Brexit is going about as well as could have been hoped for. We have a trade deal about to be signed with Europe and we've rolled over trade deals with all our other major partners too - the only way is up from here.
The EU is a dysfunctional institution. Once we've gotten out of it then we can build steadily a new path rather than facing these old arguments that have torn us asunder for the past four decades.
LOL
Ah, the disdainful LOL of the Remainer.
Some of us are going to knuckle down to make sure that new path is a reality. Underpinned by the knowledge that the democratic process has been greatly enhanced: both by getting out from under an EU that has a deep distrust of democracy - because those pesky voters use it to thwart their Project - and proving that the voters DO have a voice to which politicans must listen.
Not my problem that such things mean so little to you.
Not my problem that you appear to believe you can read minds, and consistently demonstrate you can't.
The LOL was at the notion that somehow all political argument over this would cease.
Of course it won't but what would be nice - given neither the announcement of a deal nor its broad substance will be at all surprising - is if debate could be focused on the substance of it. What does it mean for us? What is the likely path from here?
But I predict a load of puerile card game tosh along the lines of "blinking" or "capitulating" or - and this would be the absolute pits - "Boris hung tough and got us a great deal through his chutzpah and iron resolution".
I have quite a robust constitution but I'm not sure I can bear too much of that.
I think that for the next umpteen decades we will continue to make lots of little arrangement with the EU on every topic under the sun (customs, standards, travel, etc) to make life easier for both sides each time creeping millimetre by millimetre back to where we started (although not formally).
Could well be, yes. Not the worst outcome if so. I certainly don't like the look of the alternative fork which has now become a possibility. "We're not really a European nation. We're England!". That one.
When it comes down to it, England is more European than everything else.
Then why is the British diaspora overwhelmingly in the anglophone world? There are more Brits in Australia alone than the entire EU. "Global Britain" as lived by ordinary monolingual Brits is anglophone - its the "elites" and commentariat who have enjoyed the advantages of second homes in Europe and European jobs.
Because counting expats is a rubbish measure. It tells you about the preferences of the small percentage (5% or so?) who, for whatever reason, choose to go and live in another country. They really aren't a representative sample.
Who are a representative sample? European second home owners?
quite tenuous... I prefer the analysis of 1. Blair's Iraq War - demolishing trust in politicians 2. Accession of the Eastern European nations to the EU will few limits on numbers (which I was generally in favour of BTW) 3. A recession in 2009 that saw UK public services and incomes squeezed to the limits 4. A lacklustre Remain campaign dominated by the Conservatice modernising wing which was not helped by piss poor Labour support.... maybe then I would buy into the Arab Spring having a part......(assisted by N Farage et al...)
no mention of Red Buses from me...
The most interesting part of it is the unstated assumption that Brexit isn't a positive development.
Some things don't need to be said.
When all is said and done I think it is, Brexit is going about as well as could have been hoped for. We have a trade deal about to be signed with Europe and we've rolled over trade deals with all our other major partners too - the only way is up from here.
The EU is a dysfunctional institution. Once we've gotten out of it then we can build steadily a new path rather than facing these old arguments that have torn us asunder for the past four decades.
LOL
Ah, the disdainful LOL of the Remainer.
Some of us are going to knuckle down to make sure that new path is a reality. Underpinned by the knowledge that the democratic process has been greatly enhanced: both by getting out from under an EU that has a deep distrust of democracy - because those pesky voters use it to thwart their Project - and proving that the voters DO have a voice to which politicans must listen.
Not my problem that such things mean so little to you.
Not my problem that you appear to believe you can read minds, and consistently demonstrate you can't.
The LOL was at the notion that somehow all political argument over this would cease.
Of course it won't but what would be nice - given neither the announcement of a deal nor its broad substance will be at all surprising - is if debate could be focused on the substance of it. What does it mean for us? What is the likely path from here?
But I predict a load of puerile card game tosh along the lines of "blinking" or "capitulating" or - and this would be the absolute pits - "Boris hung tough and got us a great deal through his chutzpah and iron resolution".
I have quite a robust constitution but I'm not sure I can bear too much of that.
I think that for the next umpteen decades we will continue to make lots of little arrangement with the EU on every topic under the sun (customs, standards, travel, etc) to make life easier for both sides each time creeping millimetre by millimetre back to where we started (although not formally).
Could well be, yes. Not the worst outcome if so. I certainly don't like the look of the alternative fork which has now become a possibility. "We're not really a European nation. We're England!". That one.
When it comes down to it, England is more European than everything else.
Then why is the British diaspora overwhelmingly in the anglophone world? There are more Brits in Australia alone than the entire EU. "Global Britain" as lived by ordinary monolingual Brits is anglophone - its the "elites" and commentariat who have enjoyed the advantages of second homes in Europe and European jobs.
My grandparents, working class Tory voters who worked hard and managed to put away some money, retired to Mallorca and spent a couple of very happy decades there, with full Spanish health care, courtesy of the EU. They spoke enough Spanish to get by in the shops. They were far from the "elite", despite reading the Telegraph.
Johnson’s technique for dealing with problems is to let them run out of control, building to a point of sufficient crisis that delay is no longer viable. That way the choice becomes perversely easier because there are fewer options left. Wait long enough and there might be only one.
That is how he has dealt with Brexit. He imagines that brinkmanship is a negotiating strategy to wring concessions out of Brussels, but in reality it is just a way to simplify the decision by eliminating options that needed time to develop. He lets procrastination do the heavy lifting. He can then tell himself (and his audience) that the final outcome, while not perfect, is the best available solution. And maybe it is. But only because it is so late in the day and all the better solutions have long since expired.
It is a chaotic way to run anything: leaving it all to the last minute, relying on a critical mass of external pressure to get motivated. As a way of governing in a pandemic it is disastrous because there is no slack time between deadlines. The moment to make the tough choices is always now. The rate at which good options decay is exponential. The virus thrives on indecision. Johnson’s method is effective for one thing, though: it guarantees a sustained pitch of political drama, with the figure of the prime minister lit centre stage. It forces the nation to hang on his word, waiting for him to act, while the consequences of his inaction play out. That bathes him in an aura of power, but it is not leadership.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels gave the UK a one year transition period with full access to its market with the option to extend and has devoted that time to negotiating an FTA. So I would expect the rUK and Scotland to behave similarly.
quite tenuous... I prefer the analysis of 1. Blair's Iraq War - demolishing trust in politicians 2. Accession of the Eastern European nations to the EU will few limits on numbers (which I was generally in favour of BTW) 3. A recession in 2009 that saw UK public services and incomes squeezed to the limits 4. A lacklustre Remain campaign dominated by the Conservatice modernising wing which was not helped by piss poor Labour support.... maybe then I would buy into the Arab Spring having a part......(assisted by N Farage et al...)
no mention of Red Buses from me...
The most interesting part of it is the unstated assumption that Brexit isn't a positive development.
Some things don't need to be said.
When all is said and done I think it is, Brexit is going about as well as could have been hoped for. We have a trade deal about to be signed with Europe and we've rolled over trade deals with all our other major partners too - the only way is up from here.
The EU is a dysfunctional institution. Once we've gotten out of it then we can build steadily a new path rather than facing these old arguments that have torn us asunder for the past four decades.
LOL
Ah, the disdainful LOL of the Remainer.
Some of us are going to knuckle down to make sure that new path is a reality. Underpinned by the knowledge that the democratic process has been greatly enhanced: both by getting out from under an EU that has a deep distrust of democracy - because those pesky voters use it to thwart their Project - and proving that the voters DO have a voice to which politicans must listen.
Not my problem that such things mean so little to you.
Not my problem that you appear to believe you can read minds, and consistently demonstrate you can't.
The LOL was at the notion that somehow all political argument over this would cease.
Of course it won't but what would be nice - given neither the announcement of a deal nor its broad substance will be at all surprising - is if debate could be focused on the substance of it. What does it mean for us? What is the likely path from here?
But I predict a load of puerile card game tosh along the lines of "blinking" or "capitulating" or - and this would be the absolute pits - "Boris hung tough and got us a great deal through his chutzpah and iron resolution".
I have quite a robust constitution but I'm not sure I can bear too much of that.
I think that for the next umpteen decades we will continue to make lots of little arrangement with the EU on every topic under the sun (customs, standards, travel, etc) to make life easier for both sides each time creeping millimetre by millimetre back to where we started (although not formally).
Could well be, yes. Not the worst outcome if so. I certainly don't like the look of the alternative fork which has now become a possibility. "We're not really a European nation. We're England!". That one.
When it comes down to it, England is more European than everything else.
Then why is the British diaspora overwhelmingly in the anglophone world? There are more Brits in Australia alone than the entire EU. "Global Britain" as lived by ordinary monolingual Brits is anglophone - its the "elites" and commentariat who have enjoyed the advantages of second homes in Europe and European jobs.
Because counting expats is a rubbish measure. It tells you about the preferences of the small percentage (5% or so?) who, for whatever reason, choose to go and live in another country. They really aren't a representative sample.
Who are a representative sample? European second home owners?
Of course not. I imagine most people in Britain interact with "abroad" by short trips; for holidays mostly and work rather less. I don't have the stats, but if you look at the destination list for a typical UK airport....
Couple of interesting things from that Comres poll
1. Bit of a difference to survation - presumably because of difference method of reallocating undecided? 2. Economy tops concern for scots - one to keep an eye on particular in context of indy and the likely focus on economy/currency/debt issues 3. The route to a legal referendum seems difficult- there doesn't yet seem to be any emerging alternative to that
...theres still not been a focus on the logistics of indepedence either.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
If Scotland joined the EU they would get the benefits from the EU FTA. 🤦🏻♂️
You're making the same failed arguments you made when you voted and supported Remain. It doesn't work.
Even an EU FTA means some tariffs on UK and EU trade, No Deal means heavy tariffs
Same old Remainer Project Fear.
Remain lost, get with the programme.
Your attitude to the 2016 result is exactly the same as HYUFD's attiude to the 2014 Scots result. The good news for both of you is that nothing lasts forever. The bad news for both of you is that nothing lasts forever. No political idea ever dies. History does not simply end with one side winning. 30 years ago it was blithely assumed that liberal democracy had "won". If you keep dismissing arguments idiotic putdowns we have heard constantly for five years like "you lost, get over it" then you will very soon have as much credibility as Francis Fukuyama.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels gave the UK a one year transition period with full access to its market with the option to extend and has devoted that time to negotiating an FTA. So I would expect the rUK and Scotland to behave similarly.
Even if a UK and EU FTA is agreed there would still be some tariffs on UK goods sent to the EU and some restrictions on UK services access to the EU market too once we leave the Single Market and Customs Union in January and vice versa.
There would also similarly be some tariffs on Scottish exports to England and restrictions on Scottish services access to England even with a rUK and Scotland FTA if Scotland decided to leave the UK single market
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
quite tenuous... I prefer the analysis of 1. Blair's Iraq War - demolishing trust in politicians 2. Accession of the Eastern European nations to the EU will few limits on numbers (which I was generally in favour of BTW) 3. A recession in 2009 that saw UK public services and incomes squeezed to the limits 4. A lacklustre Remain campaign dominated by the Conservatice modernising wing which was not helped by piss poor Labour support.... maybe then I would buy into the Arab Spring having a part......(assisted by N Farage et al...)
no mention of Red Buses from me...
The most interesting part of it is the unstated assumption that Brexit isn't a positive development.
Some things don't need to be said.
When all is said and done I think it is, Brexit is going about as well as could have been hoped for. We have a trade deal about to be signed with Europe and we've rolled over trade deals with all our other major partners too - the only way is up from here.
The EU is a dysfunctional institution. Once we've gotten out of it then we can build steadily a new path rather than facing these old arguments that have torn us asunder for the past four decades.
LOL
Ah, the disdainful LOL of the Remainer.
Some of us are going to knuckle down to make sure that new path is a reality. Underpinned by the knowledge that the democratic process has been greatly enhanced: both by getting out from under an EU that has a deep distrust of democracy - because those pesky voters use it to thwart their Project - and proving that the voters DO have a voice to which politicans must listen.
Not my problem that such things mean so little to you.
Not my problem that you appear to believe you can read minds, and consistently demonstrate you can't.
The LOL was at the notion that somehow all political argument over this would cease.
Of course it won't but what would be nice - given neither the announcement of a deal nor its broad substance will be at all surprising - is if debate could be focused on the substance of it. What does it mean for us? What is the likely path from here?
But I predict a load of puerile card game tosh along the lines of "blinking" or "capitulating" or - and this would be the absolute pits - "Boris hung tough and got us a great deal through his chutzpah and iron resolution".
I have quite a robust constitution but I'm not sure I can bear too much of that.
I think that for the next umpteen decades we will continue to make lots of little arrangement with the EU on every topic under the sun (customs, standards, travel, etc) to make life easier for both sides each time creeping millimetre by millimetre back to where we started (although not formally).
Could well be, yes. Not the worst outcome if so. I certainly don't like the look of the alternative fork which has now become a possibility. "We're not really a European nation. We're England!". That one.
When it comes down to it, England is more European than everything else.
Then why is the British diaspora overwhelmingly in the anglophone world? There are more Brits in Australia alone than the entire EU. "Global Britain" as lived by ordinary monolingual Brits is anglophone - its the "elites" and commentariat who have enjoyed the advantages of second homes in Europe and European jobs.
My grandparents, working class Tory voters who worked hard and managed to put away some money, retired to Mallorca and spent a couple of very happy decades there, with full Spanish health care, courtesy of the EU. They spoke enough Spanish to get by in the shops. They were far from the "elite", despite reading the Telegraph.
Then are are people like me. When I was born, my dad was a farm labourer and my mum a secretary. There wasn't much money when I grew up, but I went to grammar school, then to uni (first in the family) and then, thanks to the Erasmus scheme, got my first taste of life abroad. I ended up living and working in Germany for 10 years.
Sadly, this door will be closed in future to working class lads like me, and only those with money or connections will have the opportunities that I had. It's a crying shame.
My grandparents, working class Tory voters who worked hard and managed to put away some money, retired to Mallorca and spent a couple of very happy decades there, with full Spanish health care, courtesy of the EU. They spoke enough Spanish to get by in the shops. They were far from the "elite", despite reading the Telegraph.
Spain is by a wide margin the most popular destination for Brits in the EU - yet its barely half the number who have gone to Australia (who will almost all have to have been working age, unlike many of their Spanish compatriots) and not far ahead of the number of working age Brits who have gone to each of Canada, and the US. There are more expat Brits in New Zealand and South Africa than our nearest neighbour France - and twice as many as in Germany. People have voted with their feet.
But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
It's behind the paywall so I could only read the first few sentences. But the idea that the various countries of the UK are not European is so self-evidently stupid AF that it could only have appeared in the Tory press. The UK, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandis, Ireland are all essentially the same. Where we differ it is narcissism of small differences stuff, trivial cultural differences that can create a barrier to understanding but don't mean we actually differ - like language. The countries to the south and east start to be a bit different, but not much. Then we have those various offshoots of European culture, the settler colonies of the new world. They obviously have many similarities to the mother country (the most British country I have ever spent time in is Barbados, for instance). But their status as former colonies also marks them as different and over time those differences have tended to grow. The largest and most successful of our former settler colonies, the US, is completely different from us, much more culturally distinct than say the Netherlands is. Even the most superficially similar, eg New Zealand, is probably more distinct from us than European Ireland is. But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
We are not "essentially the same" that is complete codswallop.
Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Well, as someone who's lived in 4 European countries and is very familiar with half a dozen more, I do think we're broadly the same culture, and distinctively different from e.g. US culture. I agree there was an important difference at the time of the founding of the EU that some countries had been occupied and we hadn't, but I know from my parents' generation that ending war in Europe was a powerful argument for the EEC for many - we weren't occupied. but the effects of stupid nationalism had led to extreme misery for millions in this country, and any institution that was dedicated to preventing that was seen as a good thing.
Life has moved on and few people worry that Germany will invade France or Britain or vice versa any time soon. But the cultural differences have further diminished too, thanks to the internet and cheap travel. Urban teenagers in Britain are IMO more like urban teenagers in most European countries than they are like elderly British folk (like me).
I'm not a Euro-evangelist in the sense that I think European values are always best - we should consider whether other value systems in e.g. India have merits that we don't, and I think American small-town culture has its virtues too which we denigrate too easily. But it's a mistake to argue that European culture doesn't exist.
The work rate of Liz Truss is phenomenal. Not only has she grandfathered (or bettered) all significant UK trade deals it held via the EU in 11 months, except Turkey, but she's also now advancing a US-UK mini-deal: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55341970
On top of that, don't forget she's also Minister for Women and Equalities.
She gave a common sense decision to the consultation on reform of the Gender Recognition Act in September and, today, she's hit out at identity politics and signalled a pivot away from “fashionable” race, sexuality and gender issues to poverty and geographical disparities - including rebasing it in the north:
I have been seriously considering her odds as next Prime Minister this morning. After reviewing the market, I think the 100/1 with William Hill is stonking value. I've hoovered up as much as I can.
DYOR.
could be an excellent trading bet. i suspect in the end she'll angle for being someone's coe, but might run to help get her name in the frame.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
If Scotland joined the EU they would get the benefits from the EU FTA. 🤦🏻♂️
You're making the same failed arguments you made when you voted and supported Remain. It doesn't work.
Even an EU FTA means some tariffs on UK and EU trade, No Deal means heavy tariffs
Same old Remainer Project Fear.
Remain lost, get with the programme.
Your attitude to the 2016 result is exactly the same as HYUFD's attiude to the 2014 Scots result. The good news for both of you is that nothing lasts forever. The bad news for both of you is that nothing lasts forever. No political idea ever dies. History does not simply end with one side winning. 30 years ago it was blithely assumed that liberal democracy had "won". If you keep dismissing arguments idiotic putdowns we have heard constantly for five years like "you lost, get over it" then you will very soon have as much credibility as Francis Fukuyama.
No my response is very different to his and the point clearly went over your head.
HYUFD has an attitude that 2014 lasts forever (or a generation) even if the voters elect a government that says otherwise. I say it is up to the voters to decide at the ballot box.
My point though is that HYUFD is still repeating the same stale lines of fears over FTA etc that lost the 2016 referendum as if it is election winning golddust that will put the Scots back in their box.
Since it didn't work in 2016 in England, why would it work in the future in Scotland?
But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
It's behind the paywall so I could only read the first few sentences. But the idea that the various countries of the UK are not European is so self-evidently stupid AF that it could only have appeared in the Tory press. The UK, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandis, Ireland are all essentially the same. Where we differ it is narcissism of small differences stuff, trivial cultural differences that can create a barrier to understanding but don't mean we actually differ - like language. The countries to the south and east start to be a bit different, but not much. Then we have those various offshoots of European culture, the settler colonies of the new world. They obviously have many similarities to the mother country (the most British country I have ever spent time in is Barbados, for instance). But their status as former colonies also marks them as different and over time those differences have tended to grow. The largest and most successful of our former settler colonies, the US, is completely different from us, much more culturally distinct than say the Netherlands is. Even the most superficially similar, eg New Zealand, is probably more distinct from us than European Ireland is. But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
We are not "essentially the same" that is complete codswallop.
Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Certainly the UK and the major continental powers took different lessons from the experience of WW1&2, and that has shaped attitudes towards European integration. But honestly, if you walk around a small town or a big city anywhere in Western Europe, it will immediately feel familiar to anyone from the UK. The rhythm of life, the architecture, the rituals. Try the same in some American cities - you will find there may not even be a pavement to walk on. Try the same in Tokyo - it is utterly bewildering. Or India. France is 20 miles away. Ireland is a step over an invisible line. We are Europeans.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
The PPE for a flu and a COVID pandemic may well be the same.
However, the **amount** of PPE you will need depends on the time over which people are infectious and the rate of infection.
With COVID-19, it takes longer before people show symptoms and people can be contagious for longer than for flu. And the disease spreads much more easily & much more rapidly.
Whatever PPE you stockpile for flu, you will be nonetheless be overwhelmed if you are hit by a disease that is more infectious for longer periods and spreads more rapidly.
But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
It's behind the paywall so I could only read the first few sentences. But the idea that the various countries of the UK are not European is so self-evidently stupid AF that it could only have appeared in the Tory press. The UK, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandis, Ireland are all essentially the same. Where we differ it is narcissism of small differences stuff, trivial cultural differences that can create a barrier to understanding but don't mean we actually differ - like language. The countries to the south and east start to be a bit different, but not much. Then we have those various offshoots of European culture, the settler colonies of the new world. They obviously have many similarities to the mother country (the most British country I have ever spent time in is Barbados, for instance). But their status as former colonies also marks them as different and over time those differences have tended to grow. The largest and most successful of our former settler colonies, the US, is completely different from us, much more culturally distinct than say the Netherlands is. Even the most superficially similar, eg New Zealand, is probably more distinct from us than European Ireland is. But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
We are not "essentially the same" that is complete codswallop.
Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Well, as someone who's lived in 4 European countries and is very familiar with half a dozen more, I do think we're broadly the same culture, and distinctively different from e.g. US culture. I agree there was an important difference at the time of the founding of the EU that some countries had been occupied and we hadn't, but I know from my parents' generation that ending war in Europe was a powerful argument for the EEC for many - we weren't occupied. but the effects of stupid nationalism had led to extreme misery for millions in this country, and any institution that was dedicated to preventing that was seen as a good thing.
Life has moved on and few people worry that Germany will invade France or Britain or vice versa any time soon. But the cultural differences have further diminished too, thanks to the internet and cheap travel. Urban teenagers in Britain are IMO more like urban teenagers in most European countries than they are like elderly British folk (like me).
I'm not a Euro-evangelist in the sense that I think European values are always best - we should consider whether other value systems in e.g. India have merits that we don't, and I think American small-town culture has its virtues too which we denigrate too easily. But it's a mistake to argue that European culture doesn't exist.
It's also worth noting that, until 25 years ago, stupid nationalisms were causing misery in Northern Ireland and outbreaks of pain on the British mainland. Allowing people to sashay round the question of "what country are you in?" and acknowledging that there's more to democracy than a simple majority allowed British and Irish people to move on from that pain.
But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
It's what people perceive themselves to be and we Remainers never even tried making any sort of argument. My sixth form history teacher in 1992 mentioned in an unguarded moment around the time of the Danish referendum how he regretted voting remain in 1975 now that the (soon to be) EU was becoming an increasingly political project. As embarrassed by it as I am now, a couple of years earlier I had persuaded my folks to let me apply for a blue passport in my own name (back then you could be included on your mother's passport) before the new ones were introduced. This stuff matters. We Remainers only ever dealt with the economic consequences of leaving not the identity consequences of staying in. We won the economic argument but didn't even bother with the identity politics angle. Not everyone went on the journey from teenage Euroscepticism to Europilia that I did.
People see the badges of an emergent EU identity. They see the increasing ubiquity of the EU flag hanging next to a national flag in parliaments and on embassies, they hear the EU anthem on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at half-time, they understand what a constitution is (however much it is rebadged), they spend Euros on holiday, they read what happened during the Eurozone crisis, and, yes, they see (all jokes aside) the name of the EU symbolically above the name of their country on their passports. That stuff matters. As much as we liked to say the EU was something new and unique, that didn't challenge our national institutions or identity, if it looks like a country and sounds like a country people will think its supposed to be a new country of which we were citizens. That was never faced up to and met head on - rather than any attempt to positively sell such matters they were essentially ignored, laughed at ("Blue Passports!" is now basically a punchline) or treated as a trade off for prosperity. As a result, since Maastricht, the identity politics aspect of the Remain case was very weak indeed and, as we have seen, identity politics matter very much. It's no good just saying "well, it's not a problem for the Irish/Greeks/Germans/Dutch - we must be racist/stupid" etc etc because, for obvious reasons, insulting your electorate doesn't win votes.
This was going to happen one day because no-one (Blair mostly) faced up to these uncomfortable political optics. With the identity stuff we treated peple like mugs. If we had won in 2016, then what? Would people committed to Leave have just shrugged and let it go? Hardly. 2014 hasn't settled anything long term in Scotland - hell 2016 didn't settle very much in the UK as a whole. Unless we did a lot better selling the EU to the English and Welsh people (as well as not insignificant numbers in Scotland an NI) then this was going to happen, if not now, then later. Whoever took over from Cameron in 2020 would have been dealing with a UKIP as motivated and probably stronger than it had been in 2015.
De-lurking again ... two great posts in two days getting to the crux of matters ... Robert's yesterday on privilege and this one today from Doug on European vs British identity.
IIRC Tegnell opposed the Who move to recommend face masks as he believed it would make people think Covid was airborne.
It’s very obviously airborne! Jesus wept.
The papers coming out of S.Korea (where they do /real/ test & trace) demonstrate this without question. You can track who does & doesn’t get infected in a given event by whether they’re sitting downstream of the airflow from the index case for that event.
Are these people simply ignoring this work altogether? What is wrong with them?
@DougSeal re your post. We Remainers never made the sovereignty argument because never did we imagine the level of insecurity around their nation, and sense of identity that leavers have displayed.
But it's self-evidently daft. Our languages are European, amalgams of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Norse and, via French, Latin. Our primary religions are either Protestant (in common with the rest of northern Europe) or Roman Catholic (the Europeanness of which ought not to require explanation). Our legal system is a mixture of Germanic-influenced common law and the Roman traditions (via Justinian). Our historic aristocracy was effectively French until the 14th century. In the 17th century we replaced our monarch with a Dutch one, and in the 18th with Germans (the famous Blackadder riposte to Captain Darling's claim to be "as British as Queen Victoria!" was "So your father's German, you're half German, and you married a German?").
The British system of constitutional monarchy is broadly similar to that of the Netherlands (for obvious historical reasons) as well as that of Sweden and Denmark. The British Empire finds its most obvious historical relation with the Spanish, and as a trading nation the British have traditionally been most comparable with the Dutch, though the British empire's (or, to be more precise, the British East India Company's) gradual eclipse of the Dutch equivalent somewhat obscures the history.
Like it or not, our closest peers in the modern world are the European nations, with whom we share considerably history. We are, of course, closely bound to the former empire and colonies, and as these are larger in size than most European colonies, this forms a larger part of our understanding of the world.
I am really not sure what anyone hopes to achieve by saying that Britain is not a European country. It's not as though all European countries are alike! Hungary is cited as an example of a European country, but it is rare in that its language is not Indo-European at all! Greece falls on the opposing side of a 1700-year-old schism between the Eastern and Western Roman Empires, and a near-thousand-year-old schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, never mind having spent considerable time under Ottoman rule, but is apparently considered to be just as European as France. Why would these countries be European and Britain not?
Did you read the piece? Many of your 'points' mirror facts mentioned by the author.
But you're wrong about our "closest peers in the modern world" unless you mean closest geographically which isn't really relevant.
It's behind the paywall so I could only read the first few sentences. But the idea that the various countries of the UK are not European is so self-evidently stupid AF that it could only have appeared in the Tory press. The UK, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the Scandis, Ireland are all essentially the same. Where we differ it is narcissism of small differences stuff, trivial cultural differences that can create a barrier to understanding but don't mean we actually differ - like language. The countries to the south and east start to be a bit different, but not much. Then we have those various offshoots of European culture, the settler colonies of the new world. They obviously have many similarities to the mother country (the most British country I have ever spent time in is Barbados, for instance). But their status as former colonies also marks them as different and over time those differences have tended to grow. The largest and most successful of our former settler colonies, the US, is completely different from us, much more culturally distinct than say the Netherlands is. Even the most superficially similar, eg New Zealand, is probably more distinct from us than European Ireland is. But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
We are not "essentially the same" that is complete codswallop.
Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Well, as someone who's lived in 4 European countries and is very familiar with half a dozen more, I do think we're broadly the same culture, and distinctively different from e.g. US culture. I agree there was an important difference at the time of the founding of the EU that some countries had been occupied and we hadn't, but I know from my parents' generation that ending war in Europe was a powerful argument for the EEC for many - we weren't occupied. but the effects of stupid nationalism had led to extreme misery for millions in this country, and any institution that was dedicated to preventing that was seen as a good thing.
Life has moved on and few people worry that Germany will invade France or Britain or vice versa any time soon. But the cultural differences have further diminished too, thanks to the internet and cheap travel. Urban teenagers in Britain are IMO more like urban teenagers in most European countries than they are like elderly British folk (like me).
I'm not a Euro-evangelist in the sense that I think European values are always best - we should consider whether other value systems in e.g. India have merits that we don't, and I think American small-town culture has its virtues too which we denigrate too easily. But it's a mistake to argue that European culture doesn't exist.
In many ways we are more European but there are significant areas where we are closer to the US - dramatic arts and music being the main ones. One can easily imagine someone from the UK or Ireland becoming the host of the biggest US late night talk show a la James Corden, but it is harder to imagine someone from another EU country doing the same. The cinematic versions of all-American comic book heroes like Batman, Spiderman and Superman have all been played by Brits within the last decade. There's a reason why British films are not included in a "foreign" category at the Oscars.
That's not surprising, the trade deals that Japan has with the UK and EU means that Japanese companies no longer have any need of local manufacturing to avoid tariffs. The cost base of manufacturing in Japan is significantly lower because of automated production lines vs manual ones in Europe.
It's also another sign that Nissan are separating themselves from Renault and eventually they will buy themselves out of the alliance.
quite tenuous... I prefer the analysis of 1. Blair's Iraq War - demolishing trust in politicians 2. Accession of the Eastern European nations to the EU will few limits on numbers (which I was generally in favour of BTW) 3. A recession in 2009 that saw UK public services and incomes squeezed to the limits 4. A lacklustre Remain campaign dominated by the Conservatice modernising wing which was not helped by piss poor Labour support.... maybe then I would buy into the Arab Spring having a part......(assisted by N Farage et al...)
no mention of Red Buses from me...
The most interesting part of it is the unstated assumption that Brexit isn't a positive development.
Some things don't need to be said.
When all is said and done I think it is, Brexit is going about as well as could have been hoped for. We have a trade deal about to be signed with Europe and we've rolled over trade deals with all our other major partners too - the only way is up from here.
The EU is a dysfunctional institution. Once we've gotten out of it then we can build steadily a new path rather than facing these old arguments that have torn us asunder for the past four decades.
LOL
Ah, the disdainful LOL of the Remainer.
Some of us are going to knuckle down to make sure that new path is a reality. Underpinned by the knowledge that the democratic process has been greatly enhanced: both by getting out from under an EU that has a deep distrust of democracy - because those pesky voters use it to thwart their Project - and proving that the voters DO have a voice to which politicans must listen.
Not my problem that such things mean so little to you.
Not my problem that you appear to believe you can read minds, and consistently demonstrate you can't.
The LOL was at the notion that somehow all political argument over this would cease.
Of course it won't but what would be nice - given neither the announcement of a deal nor its broad substance will be at all surprising - is if debate could be focused on the substance of it. What does it mean for us? What is the likely path from here?
But I predict a load of puerile card game tosh along the lines of "blinking" or "capitulating" or - and this would be the absolute pits - "Boris hung tough and got us a great deal through his chutzpah and iron resolution".
I have quite a robust constitution but I'm not sure I can bear too much of that.
I think that for the next umpteen decades we will continue to make lots of little arrangement with the EU on every topic under the sun (customs, standards, travel, etc) to make life easier for both sides each time creeping millimetre by millimetre back to where we started (although not formally).
Could well be, yes. Not the worst outcome if so. I certainly don't like the look of the alternative fork which has now become a possibility. "We're not really a European nation. We're England!". That one.
When it comes down to it, England is more European than everything else.
Then why is the British diaspora overwhelmingly in the anglophone world? There are more Brits in Australia alone than the entire EU. "Global Britain" as lived by ordinary monolingual Brits is anglophone - its the "elites" and commentariat who have enjoyed the advantages of second homes in Europe and European jobs.
My grandparents, working class Tory voters who worked hard and managed to put away some money, retired to Mallorca and spent a couple of very happy decades there, with full Spanish health care, courtesy of the EU. They spoke enough Spanish to get by in the shops. They were far from the "elite", despite reading the Telegraph.
Then are are people like me. When I was born, my dad was a farm labourer and my mum a secretary. There wasn't much money when I grew up, but I went to grammar school, then to uni (first in the family) and then, thanks to the Erasmus scheme, got my first taste of life abroad. I ended up living and working in Germany for 10 years.
Sadly, this door will be closed in future to working class lads like me, and only those with money or connections will have the opportunities that I had. It's a crying shame.
Agreed, it boils my blood to see rich Tories like Rees-Mogg blithely take away opportunities that he can afford to buy for his own children.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
We will only still get a deal with the EU by accepting some LPF conditions.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
Johnson’s technique for dealing with problems is to let them run out of control, building to a point of sufficient crisis that delay is no longer viable. That way the choice becomes perversely easier because there are fewer options left. Wait long enough and there might be only one.
That is how he has dealt with Brexit. He imagines that brinkmanship is a negotiating strategy to wring concessions out of Brussels, but in reality it is just a way to simplify the decision by eliminating options that needed time to develop. He lets procrastination do the heavy lifting. He can then tell himself (and his audience) that the final outcome, while not perfect, is the best available solution. And maybe it is. But only because it is so late in the day and all the better solutions have long since expired.
It is a chaotic way to run anything: leaving it all to the last minute, relying on a critical mass of external pressure to get motivated. As a way of governing in a pandemic it is disastrous because there is no slack time between deadlines. The moment to make the tough choices is always now. The rate at which good options decay is exponential. The virus thrives on indecision. Johnson’s method is effective for one thing, though: it guarantees a sustained pitch of political drama, with the figure of the prime minister lit centre stage. It forces the nation to hang on his word, waiting for him to act, while the consequences of his inaction play out. That bathes him in an aura of power, but it is not leadership.
My grandparents, working class Tory voters who worked hard and managed to put away some money, retired to Mallorca and spent a couple of very happy decades there, with full Spanish health care, courtesy of the EU. They spoke enough Spanish to get by in the shops. They were far from the "elite", despite reading the Telegraph.
Spain is by a wide margin the most popular destination for Brits in the EU - yet its barely half the number who have gone to Australia (who will almost all have to have been working age, unlike many of their Spanish compatriots) and not far ahead of the number of working age Brits who have gone to each of Canada, and the US. There are more expat Brits in New Zealand and South Africa than our nearest neighbour France - and twice as many as in Germany. People have voted with their feet.
It's hardly surprising that former British colonies have a pull factor and doesn't say anything about how European we are.
IIRC Tegnell opposed the Who move to recommend face masks as he believed it would make people think Covid was airborne.
It’s very obviously airborne! Jesus wept.
The papers coming out of S.Korea (where they do /real/ test & trace) demonstrate this without question. You can track who does & doesn’t get infected in a given event by whether they’re sitting downstream of the airflow from the index case for that event.
Are these people simply ignoring this work altogether? What is wrong with them?
That was then, this is now. In the early days it was all about hand sanitising and how we all touch our own faces 300 times a minute.
@DougSeal re your post. We Remainers never made the sovereignty argument because never did we imagine the level of insecurity around their nation, and sense of identity that leavers have displayed.
Remainers were and are generally more confident in their (national) skins.
Your "...never did we imagine..." is the issue. That failure of imagination points to a failure to connect with the electorate. It is not "Leavers" we had the problem with, it was the undecided, the nervous, and that is where we failed. "We Remainers were and are generally more confident..." - damn right. But we never tried to bring anyone less confident with us. That's how elections are lost - by assuming that all right thinking people think your way and not bothering with the rest. Succssful politicians bring people on board - they don't play to their own gallery.
Truss taking up the cudgels in the culture war in the Telegraph this morning feels like the opening salvo in a tory leadership contest.
Liz Truss needs to phone her local drama school for some private coaching. It is noticeable that even when speaking to friendly audiences, she waits for applause that never comes. She needs to polish her delivery to cue the audience to laugh or clap. Even watching videos of stand-up comedy or chat shows will help.
My grandparents, working class Tory voters who worked hard and managed to put away some money, retired to Mallorca and spent a couple of very happy decades there, with full Spanish health care, courtesy of the EU. They spoke enough Spanish to get by in the shops. They were far from the "elite", despite reading the Telegraph.
Spain is by a wide margin the most popular destination for Brits in the EU - yet its barely half the number who have gone to Australia (who will almost all have to have been working age, unlike many of their Spanish compatriots) and not far ahead of the number of working age Brits who have gone to each of Canada, and the US. There are more expat Brits in New Zealand and South Africa than our nearest neighbour France - and twice as many as in Germany. People have voted with their feet.
It's hardly surprising that former British colonies have a pull factor and doesn't say anything about how European we are.
Also, do we know how many of those British citizens in NZ etc are immigrants to those countries from the UK and how many are born in those countries but have a British passport via parents or other relatives?
Mixing with one or two other households may indeed be less social mixing than normally occurs. Many people won't be going to work, schools will be closed etc
Mixing with one or two other households may indeed be less social mixing than normally occurs. Many people won't be going to work, schools will be closed etc
I guess the trouble is you are mixing with group A before Christmas, group B during Christmas, and group A again afterwards.
It's a state aid issue and I think it's one of our major issues too, the EU wanted to lock UK companies out of public procurement. It's a positive move from both sides IMO.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
@DougSeal re your post. We Remainers never made the sovereignty argument because never did we imagine the level of insecurity around their nation, and sense of identity that leavers have displayed.
Remainers were and are generally more confident in their (national) skins.
Your "...never did we imagine..." is the issue. That failure of imagination points to a failure to connect with the electorate. It is not "Leavers" we had the problem with, it was the undecided, the nervous, and that is where we failed. "We Remainers were and are generally more confident..." - damn right. But we never tried to bring anyone less confident with us. That's how elections are lost - by assuming that all right thinking people think your way and not bothering with the rest. Succssful politicians bring people on board - they don't play to their own gallery.
I see your point but that would have been to an extent infantilising those people.
Can you rationally explain to someone why being in the EU is nothing like being a slave?
And ok for those not quite as insecure but wavering, perhaps we should have had David Davis on loop reminding us that we were always sovereign, to a background of The British Grenadier.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
We will only still get a deal with the EU by accepting some LPF conditions.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
So what?
People don't care about losing a single market if there's bigger factors involved.
Again you're still parroting the same 2016 Project Fear bullshit that lost you the last referendum. You'll lose the next one too if that's all you have.
quite tenuous... I prefer the analysis of 1. Blair's Iraq War - demolishing trust in politicians 2. Accession of the Eastern European nations to the EU will few limits on numbers (which I was generally in favour of BTW) 3. A recession in 2009 that saw UK public services and incomes squeezed to the limits 4. A lacklustre Remain campaign dominated by the Conservatice modernising wing which was not helped by piss poor Labour support.... maybe then I would buy into the Arab Spring having a part......(assisted by N Farage et al...)
no mention of Red Buses from me...
The most interesting part of it is the unstated assumption that Brexit isn't a positive development.
Some things don't need to be said.
When all is said and done I think it is, Brexit is going about as well as could have been hoped for. We have a trade deal about to be signed with Europe and we've rolled over trade deals with all our other major partners too - the only way is up from here.
The EU is a dysfunctional institution. Once we've gotten out of it then we can build steadily a new path rather than facing these old arguments that have torn us asunder for the past four decades.
LOL
Ah, the disdainful LOL of the Remainer.
Some of us are going to knuckle down to make sure that new path is a reality. Underpinned by the knowledge that the democratic process has been greatly enhanced: both by getting out from under an EU that has a deep distrust of democracy - because those pesky voters use it to thwart their Project - and proving that the voters DO have a voice to which politicans must listen.
Not my problem that such things mean so little to you.
Not my problem that you appear to believe you can read minds, and consistently demonstrate you can't.
The LOL was at the notion that somehow all political argument over this would cease.
Of course it won't but what would be nice - given neither the announcement of a deal nor its broad substance will be at all surprising - is if debate could be focused on the substance of it. What does it mean for us? What is the likely path from here?
But I predict a load of puerile card game tosh along the lines of "blinking" or "capitulating" or - and this would be the absolute pits - "Boris hung tough and got us a great deal through his chutzpah and iron resolution".
I have quite a robust constitution but I'm not sure I can bear too much of that.
I think that for the next umpteen decades we will continue to make lots of little arrangement with the EU on every topic under the sun (customs, standards, travel, etc) to make life easier for both sides each time creeping millimetre by millimetre back to where we started (although not formally).
Could well be, yes. Not the worst outcome if so. I certainly don't like the look of the alternative fork which has now become a possibility. "We're not really a European nation. We're England!". That one.
When it comes down to it, England is more European than everything else.
Then why is the British diaspora overwhelmingly in the anglophone world? There are more Brits in Australia alone than the entire EU. "Global Britain" as lived by ordinary monolingual Brits is anglophone - its the "elites" and commentariat who have enjoyed the advantages of second homes in Europe and European jobs.
Because counting expats is a rubbish measure. It tells you about the preferences of the small percentage (5% or so?) who, for whatever reason, choose to go and live in another country. They really aren't a representative sample.
Who are a representative sample? European second home owners?
Of course not. I imagine most people in Britain interact with "abroad" by short trips; for holidays mostly and work rather less. I don't have the stats, but if you look at the destination list for a typical UK airport....
Our complete list of scheduled arrivals in the Flatlands tomorrow (yes, it is a quiet airport): Riga; Vilnius; Gdansk; Warsaw; Poznan; Tenerife South; Krakow; Bucharest
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
So if you want six months at pandemic levels then that is 25 years worth at normal levels.
Which works for items with no expiry date, it doesn't work for anything which expires.
Could be we see fewer (or slower increase) in cases but more deaths (with lag, of course) as there's actually less spreading in general for the reasons in the first tweet but more spreading to vulnerable people due to families getting together.
Also worth noting that the first is very dependent on time spent with (only) families. For those who only have a few days off, infectious periods may span normal life and extended family spreading.
@OldKingCole I can't even imagine a world without maternity leave. Mad.
I can recall a world where women talked of having to leave their jobs because they'd married. Mother-in-law for one. My mother ran her own pharmacy so the issue didn't arise!
Yes. My father in law also remembers having a round of redundancies where the married women were targeted specifically because it was thought that their income wasn't necessary for their households.
My mother was a teacher before WW2 and had to give up when she married in 1941. She returned in about 1950 when the law was changed. To this day primary school teachers are usually called Miss and I had one male friend who became a primary school teacher in the 1960s and was called Miss.
Mixing with one or two other households may indeed be less social mixing than normally occurs. Many people won't be going to work, schools will be closed etc
I guess the trouble is you are mixing with group A before Christmas, group B during Christmas, and group A again afterwards.
And the experiment has been tried- Canadian Thanksgiving, US Thanksgiving... Why should Christmas be any different?
(Of course, in the likely event that it goes wrong, it will be the public's fault for not following the guidance.)
Then are are people like me. When I was born, my dad was a farm labourer and my mum a secretary. There wasn't much money when I grew up, but I went to grammar school, then to uni (first in the family) and then, thanks to the Erasmus scheme, got my first taste of life abroad. I ended up living and working in Germany for 10 years.
Erasmus is an intensely formative experience that definitely incubates a European identity. Brexit can't be sustained if the UK continues to participate.
My dad dropped me at Newcastle Central Station on a dark September morning when it was pissing down. At dusk the next day I stepped out of Marseille-Saint-Charles and looked down the famous steps and along the Boulevard d'Athènes bathed in a golden Mediterranean sunset. It was quite a moment in my young life.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
We will only still get a deal with the EU by accepting some LPF conditions.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
So what?
People don't care about losing a single market if there's bigger factors involved.
Again you're still parroting the same 2016 Project Fear bullshit that lost you the last referendum. You'll lose the next one too if that's all you have.
Oh they do and of course 70% of Scottish exports go to England which is even more than the less than 50% of UK exports that go to the EU so tariffs will hit them even harder.
Plus Leave arguably only got to 52% of the vote in 2016 UK wide by promising to stay in the single market, it was only FPTP that enabled the Tories to win a UK majority on 43% of the vote to leave the single market as well as the EU in 2019. 43% can win a general election but 43% would not have won a referendum.
Were some people saying peak Indy/SNP had passed a few days ago?
Cough.
An outlier. 17th outlier in a row, but still an outlier.
Some unknowable but significant part of that 58% must be down to Johnson's snaggle-toothed and flabby presence in No.10. The SNP have to act while here is still there.
To delay action is the same as death, as Father Lenin said.
I know it. Still have pm Gove as a saver tho’.
Boris vs Nicola, in the immediate aftermath of Covid, Brexit and wall-to-wall coverage of the First Minister is obviously optimal for Indy. Which is why there will not be a referendum. Simples.
It may be uncomfortable for Boris to veto a referendum if SNP sweep the polls in May, but it would be a lot more uncomfortable to preside over a referendum which breaks up the UK.
Next.
The last heroic stand of the Union, shut up and go away followed by fingers stuck in ears. I always knew it would end with a whimper rather than a bang, but I didn't think it would be quite that abject.
Mixing with one or two other households may indeed be less social mixing than normally occurs. Many people won't be going to work, schools will be closed etc
Yep. Also, between the very busy pre Christmas period and the relative calm afterwards, we probably won't actually be able to separate out the effect of the Christmas mixing itself.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
So if you want six months at pandemic levels then that is 25 years worth at normal levels.
Which works for items with no expiry date, it doesn't work for anything which expires.
What do you mean by "doesn't work"? Too expensive? Not enough warehouse space?
Let's say a single N95 mask bought in bulk costs £1, and they expire after 5 years, last for 1 day in use, and we have 2m people (NHS and care home staff) who need them. 180 days x 2m people x £1 a pop is £360m. To roll over the stock is £72m a year. Gloves, aprons and so on are presumably cheaper per unit. Presumably running the warehouses costs a few million per year. We could run it all up to less than £150m a year to maintain a 6-month supply at pandemic levels of usage. These are very much back-of-a-napkin numbers, but I've erred on the side of higher costs and round numbers to make the sums easier.
In many ways we are more European but there are significant areas where we are closer to the US - dramatic arts and music being the main ones. One can easily imagine someone from the UK or Ireland becoming the host of the biggest US late night talk show a la James Corden, but it is harder to imagine someone from another EU country doing the same. The cinematic versions of all-American comic book heroes like Batman, Spiderman and Superman have all been played by Brits within the last decade. There's a reason why British films are not included in a "foreign" category at the Oscars.
Yes, I don't want to overstate it - language is still an issue, though English is pervasive among Europeans under 40, and Anglo-American music and movies are big across Europe. One can make an argument that English-speaking culture has colonised much of the world with reverse influences more limited - although TV series like The Killing and The Bridge are very successful in relative terms, they are still a niche in British culture.
I was thinking more in terms of social norms, though - attitudes to work, fun, socialising, sex, drinking, drugs, etc. have become more similar across urban Europe in ways that many older folk find partly attractive and partly repellent, but in any case quite similar across European borders. It's interesting to consider why some things travel and some don't. American light entertainment is almost universally enjoyed, while American preoccupation with religion seems eccentric in much of Europe.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he has not yet received the Russian-made coronavirus vaccine but would do so when it was approved for his age group.
Mr Putin, 68, speaking at his annual end-of-year press conference, hailed the Sputnik V vaccine as safe and effective and said other age groups were receiving it first.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
We will only still get a deal with the EU by accepting some LPF conditions.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
I think far more resonant than these issues around tariffs will be the future of the currency. Losing the reserves and backing of the Bank of England via "sterlingisation" is hugely consequential. Knock on effects for pensions and savings. Combine that with the loss of the Barnett transfers, Scotland's deficit etc and you are facing an extremely bleak prospect indeed. So far, the SNP has failed completely to come up with a credible economic prospectus.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says he has not yet received the Russian-made coronavirus vaccine but would do so when it was approved for his age group.
Mr Putin, 68, speaking at his annual end-of-year press conference, hailed the Sputnik V vaccine as safe and effective and said other age groups were receiving it first.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
The amount of PPE you need depends on the characteristics of the disease. If you stockpile 6 months for a flu pandemic, and you are hit by a disease for which the infection period is, say, twice as long, and which spreads three times as rapidly, then you are already down to about a month.
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
I also believe the NAO found 184 million items of PPE were not fit for purpose.
The weird thing here is that we ought have had enormous stockpiles of PPE, of the kind that would make panic buying unnecessary. The UK was rated as #1 in the world for pandemic preparedness precisely because we were supposed to have these stockpiles. Watch about a minute of this to see what this was meant to look like as of 2018, it's quite spooky: https://youtu.be/RmGiDUczhqQ?t=295
But, when the need came, where was the stockpile? Apparently some of it was sold off, some as late as January 2020! Other parts had expired, going beyond safe use-by dates. I can't entirely blame the government for panic-buying if there was truly no other option, but the fact that there was no other option is a scandal in and of itself.
That pandemic preparedness rating was for flu. That's what we and many other countries were focused on.
The PPE is the same for flu.
Sure, but the rating for the UK's pandemic planning was based upon how the UK would fight influenza. So it's a red herring. The rating based upon how we fight influenza has little bearing on how ready we were for fighting COVID-19. I would say it's quite clear that our PPE stockpile and the supply chains were not remotely adequate for the latter.
Obviously the flu anti-virals are useless. But look at the video: there are also stacks and stacks of boxes with labels like 3M and Nitrex - this is PPE. The same PPE you'd want in a novel flu pandemic was the PPE we needed for COVID-19, yet there were shortages almost immediately. If anything, we got a lucky break because the first wave was only fairly brief, and yet we were out of PPE almost immediately. The care home -> hospital -> care home transmission network was so dangerous because very few people in that chain had access to the necessary PPE, and this is where a large proportion of our deaths came from.
How much PPE do you stockpile though? Three months? Six months?
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
But the whole point of stockpiling is to be able to deal with a pandemic. You're meant to expect that you're going to need to use lots of it! That's why you do it! You're meant to stockpile for 6-12 months of usage at pandemic levels, because why would you stockpile otherwise? Again, from the documentary: "Dotted around the country are secret depots housing vast stockpiles, all poised for the next big outbreak. Protective kit so that health workers can carry out their job safely... It is critical that the right supplies are in the right place at the right time". This was 2018, so I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what changed in the intervening year-and-a-bit.
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
So if you want six months at pandemic levels then that is 25 years worth at normal levels.
Which works for items with no expiry date, it doesn't work for anything which expires.
What do you mean by "doesn't work"? Too expensive? Not enough warehouse space?
Let's say a single N95 mask bought in bulk costs £1, and they expire after 5 years, last for 1 day in use, and we have 2m people (NHS and care home staff) who need them. 180 days x 2m people x £1 a pop is £360m. To roll over the stock is £72m a year. Gloves, aprons and so on are presumably cheaper per unit. Presumably running the warehouses costs a few million per year. We could run it all up to less than £150m a year to maintain a 6-month supply at pandemic levels of usage. These are very much back-of-a-napkin numbers, but I've erred on the side of higher costs and round numbers to make the sums easier.
Final note on public procurement, I think it shows that both sides now accept that this is going tnbe a fairly standard off the shelf trade deal. Our trade deals with other third countries allow for reciprocal public procurement, it would be odd if the EU one didn't. It's absolutely great for UK companies as they have got 27 governments and the EU to sell to and from what I can tell it was a huge sticking point that the EU wanted one way access for EU companies to be able to get UK public contracts but to lock UK companies out of the single market.
More and more it feels as though the EU has realised that their "consequences for leaving" stance was the roadblock to a deal and are dropping all of these measures and our final deal with the EU is going to look a lot like the Canada/EU deal, almost identical with a few extra lines on shipping and haulage rights.
Didn’t you get the brief from Philip ? We no longer have to face the arguments which have torn us asunder....
Brexit not Sindy.
We will move on from arguments about Europe primarily to other arguments and Sindyref II is going to be up there near the top.
I for one will be cheering on from the sidelines the Yes campaign in the inevitable second Sindyref. Only once Scotland becomes a sovereign country can and will it start to move on from every issue being a battle with London.
There will be no legal SindyrefII allowed by this Tory government.
The SNP would of course blame London for any problems with Scexit exactly as London will blame Brussels for any problems with Brexit plus of course once we leave the SM and CU in January Scexit would mean tariffs on all Scottish exports to England and vice versa
Er, not if there is an Anglo-Scottish FTA.
That would only be possible if Scotland decided not to rejoin the EU and even so some tariffs would be likely as there will still be minimal tariffs for goods from the EU to the UK even with a UK and EU FTA and more limited access for UK services to the EU
Scotland would be outside the EU initially and would need an FTA with rUK immediately. Once we rejoin our European friends I think we could figure out a special status like NI has, the obstacle to that was London not Brussels.
Why should the rUK prioritise a FTA with an independent Scotland over FTAs with vastly bigger economies like India and the USA etc? NI only has a special status because of the Troubles, the GFA and its border with an EU nation, that does not apply to Scotland.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
Brussels has been desperate to get a deal with the UK and to bind the UK as close to Europe as possible.
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
Brussels has made clear there can only be a FTA with the UK with UK agreement on LPF conditions at least and some continued EU access to UK fishing waters at minimum
Because the EU want a deal including those. There will be a deal most likely it seems since they've moved on the isses that were blocking a deal. The UK never intended to deny all access to UK waters - quotas are the real issue not access.
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
We will only still get a deal with the EU by accepting some LPF conditions.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
So what?
People don't care about losing a single market if there's bigger factors involved.
Again you're still parroting the same 2016 Project Fear bullshit that lost you the last referendum. You'll lose the next one too if that's all you have.
Oh they do and of course 70% of Scottish exports go to England which is even more than the less than 50% of UK exports that go to the EU so tariffs will hit them even harder.
Plus Leave arguably only got to 52% of the vote in 2016 UK wide by promising to stay in the single market, it was only FPTP that enabled the Tories to win a UK majority on 43% of the vote to leave the single market as well as the EU in 2019. 43% can win a general election but 43% would not have won a referendum.
@DougSeal re your post. We Remainers never made the sovereignty argument because never did we imagine the level of insecurity around their nation, and sense of identity that leavers have displayed.
Remainers were and are generally more confident in their (national) skins.
Your "...never did we imagine..." is the issue. That failure of imagination points to a failure to connect with the electorate. It is not "Leavers" we had the problem with, it was the undecided, the nervous, and that is where we failed. "We Remainers were and are generally more confident..." - damn right. But we never tried to bring anyone less confident with us. That's how elections are lost - by assuming that all right thinking people think your way and not bothering with the rest. Succssful politicians bring people on board - they don't play to their own gallery.
I see your point but that would have been to an extent infantilising those people.
Can you rationally explain to someone why being in the EU is nothing like being a slave?
And ok for those not quite as insecure but wavering, perhaps we should have had David Davis on loop reminding us that we were always sovereign, to a background of The British Grenadier.
That flippancy is the problem. You're dismissing (perhaps you're being ironic) even the waiverers as being nationalistic idiots. You're assuming that the benefits are obvious and the fears incabable of being addressed by any rational person. That's why we lost.
Comments
Then we have those various offshoots of European culture, the settler colonies of the new world. They obviously have many similarities to the mother country (the most British country I have ever spent time in is Barbados, for instance). But their status as former colonies also marks them as different and over time those differences have tended to grow. The largest and most successful of our former settler colonies, the US, is completely different from us, much more culturally distinct than say the Netherlands is. Even the most superficially similar, eg New Zealand, is probably more distinct from us than European Ireland is. But it is stupid to argue about it really because the US, Australia, Chile, Mexico etc are all basically European countries too.
You're making the same failed arguments you made when you voted and supported Remain. It doesn't work.
Catalonia remains part of Spain 3 years after the Spanish government prevented the Catalan government from holding a legal independence referendum.
The UK government has made clear 2014 was a once in a generation vote
https://twitter.com/GlennBBC/status/1324616486397370368?s=20.
As I have pointed out even a UK and EU trade deal will likely not be completely tariff free, we would have needed to stay in the Single Market and Customs Union to have completely tariff free trade with the EU and full access for our services to the EU without restriction.
No Deal of course means heavy tariffs on EU exports to the UK and UK exports to the EU
People see the badges of an emergent EU identity. They see the increasing ubiquity of the EU flag hanging next to a national flag in parliaments and on embassies, they hear the EU anthem on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at half-time, they understand what a constitution is (however much it is rebadged), they spend Euros on holiday, they read what happened during the Eurozone crisis, and, yes, they see (all jokes aside) the name of the EU symbolically above the name of their country on their passports. That stuff matters. As much as we liked to say the EU was something new and unique, that didn't challenge our national institutions or identity, if it looks like a country and sounds like a country people will think its supposed to be a new country of which we were citizens. That was never faced up to and met head on - rather than any attempt to positively sell such matters they were essentially ignored, laughed at ("Blue Passports!" is now basically a punchline) or treated as a trade off for prosperity. As a result, since Maastricht, the identity politics aspect of the Remain case was very weak indeed and, as we have seen, identity politics matter very much. It's no good just saying "well, it's not a problem for the Irish/Greeks/Germans/Dutch - we must be racist/stupid" etc etc because, for obvious reasons, insulting your electorate doesn't win votes.
This was going to happen one day because no-one (Blair mostly) faced up to these uncomfortable political optics. With the identity stuff we treated peple like mugs. If we had won in 2016, then what? Would people committed to Leave have just shrugged and let it go? Hardly. 2014 hasn't settled anything long term in Scotland - hell 2016 didn't settle very much in the UK as a whole. Unless we did a lot better selling the EU to the English and Welsh people (as well as not insignificant numbers in Scotland an NI) then this was going to happen, if not now, then later. Whoever took over from Cameron in 2020 would have been dealing with a UKIP as motivated and probably stronger than it had been in 2015.
Certainly, we lucky islanders have rarely had existential worries about our “identity” or our borders. But France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary – to mention only the biggest – have experienced border disputes or territorial changes even within living memory. You can fight over these things, or you can try to transcend them. So thought Europeanism’s founding fathers, who included men from borderlands wanting to end a nightmare.
Rightly or wrongly, this can never be an instinctive British preoccupation. We could never have been at the heart of this “Europe”, with its quasi-religious mission to replace old nationalisms with an ersatz Europeanism seen as benign. “We have made Europe, now we have to make Europeans”, wrote one leading EU politician a few years back. We might theoretically understand the mistrust of popular sovereignty that has created the EU as a secretive elite power structure. But most of us can never feel this to be the inevitable price for peace. The 20th century taught us a different lesson: that the democratic nation is the bulwark of European civilisation, not its enemy. We instinctively feel that suppressing democratic choice is the truly dangerous course.
Remain lost, get with the programme.
London would treat Edinburgh post any Scexit as Brussels has treated London after Brexit, no favours whatsoever
That is how he has dealt with Brexit. He imagines that brinkmanship is a negotiating strategy to wring concessions out of Brussels, but in reality it is just a way to simplify the decision by eliminating options that needed time to develop. He lets procrastination do the heavy lifting. He can then tell himself (and his audience) that the final outcome, while not perfect, is the best available solution. And maybe it is. But only because it is so late in the day and all the better solutions have long since expired.
It is a chaotic way to run anything: leaving it all to the last minute, relying on a critical mass of external pressure to get motivated. As a way of governing in a pandemic it is disastrous because there is no slack time between deadlines. The moment to make the tough choices is always now. The rate at which good options decay is exponential. The virus thrives on indecision. Johnson’s method is effective for one thing, though: it guarantees a sustained pitch of political drama, with the figure of the prime minister lit centre stage. It forces the nation to hang on his word, waiting for him to act, while the consequences of his inaction play out. That bathes him in an aura of power, but it is not leadership.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/15/boris-johnson-pandemic-britain-christmas-covid
Of course the UK would agree an FTA with Scotland and it isn't about "prioritise" since as Liz Truss has shown we can negotiate FTAs simultaneously. These things aren't resolved sequentially with some mythical Obama-style "queue" to get to the back of.
You're still parroting 2016 Remain lies that lost.
https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1339524967000629248?s=20
https://twitter.com/adamparsons/status/1339526449183797248?s=20
I imagine most people in Britain interact with "abroad" by short trips; for holidays mostly and work rather less.
I don't have the stats, but if you look at the destination list for a typical UK airport....
1. Bit of a difference to survation - presumably because of difference method of reallocating undecided?
2. Economy tops concern for scots - one to keep an eye on particular in context of indy and the likely focus on economy/currency/debt issues
3. The route to a legal referendum seems difficult- there doesn't yet seem to be any emerging alternative to that
...theres still not been a focus on the logistics of indepedence either.
Interesting times (as always)
Did they think the EU was some sort of democracy where its Parliament mattered?
There would also similarly be some tariffs on Scottish exports to England and restrictions on Scottish services access to England even with a rUK and Scotland FTA if Scotland decided to leave the UK single market
If we were to say six months that seems reasonable. Only issue is that the pandemic increased our consumption of certain PPE items by over 50-fold. Meaning that we were using 12 months of PPE every single week.
Six months stockpile then is enough to get you from Monday to Thursday. Not through a pandemic.
Sadly, this door will be closed in future to working class lads like me, and only those with money or connections will have the opportunities that I had. It's a crying shame.
Life has moved on and few people worry that Germany will invade France or Britain or vice versa any time soon. But the cultural differences have further diminished too, thanks to the internet and cheap travel. Urban teenagers in Britain are IMO more like urban teenagers in most European countries than they are like elderly British folk (like me).
I'm not a Euro-evangelist in the sense that I think European values are always best - we should consider whether other value systems in e.g. India have merits that we don't, and I think American small-town culture has its virtues too which we denigrate too easily. But it's a mistake to argue that European culture doesn't exist.
https://twitter.com/DPJHodges/status/1339510336467169281
The idea that an independent Scotland can't get a deal with England is for the birds. It is Project Fear nonsense that lost the referendum in 2016. 2016 provides a template for the SNP to win a referendum and you parroting the same fear nonsense you parroted in 2016 won't win the day.
HYUFD has an attitude that 2014 lasts forever (or a generation) even if the voters elect a government that says otherwise. I say it is up to the voters to decide at the ballot box.
My point though is that HYUFD is still repeating the same stale lines of fears over FTA etc that lost the 2016 referendum as if it is election winning golddust that will put the Scots back in their box.
Since it didn't work in 2016 in England, why would it work in the future in Scotland?
But honestly, if you walk around a small town or a big city anywhere in Western Europe, it will immediately feel familiar to anyone from the UK. The rhythm of life, the architecture, the rituals. Try the same in some American cities - you will find there may not even be a pavement to walk on. Try the same in Tokyo - it is utterly bewildering. Or India.
France is 20 miles away. Ireland is a step over an invisible line. We are Europeans.
However, the **amount** of PPE you will need depends on the time over which people are infectious and the rate of infection.
With COVID-19, it takes longer before people show symptoms and people can be contagious for longer than for flu. And the disease spreads much more easily & much more rapidly.
Whatever PPE you stockpile for flu, you will be nonetheless be overwhelmed if you are hit by a disease that is more infectious for longer periods and spreads more rapidly.
https://twitter.com/talkRADIO/status/1339508676684636160
https://twitter.com/IanDunt/status/1339519221278134273
The papers coming out of S.Korea (where they do /real/ test & trace) demonstrate this without question. You can track who does & doesn’t get infected in a given event by whether they’re sitting downstream of the airflow from the index case for that event.
Are these people simply ignoring this work altogether? What is wrong with them?
@Richard_Tyndall likens being in the EU to being a slave ffs.
Remainers were and are generally more confident in their (national) skins.
It's also another sign that Nissan are separating themselves from Renault and eventually they will buy themselves out of the alliance.
Even if rUK did give Scotland a trade deal once Scotland left the UK single market as the UK has left the EU single market as I have said that trade deal would still mean some tariffs on Scottish goods sent to rUK and restrictions on the access Scottish services get to the rUK too.
Scotland would become a third country, a foreign country to the rUK and would be treated accordingly in the same way the UK is now a third country to the EU, no longer part of the club and no longer even part of the single market.
Macron also met with UVL and Charles Michel on Monday
Mixing with one or two other households may indeed be less social mixing than normally occurs. Many people won't be going to work, schools will be closed etc
Will THEY ever ever ever learn ?
This is the conundrum at the heart of Johnsonism, for me. On the one hand, we have the optimistic stuff about how Britain can do better, "best country in the world" and all that. And this is fantastic! We really should be aiming to be the best country in the world, and we should be optimistic about making real improvements in the lives of our fellow citizens and the wealth of our nation. We know that opportunities for improvement exist, and we should be optimistic about discovering more.
But as soon as any practical consideration comes up, there's this retreat to "well, we're not quite the worst" and "how could anyone have done any better?" or "it was the wrong kind of pandemic". It's all a bit "sorry, your train isn't here because there are leaves on the line". The gap between the optimism implied by the rhetoric and the low expectations that exist for real-world performance is staggering.
Can you rationally explain to someone why being in the EU is nothing like being a slave?
And ok for those not quite as insecure but wavering, perhaps we should have had David Davis on loop reminding us that we were always sovereign, to a background of The British Grenadier.
People don't care about losing a single market if there's bigger factors involved.
Again you're still parroting the same 2016 Project Fear bullshit that lost you the last referendum. You'll lose the next one too if that's all you have.
Riga; Vilnius; Gdansk; Warsaw; Poznan; Tenerife South; Krakow; Bucharest
Only Tenerife is 'Britons abroad' I would guess.
Which works for items with no expiry date, it doesn't work for anything which expires.
Also worth noting that the first is very dependent on time spent with (only) families. For those who only have a few days off, infectious periods may span normal life and extended family spreading.
Wow! That's a mammoth jump. Good news.
self-isolating day after hugging Portugal's PM and welcoming top European politicians
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9063043/Emmanuel-Macron-tests-positive-Covid-19-self-isolating.html
(Of course, in the likely event that it goes wrong, it will be the public's fault for not following the guidance.)
My dad dropped me at Newcastle Central Station on a dark September morning when it was pissing down. At dusk the next day I stepped out of Marseille-Saint-Charles and looked down the famous steps and along the Boulevard d'Athènes bathed in a golden Mediterranean sunset. It was quite a moment in my young life.
Plus Leave arguably only got to 52% of the vote in 2016 UK wide by promising to stay in the single market, it was only FPTP that enabled the Tories to win a UK majority on 43% of the vote to leave the single market as well as the EU in 2019. 43% can win a general election but 43% would not have won a referendum.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/poll-most-scots-would-reject-independence-after-considering-issues-2976093
Let's say a single N95 mask bought in bulk costs £1, and they expire after 5 years, last for 1 day in use, and we have 2m people (NHS and care home staff) who need them. 180 days x 2m people x £1 a pop is £360m. To roll over the stock is £72m a year. Gloves, aprons and so on are presumably cheaper per unit. Presumably running the warehouses costs a few million per year. We could run it all up to less than £150m a year to maintain a 6-month supply at pandemic levels of usage. These are very much back-of-a-napkin numbers, but I've erred on the side of higher costs and round numbers to make the sums easier.
Which part of this doesn't work?
[Although I do think a lot of the moaning about test and trace has been over the top]
I was thinking more in terms of social norms, though - attitudes to work, fun, socialising, sex, drinking, drugs, etc. have become more similar across urban Europe in ways that many older folk find partly attractive and partly repellent, but in any case quite similar across European borders. It's interesting to consider why some things travel and some don't. American light entertainment is almost universally enjoyed, while American preoccupation with religion seems eccentric in much of Europe.
Mr Putin, 68, speaking at his annual end-of-year press conference, hailed the Sputnik V vaccine as safe and effective and said other age groups were receiving it first.
"I am a fairly law-abiding person," he said
FAIRLY LAW-ABIDING....interesting turn of phrase.
https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/0041215f-98c9-4c34-b643-a2447ae71243
https://twitter.com/maxwalden_/status/1339537365157597184?s=20
The whole world was hit by an unknown disease that had never existed before. The main mechanism of the transmission was initially unclear, its severity, its infection rate, the incubation period, its death rate were all completely unknown. Look how long it took the WHO to recommend the wearing of face masks -- it was months.
It is not possible to plan effectively for such a disease.
Here's a test for you.
Suppose you were asked to mitigate the risk for the next existential risk to humanity.
What would you do? (Note I am not even telling you that the next existential risk will be an airborne disease, or even a disease at all). It is not possible to plan for such events.
More and more it feels as though the EU has realised that their "consequences for leaving" stance was the roadblock to a deal and are dropping all of these measures and our final deal with the EU is going to look a lot like the Canada/EU deal, almost identical with a few extra lines on shipping and haulage rights.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fDn0MvcHQ4
And push polling is irrelevant nonsense.