Ok, all these prediction headers have got me in the mood for crystal balling, so here are my top 3 calls. I’m feeling quite bullish as you can tell -
(1) The vaccination rollout will go like clockwork and the Covid-19 pandemic will be all over by the summer. By the end of 2021 the capacity of people to adjust to the new and forget the old will be demonstrated once again as this short traumatic episode takes its rightful place as a blip in the relentless onward march of humanity towards a better world. Christmas 2021 will be the best ever. An extended 5 day celebration of all that is good and wholesome. Everyone will get exactly the present they wanted from their beloved.
(2) By this time next year something else that is deeply unpleasant and looms large now will be hardly discussed. I refer here to Brexit. It won’t be boredom that kills it, it will be the very opposite. There will be a reckoning, facilitated by the great & good from all sections of society, on the template of Nelson Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation committee. It will be tough but it will work. At the end of it, Leavers and Remainers will recognize each other’s truths and they will indeed be reconciled. They will hug and make sincere promises to each other. The Bad Thing will thereafter not be mentioned.
(3) Boris Johnson will be reborn. Everyone knows our PM is a disgrace but what few know is that he realizes this himself and wishes fervently to upgrade. To this end he asked Santa this year for a moral compass plus a high tech piece of wearable kit which will allow him to distinguish fact from fiction. It will work like a dream. On 29th February, in the Big Reset, he will address the nation and deliver a long peroration of searing honesty and intelligence. Brexit myths will be exploded and the vacuous “levelling up” will be junked in favour of a ruthless bearing down on poverty and inequality. There will be much else besides, in particular a genuine focus on the environment. The Glasgow Green Forum will be an unadulterated triumph. At its close, Sir Richard Attenborough will announce with a straight face and not a hint of sarkiness that “Boris has saved the world”. Amazing. Who would have believed it?
It is good to see a positive if tongue in cheek post
Well done but point of order
My birthday is on the 29th February and I have to wait until 2024 to achieve my 20th birthday
Feel sorry for anyone born 29/02/2096 . . . they will need to wait eight years for their 1st birthday.
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
I would certainly agree that Trump has caused enormous damage to the US and its standing in the world. His antics since the election have failed miserably but they have also extended the scope of what might be conceivable and not in a good way. I don't Biden is the man to lead the US to a great renewal. I very much hope that I am proved wrong and his skills at bipartisanship prevail. I just don't see it though.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
There's politics and there's government. How you win and retain power, and how you use that power. And of course, there's no point being great at using power if you never win it.
Vote Leave / Vote Johnson appear to be brilliant at politics and utterly calamitous at government.
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. That's the saying, I think. Good advice too. You don't bet, though, do you? If you bet and veer too much to the dark side on probability assessment due to innate pessimism you'll lose.
Totally agree on Trump. I happen to think he's going to fade away quite quickly once he's somehow levered out of the White House but he's done so much damage, both tangible and intangible. I pray that he represented the peak of nasty right populism in the western world.
Blimey - I thought I was being realistic and hard-headed not downbeat.
What a bunch of Pollyannas you all are!
It is not just my daughter's travails that ail me. Her place is the only one still open in the area - but for how much longer. But also that of my sons who are finding life very hard. And my work fell off a cliff this year. I have just reinvented myself as an expert - and have just written an expert's report on whistleblowing - so am shamelessly advertising myself on here. There are plenty of people - freelancers etc - who are facing tough economic times, who do not have pensions and secure jobs, a group somewhat over-represented on here I feel. The line between economic security and insecurity is somewhat thinner than many realise.
I hope I am wrong and that things go better but nothing this government has done has given me confidence that the vaccination programme will be up and running consistently at the levels it needs to be. I have been shielding this year and expect to be for most of next year as well.
However I did plant some Gertrude Jekyll roses in 3 planters the day before Xmas. They have been voted England's favourite rose - and with good reason: beautiful, floriferous with gorgeous scent. You can see them in my avatar picture. With luck they will grow up the trellis I have just fixed in the home I hope to move into next year. So there is some hope there.
Gardeners plan for the future so are eternal optimists even if they may not be around to see the fruits of their labour.
Il faut cultiver son jardin, as that great cynic, Voltaire, once wrote.
It has indeed been a crap year to be a freelancer, but it does look like things are moving in the right direction as we enter 2021.
Even pessimistic forecasts are for 6% year-on-year growth, and with a successful vaccine rollout we can expect the economy to be back within a couple of percent of 2019 levels.
Certain sectors are going to take longer to recover though, as changes such as increased WFH are probably here to stay.
Best of luck to your children, a recession is always a bad time to be early in your career or starting a business, but there is hope on the horizon.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
On the whole, I agree with Starmer. Brexit has gone past the point of a being a mistake that might be avoided. Now it's a problem to be dealt with. Get the deal and start from there.
But Starmer does need to articulate in broad terms what a solution looks like. ie close relationship with the European Union, which involves reinstating some of things lost with Brexit. Pick a few things that seem important and focus on those. It creates a divide with the Conservatives that the latter will exploit. But they are in their comfort zone on Brexit anyway. Labour doesn't need to support them in that.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
People need to stop thinking about blame. Things, people and events will have contributed to Brexit occurring without it being their 'fault', and omitting to do some things will fall into that as well. A level of dispassion really could not go amiss when it comes to Brexit historical analysis, and that doesn't even require people to be less upset about current developments so it should be easy.
You hit the nail on the head with so many of your posts
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
I think that this will prove to be far too pessimistic. Contrary to expectations the numbers employed in financial services has increased. London has a critical mass of skills in banking, finance, law and technology that nowhere else in Europe can come close to matching and it will continue to thrive.
But you keep on missing the point.
The some of the jobs will remain in the UK but for purposes of booking the transactions the trades will now take place in various EU countries, which means the UK Exchequer loses the revenue and various EU countries gain revenues for their countries.
I mean it isn't like financial services is the biggest contributor to the UK Exchequer.
The other point I've made (and some people at the DMO have also mentioned) is that the government's Internal Market Bill has damaged our legal sector, as has the plans to castrate the judiciary.
One of the main attractions of doing business in the UK is that we had a strong legal sector backed up by a strong and independent judiciary that does put the government back in its box, but we now have a government that thinks breaking international treaties is fine.
The point is where is the profit made, where is the tax paid and where are the bonuses paid? If we maintain competitive tax rates there will still be an inclination to book the profit here, whatever is done in an EU based subsidiary. Dublin is a bit more of a threat that way because of its low CT rates but most of mainland Europe isn't. If the critical mass remains based in London that is where they will pay their taxes and spend their loot.
Unless they want to seriously disrupt their economies in the middle of a severe recession they will want unrestricted access to London's skills.
In the short-term certainly. In the medium and long-term no. The French have already set up a common law court to be staffed by English qualified lawyers. The EU will do everything it can to ensure that it has a financial centre it can rely on within the EU.
Blimey - I thought I was being realistic and hard-headed not downbeat.
What a bunch of Pollyannas you all are!
It is not just my daughter's travails that ail me. Her place is the only one still open in the area - but for how much longer. But also that of my sons who are finding life very hard. And my work fell off a cliff this year. I have just reinvented myself as an expert - and have just written an expert's report on whistleblowing - so am shamelessly advertising myself on here. There are plenty of people - freelancers etc - who are facing tough economic times, who do not have pensions and secure jobs, a group somewhat over-represented on here I feel. The line between economic security and insecurity is somewhat thinner than many realise.
I hope I am wrong and that things go better but nothing this government has done has given me confidence that the vaccination programme will be up and running consistently at the levels it needs to be. I have been shielding this year and expect to be for most of next year as well.
However I did plant some Gertrude Jekyll roses in 3 planters the day before Xmas. They have been voted England's favourite rose - and with good reason: beautiful, floriferous with gorgeous scent. You can see them in my avatar picture. With luck they will grow up the trellis I have just fixed in the home I hope to move into next year. So there is some hope there.
Gardeners plan for the future so are eternal optimists even if they may not be around to see the fruits of their labour.
Il faut cultiver son jardin, as that great cynic, Voltaire, once wrote.
Are you in your new home then?
No. Hope to be in by February. If we have hard lockdown again, God knows. It buggered up last year's plans something rotten. I have now been living out of a suitcase in rented places for a year now. Am getting a teensy bit bored with it all.
Ok, all these prediction headers have got me in the mood for crystal balling, so here are my top 3 calls. I’m feeling quite bullish as you can tell -
(1) The vaccination rollout will go like clockwork and the Covid-19 pandemic will be all over by the summer. By the end of 2021 the capacity of people to adjust to the new and forget the old will be demonstrated once again as this short traumatic episode takes its rightful place as a blip in the relentless onward march of humanity towards a better world. Christmas 2021 will be the best ever. An extended 5 day celebration of all that is good and wholesome. Everyone will get exactly the present they wanted from their beloved.
(2) By this time next year something else that is deeply unpleasant and looms large now will be hardly discussed. I refer here to Brexit. It won’t be boredom that kills it, it will be the very opposite. There will be a reckoning, facilitated by the great & good from all sections of society, on the template of Nelson Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation committee. It will be tough but it will work. At the end of it, Leavers and Remainers will recognize each other’s truths and they will indeed be reconciled. They will hug and make sincere promises to each other. The Bad Thing will thereafter not be mentioned.
(3) Boris Johnson will be reborn. Everyone knows our PM is a disgrace but what few know is that he realizes this himself and wishes fervently to upgrade. To this end he asked Santa this year for a moral compass plus a high tech piece of wearable kit which will allow him to distinguish fact from fiction. It will work like a dream. On 29th February, in the Big Reset, he will address the nation and deliver a long peroration of searing honesty and intelligence. Brexit myths will be exploded and the vacuous “levelling up” will be junked in favour of a ruthless bearing down on poverty and inequality. There will be much else besides, in particular a genuine focus on the environment. The Glasgow Green Forum will be an unadulterated triumph. At its close, Sir Richard Attenborough will announce with a straight face and not a hint of sarkiness that “Boris has saved the world”. Amazing. Who would have believed it?
I think Richard is dead. Presumably you mean David (pbuh). Other than that it has the feel of inevitability.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The blame for Brexit was the idiotic remain campaign and highlighted by Obama's back of the queue comment
The blame for Brexit is partly the tabloids poisoning of the well of what the EU is and partly the EU itself for its progression towards a single state.
Ok, all these prediction headers have got me in the mood for crystal balling, so here are my top 3 calls. I’m feeling quite bullish as you can tell -
(1) The vaccination rollout will go like clockwork and the Covid-19 pandemic will be all over by the summer. By the end of 2021 the capacity of people to adjust to the new and forget the old will be demonstrated once again as this short traumatic episode takes its rightful place as a blip in the relentless onward march of humanity towards a better world. Christmas 2021 will be the best ever. An extended 5 day celebration of all that is good and wholesome. Everyone will get exactly the present they wanted from their beloved.
(2) By this time next year something else that is deeply unpleasant and looms large now will be hardly discussed. I refer here to Brexit. It won’t be boredom that kills it, it will be the very opposite. There will be a reckoning, facilitated by the great & good from all sections of society, on the template of Nelson Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation committee. It will be tough but it will work. At the end of it, Leavers and Remainers will recognize each other’s truths and they will indeed be reconciled. They will hug and make sincere promises to each other. The Bad Thing will thereafter not be mentioned.
(3) Boris Johnson will be reborn. Everyone knows our PM is a disgrace but what few know is that he realizes this himself and wishes fervently to upgrade. To this end he asked Santa this year for a moral compass plus a high tech piece of wearable kit which will allow him to distinguish fact from fiction. It will work like a dream. On 29th February, in the Big Reset, he will address the nation and deliver a long peroration of searing honesty and intelligence. Brexit myths will be exploded and the vacuous “levelling up” will be junked in favour of a ruthless bearing down on poverty and inequality. There will be much else besides, in particular a genuine focus on the environment. The Glasgow Green Forum will be an unadulterated triumph. At its close, Sir Richard Attenborough will announce with a straight face and not a hint of sarkiness that “Boris has saved the world”. Amazing. Who would have believed it?
It is good to see a positive if tongue in cheek post
Well done but point of order
My birthday is on the 29th February and I have to wait until 2024 to achieve my 20th birthday
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The blame for Brexit was the idiotic remain campaign and highlighted by Obama's back of the queue comment
The tone was set on the very first day of the Remain campaign, as Remain campaign chairman Sir Stuart Rose, addressing a conference of business leaders, suggested that the best thing about EU membership was that it drove down wages and kept them low.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
Ok, all these prediction headers have got me in the mood for crystal balling, so here are my top 3 calls. I’m feeling quite bullish as you can tell -
(1) The vaccination rollout will go like clockwork and the Covid-19 pandemic will be all over by the summer. By the end of 2021 the capacity of people to adjust to the new and forget the old will be demonstrated once again as this short traumatic episode takes its rightful place as a blip in the relentless onward march of humanity towards a better world. Christmas 2021 will be the best ever. An extended 5 day celebration of all that is good and wholesome. Everyone will get exactly the present they wanted from their beloved.
(2) By this time next year something else that is deeply unpleasant and looms large now will be hardly discussed. I refer here to Brexit. It won’t be boredom that kills it, it will be the very opposite. There will be a reckoning, facilitated by the great & good from all sections of society, on the template of Nelson Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation committee. It will be tough but it will work. At the end of it, Leavers and Remainers will recognize each other’s truths and they will indeed be reconciled. They will hug and make sincere promises to each other. The Bad Thing will thereafter not be mentioned.
(3) Boris Johnson will be reborn. Everyone knows our PM is a disgrace but what few know is that he realizes this himself and wishes fervently to upgrade. To this end he asked Santa this year for a moral compass plus a high tech piece of wearable kit which will allow him to distinguish fact from fiction. It will work like a dream. On 29th February, in the Big Reset, he will address the nation and deliver a long peroration of searing honesty and intelligence. Brexit myths will be exploded and the vacuous “levelling up” will be junked in favour of a ruthless bearing down on poverty and inequality. There will be much else besides, in particular a genuine focus on the environment. The Glasgow Green Forum will be an unadulterated triumph. At its close, Sir Richard Attenborough will announce with a straight face and not a hint of sarkiness that “Boris has saved the world”. Amazing. Who would have believed it?
You worked so hard to build your stock as a predicter par excellence - showing unflinching confidence in the face of Trump, No Deal etc.... to then play quadruple or quits with this!?
I read somewhere that there are proportionally more younger COVID patients in hospital now than there were in the first wave. Does anyone know anything about that?
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
I would certainly agree that Trump has caused enormous damage to the US and its standing in the world. His antics since the election have failed miserably but they have also extended the scope of what might be conceivable and not in a good way. I don't Biden is the man to lead the US to a great renewal. I very much hope that I am proved wrong and his skills at bipartisanship prevail. I just don't see it though.
I am reading the Biden biography by Evan Osnos at the moment, it shows how he has built a record of dealmaking over decades with Republicans on Congress and has great people skills.
In that sense he was more LBJ to Obama's JFK, Obama dreamt the schemes and did the passionate rhetoric while maintaining an air of lofty distance, Biden did the hard graft of getting the votes and backslapping and schmoozing legislators, particularly over Obamacare. The Biden presidency will probably be the most centrist incoming Presidency since Bush Snr's, especially if the GOP hold the Senate and that is likely what the US needs right now ie an experienced pragmatist, not the next Messiah
I read somewhere that there are proportionally more younger COVID patients in hospital now than there were in the first wave. Does anyone know anything about that?
Foxy mentioned that his hospital was seeing paediatric admissions last week but he didn't know if they were infant or secondary school age groups.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
Ok, all these prediction headers have got me in the mood for crystal balling, so here are my top 3 calls. I’m feeling quite bullish as you can tell -
(1) The vaccination rollout will go like clockwork and the Covid-19 pandemic will be all over by the summer. By the end of 2021 the capacity of people to adjust to the new and forget the old will be demonstrated once again as this short traumatic episode takes its rightful place as a blip in the relentless onward march of humanity towards a better world. Christmas 2021 will be the best ever. An extended 5 day celebration of all that is good and wholesome. Everyone will get exactly the present they wanted from their beloved.
(2) By this time next year something else that is deeply unpleasant and looms large now will be hardly discussed. I refer here to Brexit. It won’t be boredom that kills it, it will be the very opposite. There will be a reckoning, facilitated by the great & good from all sections of society, on the template of Nelson Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation committee. It will be tough but it will work. At the end of it, Leavers and Remainers will recognize each other’s truths and they will indeed be reconciled. They will hug and make sincere promises to each other. The Bad Thing will thereafter not be mentioned.
(3) Boris Johnson will be reborn. Everyone knows our PM is a disgrace but what few know is that he realizes this himself and wishes fervently to upgrade. To this end he asked Santa this year for a moral compass plus a high tech piece of wearable kit which will allow him to distinguish fact from fiction. It will work like a dream. On 29th February, in the Big Reset, he will address the nation and deliver a long peroration of searing honesty and intelligence. Brexit myths will be exploded and the vacuous “levelling up” will be junked in favour of a ruthless bearing down on poverty and inequality. There will be much else besides, in particular a genuine focus on the environment. The Glasgow Green Forum will be an unadulterated triumph. At its close, Sir Richard Attenborough will announce with a straight face and not a hint of sarkiness that “Boris has saved the world”. Amazing. Who would have believed it?
You worked so hard to build your stock as a predicter par excellence - showing unflinching confidence in the face of Trump, No Deal etc.... to then play quadruple or quits with this!?
Yep. I've put it all on the line. Will I be the Fool on the Hill again a year from now? Or will there be no Hill?
I read somewhere that there are proportionally more younger COVID patients in hospital now than there were in the first wave. Does anyone know anything about that?
Foxy mentioned that his hospital was seeing paediatric admissions last week but he didn't know if they were infant or secondary school age groups.
Mrs Nashe works in paeds at a west London hospital. She’s been seeing babies with Covid for the first time.
Ok, all these prediction headers have got me in the mood for crystal balling, so here are my top 3 calls. I’m feeling quite bullish as you can tell -
(1) The vaccination rollout will go like clockwork and the Covid-19 pandemic will be all over by the summer. By the end of 2021 the capacity of people to adjust to the new and forget the old will be demonstrated once again as this short traumatic episode takes its rightful place as a blip in the relentless onward march of humanity towards a better world. Christmas 2021 will be the best ever. An extended 5 day celebration of all that is good and wholesome. Everyone will get exactly the present they wanted from their beloved.
(2) By this time next year something else that is deeply unpleasant and looms large now will be hardly discussed. I refer here to Brexit. It won’t be boredom that kills it, it will be the very opposite. There will be a reckoning, facilitated by the great & good from all sections of society, on the template of Nelson Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation committee. It will be tough but it will work. At the end of it, Leavers and Remainers will recognize each other’s truths and they will indeed be reconciled. They will hug and make sincere promises to each other. The Bad Thing will thereafter not be mentioned.
(3) Boris Johnson will be reborn. Everyone knows our PM is a disgrace but what few know is that he realizes this himself and wishes fervently to upgrade. To this end he asked Santa this year for a moral compass plus a high tech piece of wearable kit which will allow him to distinguish fact from fiction. It will work like a dream. On 29th February, in the Big Reset, he will address the nation and deliver a long peroration of searing honesty and intelligence. Brexit myths will be exploded and the vacuous “levelling up” will be junked in favour of a ruthless bearing down on poverty and inequality. There will be much else besides, in particular a genuine focus on the environment. The Glasgow Green Forum will be an unadulterated triumph. At its close, Sir Richard Attenborough will announce with a straight face and not a hint of sarkiness that “Boris has saved the world”. Amazing. Who would have believed it?
Did you know that Glasgow's oldest park is called Glasgow Green (with a decent radical history) or is that just a happy coincidence?
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
I would certainly agree that Trump has caused enormous damage to the US and its standing in the world. His antics since the election have failed miserably but they have also extended the scope of what might be conceivable and not in a good way. I don't Biden is the man to lead the US to a great renewal. I very much hope that I am proved wrong and his skills at bipartisanship prevail. I just don't see it though.
I am reading the Biden biography by Evan Osnos at the moment, it shows how he has built a record of dealmaking over decades with Republicans on Congress and has great people skills.
In that sense he was more LBJ to Obama's JFK, Obama dreamt the schemes and did the passionate rhetoric while maintaining an air of lofty distance, Biden did the hard graft of getting the votes and backslapping and schmoozing legislators, particularly over Obamacare. The Biden presidency will probably be the most centrist incoming Presidency since Bush Snr's, especially if the GOP hold the Senate and that is likely what the US needs right now ie an experienced pragmatist, not the next Messiah
Hmm... I got a £20 Waterstone voucher for my Christmas. Would you recommend it?
I read somewhere that there are proportionally more younger COVID patients in hospital now than there were in the first wave. Does anyone know anything about that?
Foxy mentioned that his hospital was seeing paediatric admissions last week but he didn't know if they were infant or secondary school age groups.
Thanks. Assuming it is the case that there more admissions of young COVID patients I would be curious to know if the driver is different prevalence of the disease or new treatments being available.
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. That's the saying, I think. Good advice too. You don't bet, though, do you? If you bet and veer too much to the dark side on probability assessment due to innate pessimism you'll lose.
Totally agree on Trump. I happen to think he's going to fade away quite quickly once he's somehow levered out of the White House but he's done so much damage, both tangible and intangible. I pray that he represented the peak of nasty right populism in the western world.
I only bet on horses where I have been generally quite successful.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
The City will not disappear, it still has global reach, however it will no longer dominate the economy as much as it did.
This is a Brexit Deal for the Red Wall above all and rightly so as that is where the Tories made their main gains last year to get Boris his majority, the Tories made no net gains at all in London or the SE.
The best Brexit Deal for financial services would have been to stay in the single market but that would have required continuing free movement and control from the European Court which is not what the Red Wall voted for at all in either 2016 or 2019
Ok, all these prediction headers have got me in the mood for crystal balling, so here are my top 3 calls. I’m feeling quite bullish as you can tell -
(1) The vaccination rollout will go like clockwork and the Covid-19 pandemic will be all over by the summer. By the end of 2021 the capacity of people to adjust to the new and forget the old will be demonstrated once again as this short traumatic episode takes its rightful place as a blip in the relentless onward march of humanity towards a better world. Christmas 2021 will be the best ever. An extended 5 day celebration of all that is good and wholesome. Everyone will get exactly the present they wanted from their beloved.
(2) By this time next year something else that is deeply unpleasant and looms large now will be hardly discussed. I refer here to Brexit. It won’t be boredom that kills it, it will be the very opposite. There will be a reckoning, facilitated by the great & good from all sections of society, on the template of Nelson Mandela’s Truth & Reconciliation committee. It will be tough but it will work. At the end of it, Leavers and Remainers will recognize each other’s truths and they will indeed be reconciled. They will hug and make sincere promises to each other. The Bad Thing will thereafter not be mentioned.
(3) Boris Johnson will be reborn. Everyone knows our PM is a disgrace but what few know is that he realizes this himself and wishes fervently to upgrade. To this end he asked Santa this year for a moral compass plus a high tech piece of wearable kit which will allow him to distinguish fact from fiction. It will work like a dream. On 29th February, in the Big Reset, he will address the nation and deliver a long peroration of searing honesty and intelligence. Brexit myths will be exploded and the vacuous “levelling up” will be junked in favour of a ruthless bearing down on poverty and inequality. There will be much else besides, in particular a genuine focus on the environment. The Glasgow Green Forum will be an unadulterated triumph. At its close, Sir Richard Attenborough will announce with a straight face and not a hint of sarkiness that “Boris has saved the world”. Amazing. Who would have believed it?
Did you know that Glasgow's oldest park is called Glasgow Green (with a decent radical history) or is that just a happy coincidence?
I didn't but no, obviously no coincidence, a spooky and reassuring portent of what eye foretell.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
What do you mean I was wedded to a No Deal Brexit? You have completely and utterly misunderstood everything I have written on the subject if you believe that?
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
After all the PB London phobes chatting shit about a mass exodus from the crime ridden hell-scape of the capital to the bucolic arcadia of their rural idylls, I was surprised to see that the fastest house price growth in the UK this year was in Islington. Perhaps the cachet of living next door to Dominic Cummings proved irresistible.
Some of these indices are not very reliable. It may be that the mix of properties sold in Islington changed rather than prices went up, and not sure the indices account well for that, if at all. More houses and garden flats than normal would have completed and less small flats, especially those with cladding in high rises.
I have been tracking prices in other parts of central London during lockdown and asking prices are clearly down, so would be quite surprised if Islington is really up 13%.
A sudden influx of higher value properties being sold because their owners were moving to get away from Cummings (or deciding to move to farms in Wales) would push the average sale price up, even as house prices generally were falling.
You might have thought that the people most keen to move out would be living in small flats without gardens. I detect little desire to leave among the local bourgeoisie in their £1.3mn 5 bed houses with nice big gardens here in SE London.
Yes but they need to find a buyer! Hardly anything has sold, this has only got 5 properties selling there apart from one (presumably new) development:
Whether low volume reflects lack of supply or demand is unknowable without additional information.
It is neither a lack of supply or demand in the traditional sense. There are lots of properties on sale in Islington, there are lots of realistic buyers who want them. It is a lack of agreed pricing that is the issue, sellers are looking at pre covid price anchors, and buyers are looking for significant reductions and/or are constrained by tighter mortgage lending amid economic uncertainty.
This site has the number of properties on sale in Islington up 54% year on year.
Islington is a pretty nice place to live, I think (I don't go North of the river if I can help it). People will keep wanting to live in nice places in London. I think where you will see a drop in prices is in shitty bits of outer London where people who can't afford to live in the nice bits will choose to live somewhere further out with more space if they no longer need a daily commutable distance to the centre. People will still want to live in our neighbourhood, which is an earthly paradise.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
The City will not disappear, it still has global reach, however it will no longer dominate the economy as much as it did.
This is a Brexit Deal for the Redwall above all and rightly so as that is where the Tories made their main gains last year to get Boris his majority, they made no net gains at all in London or the SE.
The best Brexit Deal for financial services would have been to stay in the single market but that would have required continuing free movement and control of the European Court which is not what the Red Wall voted for at all in either 2016 or 2019
I know all that. It doesn't answer my point: will Leavers be prepared to pay the taxes no longer paid by a smaller financial sector?
I read somewhere that there are proportionally more younger COVID patients in hospital now than there were in the first wave. Does anyone know anything about that?
Aren't hospitals admitting covid patients sooner now than in the spring when the advice was 'stay at home until you are about to die' ?
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. That's the saying, I think. Good advice too. You don't bet, though, do you? If you bet and veer too much to the dark side on probability assessment due to innate pessimism you'll lose.
Totally agree on Trump. I happen to think he's going to fade away quite quickly once he's somehow levered out of the White House but he's done so much damage, both tangible and intangible. I pray that he represented the peak of nasty right populism in the western world.
I only bet on horses where I have been generally quite successful.
The best sport to bet on imo. Let's hope the Craven meeting in April has sun out and at least a partial crowd. I'll hit you up for a tip or two.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
The City will not disappear, it still has global reach, however it will no longer dominate the economy as much as it did.
This is a Brexit Deal for the Red Wall above all and rightly so as that is where the Tories made their main gains last year to get Boris his majority, the Tories made no net gains at all in London or the SE.
The best Brexit Deal for financial services would have been to stay in the single market but that would have required continuing free movement and control from the European Court which is not what the Red Wall voted for at all in either 2016 or 2019
Hurting the most successful part of your economy =/= helping the least successful parts. Only communists and now apparently Tories think that.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The blame for Brexit was the idiotic remain campaign and highlighted by Obama's back of the queue comment
The tone was set on the very first day of the Remain campaign, as Remain campaign chairman Sir Stuart Rose, addressing a conference of business leaders, suggested that the best thing about EU membership was that it drove down wages and kept them low.
Unfortunately that was almost the last truthful thing that the remain campaign said.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
What do you mean I was wedded to a No Deal Brexit? You have completely and utterly misunderstood everything I have written on the subject if you believe that?
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
Yes, you blew hot and cold a lot, but you were a pretty big no deal fanboi when that looked the likeliest outcome. We don't have a good deal, we have an anything is better than no deal deal. And your failure to predict it doesn't do much for your Borisology credentials.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
After all the PB London phobes chatting shit about a mass exodus from the crime ridden hell-scape of the capital to the bucolic arcadia of their rural idylls, I was surprised to see that the fastest house price growth in the UK this year was in Islington. Perhaps the cachet of living next door to Dominic Cummings proved irresistible.
Some of these indices are not very reliable. It may be that the mix of properties sold in Islington changed rather than prices went up, and not sure the indices account well for that, if at all. More houses and garden flats than normal would have completed and less small flats, especially those with cladding in high rises.
I have been tracking prices in other parts of central London during lockdown and asking prices are clearly down, so would be quite surprised if Islington is really up 13%.
A sudden influx of higher value properties being sold because their owners were moving to get away from Cummings (or deciding to move to farms in Wales) would push the average sale price up, even as house prices generally were falling.
You might have thought that the people most keen to move out would be living in small flats without gardens. I detect little desire to leave among the local bourgeoisie in their £1.3mn 5 bed houses with nice big gardens here in SE London.
Yes but they need to find a buyer! Hardly anything has sold, this has only got 5 properties selling there apart from one (presumably new) development:
Whether low volume reflects lack of supply or demand is unknowable without additional information.
It is neither a lack of supply or demand in the traditional sense. There are lots of properties on sale in Islington, there are lots of realistic buyers who want them. It is a lack of agreed pricing that is the issue, sellers are looking at pre covid price anchors, and buyers are looking for significant reductions and/or are constrained by tighter mortgage lending amid economic uncertainty.
This site has the number of properties on sale in Islington up 54% year on year.
Islington is a pretty nice place to live, I think (I don't go North of the river if I can help it). People will keep wanting to live in nice places in London. I think where you will see a drop in prices is in shitty bits of outer London where people who can't afford to live in the nice bits will choose to live somewhere further out with more space if they no longer need a daily commutable distance to the centre. People will still want to live in our neighbourhood, which is an earthly paradise.
What is happening is that people are trying to get out of the tiny flats.
For a number this means really reaching for it and getting a house - so London *houses* are in demand
If they can't get a house, some are moving out of London
Have any of these virtue signallers actually said what they would have negotiated into the deal to make it better? More fish? More potatoes? Something to do with Brie?
Or are they actually No Dealers, equating No Deal with being anti-globalisation?
At least it will give them something to boast about at their next dinner party.
I could see all the above being plausible, except 11, which should read, “The West’s response will be non-existant."
China is either No1 in the world, or about to be. And it isn't No.1 in a Great Power situation with No2, 3, 4 etc close behind. The US is behind. After that, there is basically no one.
China can do what it likes. No one will stop it I'm afraid to say.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
People need to stop thinking about blame. Things, people and events will have contributed to Brexit occurring without it being their 'fault', and omitting to do some things will fall into that as well. A level of dispassion really could not go amiss when it comes to Brexit historical analysis, and that doesn't even require people to be less upset about current developments so it should be easy.
You hit the nail on the head with so many of your posts
Indeed he does.
Perhaps folk should just stop posting stuff like... The blame for Brexit was the idiotic remain campaign and highlighted by Obama's back of the queue comment
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
What do you mean I was wedded to a No Deal Brexit? You have completely and utterly misunderstood everything I have written on the subject if you believe that?
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
Yes, you blew hot and cold a lot, but you were a pretty big no deal fanboi when that looked the likeliest outcome. We don't have a good deal, we have an anything is better than no deal deal. And your failure to predict it doesn't do much for your Borisology credentials.
I never, never, never preferred no deal.
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. That's the saying, I think. Good advice too. You don't bet, though, do you? If you bet and veer too much to the dark side on probability assessment due to innate pessimism you'll lose.
Totally agree on Trump. I happen to think he's going to fade away quite quickly once he's somehow levered out of the White House but he's done so much damage, both tangible and intangible. I pray that he represented the peak of nasty right populism in the western world.
I only bet on horses where I have been generally quite successful.
The best sport to bet on imo. Let's hope the Craven meeting in April has sun out and at least a partial crowd. I'll hit you up for a tip or two.
I cant wait for the flat, the"form" this Jumps Season is out the window. As an example three weeks ago Frodon was beaten 84 lengths by Santani, which he turned round on Boxing day.
I went an dug around in the ONS numbers - it turns out that the the hospitalisation rates they are using *are* based on the percentage of that age group in the population. So when they say 137.2 per 100k hospitalisation rate for over 85s - that means 137.2 per 100 thousand people over the age of 85....
I used 2019 census data to create this
Age Deaths Hospitalisations Number 85 years and over 41.75% 23.20% 1,647,271 75 to 84 years 32.82% 25.75% 4,040,624 65 to 74 years 15.14% 17.91% 6,687,066 45 to 64 years 9.24% 21.74% 17,224,230 15 to 44 years 1.03% 9.84% 25,236,635 1 to 14 years 0.01% 1.50% 11,238,100 Under 1 year 0.00% 0.05% 722,881
Thanks to this deal I'm now supervising regulatory compliance in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, and France, so thanks to the Brexiteers for the pay rise but quite frankly as a patriot I'd forego the pay rise to avoid the damage we've inflicted on the sector.
What do you mean "damage"? The deal is a triumph! And now that he's allowed out in public again Mark Francois will be along to explain in rhetoric why you are wrong about the detail.
Are you *sure* banks can't be persuaded to move to Norniron? Thanks to the Conservative and Unionist Party doing what the Conservative and Unionist Party said would never happen NI is the annex to the UK that is still in the EU. So stick all your eggs in one basket, one financial centre, same language, better craic.
After all the PB London phobes chatting shit about a mass exodus from the crime ridden hell-scape of the capital to the bucolic arcadia of their rural idylls, I was surprised to see that the fastest house price growth in the UK this year was in Islington. Perhaps the cachet of living next door to Dominic Cummings proved irresistible.
Some of these indices are not very reliable. It may be that the mix of properties sold in Islington changed rather than prices went up, and not sure the indices account well for that, if at all. More houses and garden flats than normal would have completed and less small flats, especially those with cladding in high rises.
I have been tracking prices in other parts of central London during lockdown and asking prices are clearly down, so would be quite surprised if Islington is really up 13%.
A sudden influx of higher value properties being sold because their owners were moving to get away from Cummings (or deciding to move to farms in Wales) would push the average sale price up, even as house prices generally were falling.
You might have thought that the people most keen to move out would be living in small flats without gardens. I detect little desire to leave among the local bourgeoisie in their £1.3mn 5 bed houses with nice big gardens here in SE London.
Yes but they need to find a buyer! Hardly anything has sold, this has only got 5 properties selling there apart from one (presumably new) development:
Whether low volume reflects lack of supply or demand is unknowable without additional information.
It is neither a lack of supply or demand in the traditional sense. There are lots of properties on sale in Islington, there are lots of realistic buyers who want them. It is a lack of agreed pricing that is the issue, sellers are looking at pre covid price anchors, and buyers are looking for significant reductions and/or are constrained by tighter mortgage lending amid economic uncertainty.
This site has the number of properties on sale in Islington up 54% year on year.
Islington is a pretty nice place to live, I think (I don't go North of the river if I can help it). People will keep wanting to live in nice places in London. I think where you will see a drop in prices is in shitty bits of outer London where people who can't afford to live in the nice bits will choose to live somewhere further out with more space if they no longer need a daily commutable distance to the centre. People will still want to live in our neighbourhood, which is an earthly paradise.
What is happening is that people are trying to get out of the tiny flats.
For a number this means really reaching for it and getting a house - so London *houses* are in demand
If they can't get a house, some are moving out of London
Some are moving to larger flats
It's great that the government hasn't changed the planning laws to facilitate the construction of more and more tiny flats then. Oh wait.
Thing is some of these things should be in place anyway whether we are in or out of the EU. The heat treatment of pallets and wooden packaging to remove pests is something we should insist on for all packaging arriving in the UK no matter where it comes from given the ever greater risk of pests getting into the country which can have severe consequences for our trees.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
I think this year will be quite brutal in terms of Corporation tax, as the first shutdown will show in the returns from the end of this month.
My own company return goes in in January, with a tax bill half of last year with 10/12 months were pre lockdown. It will be near zero the following year. Personal tax receipts will only show a major drop in Jan 22.
The combination of Sunak's spending spree, covid impact on receipts and Brexit is going to make a massive hole in government finances. There ain't going to be much going on in the Red Wall apart from austerity.
I could see all the above being plausible, except 11, which should read, “The West’s response will be non-existant."
China is either No1 in the world, or about to be. And it isn't No.1 in a Great Power situation with No2, 3, 4 etc close behind. The US is behind. After that, there is basically no one.
China can do what it likes. No one will stop it I'm afraid to say.
That is simply not true. While it's possible that China might throw its weight around militarily, as Cyclefree's header suggests, I think it more likely that they won't. They tend to be a risk averse nation, and there would be substantial risks involved in (say) a Taiwan adventure. And substantial risks for both the US and Pacific regional powers in not reacting.
It's more likely that regional players reach accommodations with China without a shot being fired. Which arrangements we might not like very much.
Where the balance of power lies in a decade's time will be very interesting to watch.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
I think this year will be quite brutal in terms of Corporation tax, as the first shutdown will show in the returns from the end of this month.
My own company return goes in in January, with a tax bill half of last year with 10/12 months were pre lockdown. It will be near zero the following year. Personal tax receipts will only show a major drop in Jan 22.
The combination of Sunak's spending spree, covid impact on receipts and Brexit is going to make a massive hole in government finances. There ain't going to be much going on in the Red Wall apart from austerity.
OTOH I (and millions of others) didn't pay any IT in July and will be in catch up mode in January. I expect January's tax receipts to be pretty close to a record, although that will not necessarily put us in surplus.
Have any of these virtue signallers actually said what they would have negotiated into the deal to make it better? More fish? More potatoes? Something to do with Brie?
Or are they actually No Dealers, equating No Deal with being anti-globalisation?
At least it will give them something to boast about at their next dinner party.
Single market and customs union would be a big improvement. I bet Brexit was dreamt up at a dinner party in Islington. Or a private dining room in Mayfair. One of the two.
Further to the deaths and hospitalisation percentages
Age Deaths Hospitalisations Number 85 years and over 41.75% 23.20% 1,647,271 75 to 84 years 32.82% 25.75% 4,040,624 65 to 74 years 15.14% 17.91% 6,687,066 45 to 64 years 9.24% 21.74% 17,224,230 15 to 44 years 1.03% 9.84% 25,236,635 1 to 14 years 0.01% 1.50% 11,238,100 Under 1 year 0.00% 0.05% 722,881
So, if the oldest 5.7 million are vaccinated, then
- (74% * Efficacy) deaths will be prevented - (49% * Efficacy) hospitalisations will be prevented
Looking at these numbers, I think that one thing that may well influence the government is making the period between getting the first 5-6 million vaccinated and the rest done, as short as possible.
As others have pointed out, letting rip after the oldies are vaccinated would still cause the hospitals to be overwhelmed. 50% of hospitalisation come from those below 64.
So there will be a *politically* difficult period where restriction will have to remain, while *infections* are still massive, but deaths and hospitalisations are falling.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
I think this year will be quite brutal in terms of Corporation tax, as the first shutdown will show in the returns from the end of this month.
My own company return goes in in January, with a tax bill half of last year with 10/12 months were pre lockdown. It will be near zero the following year. Personal tax receipts will only show a major drop in Jan 22.
The combination of Sunak's spending spree, covid impact on receipts and Brexit is going to make a massive hole in government finances. There ain't going to be much going on in the Red Wall apart from austerity.
Exactly. And if austerity led to Brexit, what will this continuing austerity lead to?
After all the PB London phobes chatting shit about a mass exodus from the crime ridden hell-scape of the capital to the bucolic arcadia of their rural idylls, I was surprised to see that the fastest house price growth in the UK this year was in Islington. Perhaps the cachet of living next door to Dominic Cummings proved irresistible.
Some of these indices are not very reliable. It may be that the mix of properties sold in Islington changed rather than prices went up, and not sure the indices account well for that, if at all. More houses and garden flats than normal would have completed and less small flats, especially those with cladding in high rises.
I have been tracking prices in other parts of central London during lockdown and asking prices are clearly down, so would be quite surprised if Islington is really up 13%.
A sudden influx of higher value properties being sold because their owners were moving to get away from Cummings (or deciding to move to farms in Wales) would push the average sale price up, even as house prices generally were falling.
You might have thought that the people most keen to move out would be living in small flats without gardens. I detect little desire to leave among the local bourgeoisie in their £1.3mn 5 bed houses with nice big gardens here in SE London.
Yes but they need to find a buyer! Hardly anything has sold, this has only got 5 properties selling there apart from one (presumably new) development:
Whether low volume reflects lack of supply or demand is unknowable without additional information.
It is neither a lack of supply or demand in the traditional sense. There are lots of properties on sale in Islington, there are lots of realistic buyers who want them. It is a lack of agreed pricing that is the issue, sellers are looking at pre covid price anchors, and buyers are looking for significant reductions and/or are constrained by tighter mortgage lending amid economic uncertainty.
This site has the number of properties on sale in Islington up 54% year on year.
Islington is a pretty nice place to live, I think (I don't go North of the river if I can help it). People will keep wanting to live in nice places in London. I think where you will see a drop in prices is in shitty bits of outer London where people who can't afford to live in the nice bits will choose to live somewhere further out with more space if they no longer need a daily commutable distance to the centre. People will still want to live in our neighbourhood, which is an earthly paradise.
What is happening is that people are trying to get out of the tiny flats.
For a number this means really reaching for it and getting a house - so London *houses* are in demand
If they can't get a house, some are moving out of London
Some are moving to larger flats
It's great that the government hasn't changed the planning laws to facilitate the construction of more and more tiny flats then. Oh wait.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
What do you mean I was wedded to a No Deal Brexit? You have completely and utterly misunderstood everything I have written on the subject if you believe that?
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
Yes, you blew hot and cold a lot, but you were a pretty big no deal fanboi when that looked the likeliest outcome. We don't have a good deal, we have an anything is better than no deal deal. And your failure to predict it doesn't do much for your Borisology credentials.
I never, never, never preferred no deal.
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
What do you mean I was wedded to a No Deal Brexit? You have completely and utterly misunderstood everything I have written on the subject if you believe that?
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
Yes, you blew hot and cold a lot, but you were a pretty big no deal fanboi when that looked the likeliest outcome. We don't have a good deal, we have an anything is better than no deal deal. And your failure to predict it doesn't do much for your Borisology credentials.
I never, never, never preferred no deal.
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
I think this year will be quite brutal in terms of Corporation tax, as the first shutdown will show in the returns from the end of this month.
My own company return goes in in January, with a tax bill half of last year with 10/12 months were pre lockdown. It will be near zero the following year. Personal tax receipts will only show a major drop in Jan 22.
The combination of Sunak's spending spree, covid impact on receipts and Brexit is going to make a massive hole in government finances. There ain't going to be much going on in the Red Wall apart from austerity.
While there will certainly be many negatives yet to work their way through the system it is important to distinguish between temporarily drops (which realistically are going to be borrowed and never repaid except via Quantitative Easing) and permanent ones which hit the structural deficit that will need to be eliminated in the post-pandemic boom.
Temporary disruptions like this one will occur but won't be structural. They will hit our debt figures and may lead to further QE before this is over - but they're not structural. It is structural changes that are far more damning.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
What do you mean I was wedded to a No Deal Brexit? You have completely and utterly misunderstood everything I have written on the subject if you believe that?
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
Yes, you blew hot and cold a lot, but you were a pretty big no deal fanboi when that looked the likeliest outcome. We don't have a good deal, we have an anything is better than no deal deal. And your failure to predict it doesn't do much for your Borisology credentials.
I never, never, never preferred no deal.
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
Thanks Philip, your comments are great entertainment to read.
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
"The best deal imaginable." 😂
Even Boris doesn't think that.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humour to console him for what he is. France is bacon.
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
I would certainly agree that Trump has caused enormous damage to the US and its standing in the world. His antics since the election have failed miserably but they have also extended the scope of what might be conceivable and not in a good way. I don't Biden is the man to lead the US to a great renewal. I very much hope that I am proved wrong and his skills at bipartisanship prevail. I just don't see it though.
I am reading the Biden biography by Evan Osnos at the moment, it shows how he has built a record of dealmaking over decades with Republicans on Congress and has great people skills.
In that sense he was more LBJ to Obama's JFK, Obama dreamt the schemes and did the passionate rhetoric while maintaining an air of lofty distance, Biden did the hard graft of getting the votes and backslapping and schmoozing legislators, particularly over Obamacare. The Biden presidency will probably be the most centrist incoming Presidency since Bush Snr's, especially if the GOP hold the Senate and that is likely what the US needs right now ie an experienced pragmatist, not the next Messiah
Hmm... I got a £20 Waterstone voucher for my Christmas. Would you recommend it?
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
"The best deal imaginable." 😂
Even Boris doesn't think that.
Imagination was given to man to compensate him for what he is not; a sense of humour to console him for what he is. France is bacon.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. France is bacon.
I went an dug around in the ONS numbers - it turns out that the the hospitalisation rates they are using *are* based on the percentage of that age group in the population. So when they say 137.2 per 100k hospitalisation rate for over 85s - that means 137.2 per 100 thousand people over the age of 85....
I used 2019 census data to create this
Age Deaths Hospitalisations Number 85 years and over 41.75% 23.20% 1,647,271 75 to 84 years 32.82% 25.75% 4,040,624 65 to 74 years 15.14% 17.91% 6,687,066 45 to 64 years 9.24% 21.74% 17,224,230 15 to 44 years 1.03% 9.84% 25,236,635 1 to 14 years 0.01% 1.50% 11,238,100 Under 1 year 0.00% 0.05% 722,881
Dont understand what does 41.75% deaths mean? and 23.2% Hospitalisations mean??
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
What a load of rubbish.
The financial services sector voted Remain mainly anyway, as did London.
However this Canada style deal is exactly what Leave voting regions from the Midlands to Wales, to the North and East and SouthWest of England were voting for. It avoids tariffs on goods, ends free movement, ends ECJ jurisdiction and regains sovereignty and enables us to do our own trade deals and reclaims some UK waters for UK fishermen.
If the financial sector finds it has not got its own way for once for most Leavers the response will be simple, tough.
Indeed after the referendum a Canada style Deal was the most popular form of Brexit, backed by 50% of voters to just 24% opposed
And that's a perfectly ok position for Leavers to take provided they are willing to pay the taxes the financial sector previously paid. Or to go without the services those taxes paid for if they aren't.
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
I think this year will be quite brutal in terms of Corporation tax, as the first shutdown will show in the returns from the end of this month.
My own company return goes in in January, with a tax bill half of last year with 10/12 months were pre lockdown. It will be near zero the following year. Personal tax receipts will only show a major drop in Jan 22.
The combination of Sunak's spending spree, covid impact on receipts and Brexit is going to make a massive hole in government finances. There ain't going to be much going on in the Red Wall apart from austerity.
While there will certainly be many negatives yet to work their way through the system it is important to distinguish between temporarily drops (which realistically are going to be borrowed and never repaid except via Quantitative Easing) and permanent ones which hit the structural deficit that will need to be eliminated in the post-pandemic boom.
Temporary disruptions like this one will occur but won't be structural. They will hit our debt figures and may lead to further QE before this is over - but they're not structural. It is structural changes that are far more damning.
People always like to claim the deficit isn't structural, especially when it is.
The structural changes in the economy due to covid and Brexit will lead to a structural deficit.
Great piece although somewhat infused with your tendency to always expect the worst. On which note I did tell you the last time you went ultra gloomy that both a Trump 2nd term and a Brexit "no deal" were not happening events, didn't I?
Just a quick comment on your #6, the NHS being "not there". This is less prediction than reportage since it's already becoming the case. ICU capacity is insufficient. Same for O2. Ambulances are making tough decisions. And this is before it really hits.
I have been expecting the worst since the age of 16. I have rarely been proved wrong. It's why I'm good at my job. You can't even begin to try and solve problems if you refuse to be realistic about what is happening and what might go wrong.
Trump is going but the harm he has done to US democracy and to the Republican Party will long linger. Listen to what Jo Biden had to say yesterday about the hollowing out of the US's security apparatus and the lack of co-operation. The last time anything remotely like that happened the US got 9/11 because its security services had been rendered incapable by poor leadership. So that is very worrying.
Yes we avoided No Deal. If that is the limit of our ambition as a country, well, words fail me.
I would certainly agree that Trump has caused enormous damage to the US and its standing in the world. His antics since the election have failed miserably but they have also extended the scope of what might be conceivable and not in a good way. I don't Biden is the man to lead the US to a great renewal. I very much hope that I am proved wrong and his skills at bipartisanship prevail. I just don't see it though.
I am reading the Biden biography by Evan Osnos at the moment, it shows how he has built a record of dealmaking over decades with Republicans on Congress and has great people skills.
In that sense he was more LBJ to Obama's JFK, Obama dreamt the schemes and did the passionate rhetoric while maintaining an air of lofty distance, Biden did the hard graft of getting the votes and backslapping and schmoozing legislators, particularly over Obamacare. The Biden presidency will probably be the most centrist incoming Presidency since Bush Snr's, especially if the GOP hold the Senate and that is likely what the US needs right now ie an experienced pragmatist, not the next Messiah
Hmm... I got a £20 Waterstone voucher for my Christmas. Would you recommend it?
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
I think that this will prove to be far too pessimistic. Contrary to expectations the numbers employed in financial services has increased. London has a critical mass of skills in banking, finance, law and technology that nowhere else in Europe can come close to matching and it will continue to thrive.
But you keep on missing the point.
The some of the jobs will remain in the UK but for purposes of booking the transactions the trades will now take place in various EU countries, which means the UK Exchequer loses the revenue and various EU countries gain revenues for their countries.
I mean it isn't like financial services is the biggest contributor to the UK Exchequer.
The other point I've made (and some people at the DMO have also mentioned) is that the government's Internal Market Bill has damaged our legal sector, as has the plans to castrate the judiciary.
One of the main attractions of doing business in the UK is that we had a strong legal sector backed up by a strong and independent judiciary that does put the government back in its box, but we now have a government that thinks breaking international treaties is fine.
The point is where is the profit made, where is the tax paid and where are the bonuses paid? If we maintain competitive tax rates there will still be an inclination to book the profit here, whatever is done in an EU based subsidiary. Dublin is a bit more of a threat that way because of its low CT rates but most of mainland Europe isn't. If the critical mass remains based in London that is where they will pay their taxes and spend their loot.
Unless they want to seriously disrupt their economies in the middle of a severe recession they will want unrestricted access to London's skills.
Again you've made this point before, and again it won't work.
In the UK, if you want to set up a financial services company you're going to need a well capitalised company located set up in the UK, with the money ringfenced in the UK.
So if you want to trade in the EU the company will need a well capitalised subsidiary in a EU country/countries, with the money ringfenced there, so the EU company that the trade is happening in will book the trade and relevant taxes.
So transaction taxes and profits will be largely booked in the EU, whilst payroll taxes will be booked in the UK, for the UK you really want to former to be booked in the UK.
Thanks to this deal I'm now supervising regulatory compliance in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, and France, so thanks to the Brexiteers for the pay rise but quite frankly as a patriot I'd forego the pay rise to avoid the damage we've inflicted on the sector.
You say you work in this industry? Surely you have realised by now that is an automatic disqualification from knowing anything about it? Only the high priests of Brexit and their followers have a true understanding of the economy.
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
When a goalkeeper accidentally throws the ball to the opposing team's striker who taps in the goal you don't say the "blame" for the goal belongs with the striker. The striker did his job, it was the goalkeeper that screwed up.
The credit for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The "blame" for Remainers losing the referendum rests squarely and solely on the Remain side.
You are doing it again: an ELI5, except that it is the explainer who comes across as a five year old.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
What do you mean I was wedded to a No Deal Brexit? You have completely and utterly misunderstood everything I have written on the subject if you believe that?
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
Yes, you blew hot and cold a lot, but you were a pretty big no deal fanboi when that looked the likeliest outcome. We don't have a good deal, we have an anything is better than no deal deal. And your failure to predict it doesn't do much for your Borisology credentials.
I never, never, never preferred no deal.
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
"The best deal imaginable." 😂
Even Boris doesn't think that.
I certainly don't. The lack of mutual recognition of standards and regulation in services is an obvious and important issue. The exclusion from SIS II is annoying and detrimental to vulnerable people in both the UK and the EU. I have not seen an extension of Gove's trusted trader scheme which would clearly help reduce the friction at the ports. Seed potatoes and some other agricultural products are annoying. I am still not clear if we are still a signatory to Dublin II or not.
But we will survive and thrive once we get rid of this damn virus.
Thanks Philip, your comments are great entertainment to read.
i cant really tell any of the pb tories apart. in my mind they all merge into one writhing shub-niggurath of objectional views and luke warm banter. the only two i can really distinguish are casino 'anger management' royal and thommo of the indestructible keyboard.
he would drag his nuts across 2km of covid infected broken glass just because johnson asked him to.
I think it's really very simple: once we have 6 to 10 million of the most vulnerable people vaccinated, then we can start to see restrictions relaxed. (Not removed, relaxed.)
Concerns about vaccine distribution are mostly bunkum. Sticking a needle in someone's arm is not rocket science. And while the Pfizer vaccine is very picky about its temperature for long term storage (which is still not that big a deal), that problem doesn't really exist for the other vaccines.
If we have them, and they work, they will be used. Availability - not distribution - is the issue.
The big issue is that right now, we maybe have 300,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech available per week. And its a 'dual shot' vaccine.
My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that there are 20 million doses of AZN/Oxford in the UK. If true, that will make a massive difference to getting normality back.
Could the other firms not make more of the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine under license? If so, govts should band together and make it clear this has to happen or facilities will be requisitioned to make it happen regardless.
GMP manufacturing of biologicals is not easy. Tech transfer would be difficult. It can be find but would take time to do that and then to qualify the sites. It’s why everyone started manufacturing at risk
Tech transfer wouldn't be that difficult - with the full cooperation of the company in question. I think that is the real reason it isn't happening - Moderna and Biontech are not about to give away their manufacturing secrets.
I went an dug around in the ONS numbers - it turns out that the the hospitalisation rates they are using *are* based on the percentage of that age group in the population. So when they say 137.2 per 100k hospitalisation rate for over 85s - that means 137.2 per 100 thousand people over the age of 85....
I used 2019 census data to create this
Age Deaths Hospitalisations Number 85 years and over 41.75% 23.20% 1,647,271 75 to 84 years 32.82% 25.75% 4,040,624 65 to 74 years 15.14% 17.91% 6,687,066 45 to 64 years 9.24% 21.74% 17,224,230 15 to 44 years 1.03% 9.84% 25,236,635 1 to 14 years 0.01% 1.50% 11,238,100 Under 1 year 0.00% 0.05% 722,881
Dont understand what does 41.75% deaths mean? and 23.2% Hospitalisations mean??
I understand that 15-44 year olds are 1.03% of deaths, but 9.84% of admissions.
It's an Irish site, so there's no particular British political angle. I found it an interesting read.
You might not be surprised to learn that I don't agree with some of that but I have consistently said that the deal (before there was one) is a starting point, not an end point. The key for us is to have access for our financial services by the end of March (which is the target date). If we don't get it I think we seriously have to wonder how much this deal is actually in our interests given the massive trade imbalances.
Where I think that the piece gets it wrong is that it is somewhat parochial, it seems to work on the assumption that the EU is the rest of the world for us. It isn't and its share of our trade will decline, possibly quite sharply. How sharply will depend on how they behave.
I'm friends with a former Vote Leave staffers, they both privately admitted if that if the public knew back in 2016 that this would be the deal, Remain would have won. Compare the rhetoric of Vote Leave in 2016 with the reality of the deal.
This deal is likely as good as it gets for the financial services sector, I think you're likely to see an acceleration of movements of out of the UK and domiciling the trades into the EU, which is is going to well and truly screw Rishi Sunak's plans.
I think H1 2021 will be the reverse of the big bang of 1986. The only question left is in which EU country they domicile the trades in.
I think that this will prove to be far too pessimistic. Contrary to expectations the numbers employed in financial services has increased. London has a critical mass of skills in banking, finance, law and technology that nowhere else in Europe can come close to matching and it will continue to thrive.
But you keep on missing the point.
The some of the jobs will remain in the UK but for purposes of booking the transactions the trades will now take place in various EU countries, which means the UK Exchequer loses the revenue and various EU countries gain revenues for their countries.
I mean it isn't like financial services is the biggest contributor to the UK Exchequer.
The other point I've made (and some people at the DMO have also mentioned) is that the government's Internal Market Bill has damaged our legal sector, as has the plans to castrate the judiciary.
One of the main attractions of doing business in the UK is that we had a strong legal sector backed up by a strong and independent judiciary that does put the government back in its box, but we now have a government that thinks breaking international treaties is fine.
The point is where is the profit made, where is the tax paid and where are the bonuses paid? If we maintain competitive tax rates there will still be an inclination to book the profit here, whatever is done in an EU based subsidiary. Dublin is a bit more of a threat that way because of its low CT rates but most of mainland Europe isn't. If the critical mass remains based in London that is where they will pay their taxes and spend their loot.
Unless they want to seriously disrupt their economies in the middle of a severe recession they will want unrestricted access to London's skills.
Again you've made this point before, and again it won't work.
In the UK, if you want to set up a financial services company you're going to need a well capitalised company located set up in the UK, with the money ringfenced in the UK.
So if you want to trade in the EU the company will need a well capitalised subsidiary in a EU country/countries, with the money ringfenced there, so the EU company that the trade is happening in will book the trade and relevant taxes.
So transaction taxes and profits will be largely booked in the EU, whilst payroll taxes will be booked in the UK, for the UK you really want to former to be booked in the UK.
Thanks to this deal I'm now supervising regulatory compliance in the UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Ireland, and France, so thanks to the Brexiteers for the pay rise but quite frankly as a patriot I'd forego the pay rise to avoid the damage we've inflicted on the sector.
You say you work in this industry? Surely you have realised by now that is an automatic disqualification from knowing anything about it? Only the high priests of Brexit and their followers have a true understanding of the economy.
He’s also taking a very pessimistic position
He's in Compliance. He actually has to read all the rules. Then explain them to the likes of you. *
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
That's why it was so strange, inexplicable even, that Cameron didn't have the official Leave campaign put forward an outline of a platform. It was just EU, yes or no, which made things dramatically easier for Leave and harder for Remain (who nevertheless would've won if the campaign hadn't been so bad).
The blame for Brexit lies with those who wanted it, campaigned for it, voted for it.
The blame for Brexit was the idiotic remain campaign and highlighted by Obama's back of the queue comment
For me the highlight was the 'warning' that wages would rise if we voted to leave.
Closely followed by the claim that Brexit would lead to the collapse of western civilisation.
I predicted temporary wage rises in the case of Brexit due to labour shortages. Temporary because there is indeed no such thing as a Lump of Labour. I am not sure I got that prediction right. Have there rises in real wages?
PS Your second claim is something of a straw man, I feel.
Good morning ladies & gentlemen, Poor Ms Cyclefree is not having a good time is she? Her family problems, especially, the lack of business in the hospitality sector, are clearly and understandably looming very, very, large in her mind.
As far as the vaccine and roll-out are concerned, I think (?hope) she's being too negative. There will be stutters and local problems (as we appear to have in N. Essex) but I think the NHS staff involved will move heaven and earth to get it done. The underfunding of community nursing services over the past few years is, though, coming home to roost. As people are vaccinated, then slowly the sectors which have been worst it will recover. They might not be quite the same as they were, but the people who can adapt to the 'new normal' will find opportunities.
Where I do agree with her is about deteriorating standards in public life; I think we will see more, especially low-level, corruption. 'Who one knows' will become increasingly important, and, bit by bit the integrity of our processes will be damaged. This might provide opportunity for someone with 'clean hands', but not I think until 2022.
The complexity of travelling to (and from) and doing business with Europe will, slowly get worse. At some point Nortedrn Ireland will decide to join the Republic; maybe not in 2021, but at their next elections pro-reunion and pro EU parties will eclipse the DUP.
And like Mr Dancer I suspect that China will make life increasingly difficult for Taiwan. An influx of Hong Kong Chinese citizens will not be 'popular' with anti-immigrant voters here either.
That was, as usual, almost a year ago - with major political events since then, and more to come (ie on how well the two borders, the old one and the new one, actually work in practice). No good for predicting the future. Yopu need a current poll.
I think it's really very simple: once we have 6 to 10 million of the most vulnerable people vaccinated, then we can start to see restrictions relaxed. (Not removed, relaxed.)
Concerns about vaccine distribution are mostly bunkum. Sticking a needle in someone's arm is not rocket science. And while the Pfizer vaccine is very picky about its temperature for long term storage (which is still not that big a deal), that problem doesn't really exist for the other vaccines.
If we have them, and they work, they will be used. Availability - not distribution - is the issue.
The big issue is that right now, we maybe have 300,000 doses of Pfizer/BioNTech available per week. And its a 'dual shot' vaccine.
My understanding, and I could be wrong, is that there are 20 million doses of AZN/Oxford in the UK. If true, that will make a massive difference to getting normality back.
Could the other firms not make more of the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine under license? If so, govts should band together and make it clear this has to happen or facilities will be requisitioned to make it happen regardless.
GMP manufacturing of biologicals is not easy. Tech transfer would be difficult. It can be find but would take time to do that and then to qualify the sites. It’s why everyone started manufacturing at risk
Tech transfer wouldn't be that difficult - with the full cooperation of the company in question. I think that is the real reason it isn't happening - Moderna and Biontech are not about to give away their manufacturing secrets.
Given how delicate the mRNA vaccines are, there clearly must require some special sauce to achieve production at scale.
Have any of these virtue signallers actually said what they would have negotiated into the deal to make it better? More fish? More potatoes? Something to do with Brie?
Or are they actually No Dealers, equating No Deal with being anti-globalisation?
At least it will give them something to boast about at their next dinner party.
Single market and customs union would be a big improvement. I bet Brexit was dreamt up at a dinner party in Islington. Or a private dining room in Mayfair. One of the two.
That is a case to put forward. But they're not.
They still seem to think that they are voting Remain. Which is nonsense.
The question they need to answer is what version of Leave they would like to see. Otherwise they lack credibility. The same applies to the LibDems and others planning to vote against. (But not the SNP since they have a different agenda.)
Further to the deaths and hospitalisation percentages
Age Deaths Hospitalisations Number 85 years and over 41.75% 23.20% 1,647,271 75 to 84 years 32.82% 25.75% 4,040,624 65 to 74 years 15.14% 17.91% 6,687,066 45 to 64 years 9.24% 21.74% 17,224,230 15 to 44 years 1.03% 9.84% 25,236,635 1 to 14 years 0.01% 1.50% 11,238,100 Under 1 year 0.00% 0.05% 722,881
So, if the oldest 5.7 million are vaccinated, then
- (74% * Efficacy) deaths will be prevented - (49% * Efficacy) hospitalisations will be prevented
Looking at these numbers, I think that one thing that may well influence the government is making the period between getting the first 5-6 million vaccinated and the rest done, as short as possible.
As others have pointed out, letting rip after the oldies are vaccinated would still cause the hospitals to be overwhelmed. 50% of hospitalisation come from those below 64.
So there will be a *politically* difficult period where restriction will have to remain, while *infections* are still massive, but deaths and hospitalisations are falling.
They certainly need to remain in place on the vaccinated oldies.
Allowing them to go on cheap holidays while workers continue to be restricted will not help social cohesion.
Comments
Vote Leave / Vote Johnson appear to be brilliant at politics and utterly calamitous at government.
Hence the state of the nation.
Totally agree on Trump. I happen to think he's going to fade away quite quickly once he's somehow levered out of the White House but he's done so much damage, both tangible and intangible. I pray that he represented the peak of nasty right populism in the western world.
Even pessimistic forecasts are for 6% year-on-year growth, and with a successful vaccine rollout we can expect the economy to be back within a couple of percent of 2019 levels.
Certain sectors are going to take longer to recover though, as changes such as increased WFH are probably here to stay.
Best of luck to your children, a recession is always a bad time to be early in your career or starting a business, but there is hope on the horizon.
But Starmer does need to articulate in broad terms what a solution looks like. ie close relationship with the European Union, which involves reinstating some of things lost with Brexit. Pick a few things that seem important and focus on those. It creates a divide with the Conservatives that the latter will exploit. But they are in their comfort zone on Brexit anyway. Labour doesn't need to support them in that.
Forget the competitive aspect, because it is fundamentally irrelevant. Assume we are an absolute monarchy and HM brexited of Her own volition with perhaps a bit of a steer from Thomas Wolsey (him, Wolsey) or similar. The primary question is whether brexit was a good move or not, not how we got there. I don't think you think it was, because you were so visibly wedded to the idea of no deal (eggs and omelettes, remember? We didn't break the eggs, so we don't have an omelette). "We won" looks increasingly embarrassing and irrelevant.
I put 2 in there. So one left.
2021 is going to be mint. i got my annual painful accident in before it even started.
In that sense he was more LBJ to Obama's JFK, Obama dreamt the schemes and did the passionate rhetoric while maintaining an air of lofty distance, Biden did the hard graft of getting the votes and backslapping and schmoozing legislators, particularly over Obamacare. The Biden presidency will probably be the most centrist incoming Presidency since Bush Snr's, especially if the GOP hold the Senate and that is likely what the US needs right now ie an experienced pragmatist, not the next Messiah
You wouldn't want us thinking that they are in "cake and eat it" mode now, would you.
This is a Brexit Deal for the Red Wall above all and rightly so as that is where the Tories made their main gains last year to get Boris his majority, the Tories made no net gains at all in London or the SE.
The best Brexit Deal for financial services would have been to stay in the single market but that would have required continuing free movement and control from the European Court which is not what the Red Wall voted for at all in either 2016 or 2019
I have always, always wanted this outcome and besides May's calamitous leadership it is what I expected.
I always said we need to prepare for WTO and be unafraid of it, in order to get the EU to move. I made it clear that it was Good Deal > No Deal > Bad Deal but that the only way to get the good deal was to be prepared to walk away to no deal forcing the EU to accept our demands. Which is exactly how it played out. I was right and everything I predicted has happened.
I could find you a plethora of posts where I've said this unequivocally if you want since when I did I frequently used a Latin phrase that should be easy to find posts with: si vis pacem para bellum. If you want peace prepare for war. If you want a good deal prepare for no deal.
As for the eggs ... They are well and truly broken now. Our omelette is on its way.
Closely followed by the claim that Brexit would lead to the collapse of western civilisation.
For a number this means really reaching for it and getting a house - so London *houses* are in demand
If they can't get a house, some are moving out of London
Some are moving to larger flats
Again.
Or are they actually No Dealers, equating No Deal with being anti-globalisation?
At least it will give them something to boast about at their next dinner party.
China is either No1 in the world, or about to be. And it isn't No.1 in a Great Power situation with No2, 3, 4 etc close behind. The US is behind. After that, there is basically no one.
China can do what it likes. No one will stop it I'm afraid to say.
https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/
Perhaps folk should just stop posting stuff like...
The blame for Brexit was the idiotic remain campaign and highlighted by Obama's back of the queue comment
I was always saying if the EU don't move then 'bring it on' but that I wanted and expected the EU would move in the end.
I was right. Oh and I did predict the EU would move - repeatedly. This is exactly what I predicted. Indeed even on the day the Internal Market Bill was published I said it was a masterstroke that made a deal much, much more likely as it was showing us as being seriously ready to do what we need to do in a no deal scenario. From memory williamglenn even asked how would I feel if I was wrong and we ended up with no deal.
I am glad things have turned out exactly as I predicted.
PS we do have a good deal. We have the best deal imaginable.
I used 2019 census data to create this
Age Deaths Hospitalisations Number
85 years and over 41.75% 23.20% 1,647,271
75 to 84 years 32.82% 25.75% 4,040,624
65 to 74 years 15.14% 17.91% 6,687,066
45 to 64 years 9.24% 21.74% 17,224,230
15 to 44 years 1.03% 9.84% 25,236,635
1 to 14 years 0.01% 1.50% 11,238,100
Under 1 year 0.00% 0.05% 722,881
Are you *sure* banks can't be persuaded to move to Norniron? Thanks to the Conservative and Unionist Party doing what the Conservative and Unionist Party said would never happen NI is the annex to the UK that is still in the EU. So stick all your eggs in one basket, one financial centre, same language, better craic.
My own company return goes in in January, with a tax bill half of last year with 10/12 months were pre lockdown. It will be near zero the following year. Personal tax receipts will only show a major drop in Jan 22.
The combination of Sunak's spending spree, covid impact on receipts and Brexit is going to make a massive hole in government finances. There ain't going to be much going on in the Red Wall apart from austerity.
https://www.adnkronos.com/fatti/cronaca/2020/12/28/covid-scoperta-variante-italiana-circola-agosto_GqSU097PTY1xx9k4jm9TRN.html?refresh_ce
Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true. France is bacon.
While it's possible that China might throw its weight around militarily, as Cyclefree's header suggests, I think it more likely that they won't. They tend to be a risk averse nation, and there would be substantial risks involved in (say) a Taiwan adventure.
And substantial risks for both the US and Pacific regional powers in not reacting.
It's more likely that regional players reach accommodations with China without a shot being fired. Which arrangements we might not like very much.
Where the balance of power lies in a decade's time will be very interesting to watch.
I bet Brexit was dreamt up at a dinner party in Islington. Or a private dining room in Mayfair. One of the two.
Age Deaths Hospitalisations Number
85 years and over 41.75% 23.20% 1,647,271
75 to 84 years 32.82% 25.75% 4,040,624
65 to 74 years 15.14% 17.91% 6,687,066
45 to 64 years 9.24% 21.74% 17,224,230
15 to 44 years 1.03% 9.84% 25,236,635
1 to 14 years 0.01% 1.50% 11,238,100
Under 1 year 0.00% 0.05% 722,881
So, if the oldest 5.7 million are vaccinated, then
- (74% * Efficacy) deaths will be prevented
- (49% * Efficacy) hospitalisations will be prevented
Looking at these numbers, I think that one thing that may well influence the government is making the period between getting the first 5-6 million vaccinated and the rest done, as short as possible.
As others have pointed out, letting rip after the oldies are vaccinated would still cause the hospitals to be overwhelmed. 50% of hospitalisation come from those below 64.
So there will be a *politically* difficult period where restriction will have to remain, while *infections* are still massive, but deaths and hospitalisations are falling.
Even Boris doesn't think that.
Temporary disruptions like this one will occur but won't be structural. They will hit our debt figures and may lead to further QE before this is over - but they're not structural. It is structural changes that are far more damning.
The structural changes in the economy due to covid and Brexit will lead to a structural deficit.
High praise indeed.
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2020/dec/28/george-galloway-trip-to-queen-of-the-south-set-to-end-in-charge-for-club-scottish-football
But we will survive and thrive once we get rid of this damn virus.
he would drag his nuts across 2km of covid infected broken glass just because johnson asked him to.
https://twitter.com/leonardbenardo1/status/1343209549310922752?s=20
And then get you to follow them.
No wonder he's pessimistic.
* Not you, exactly. But you know what I mean. 😏
PS Your second claim is something of a straw man, I feel.
By Abi Butcher"
https://www.wheretoskiandsnowboard.com/blogs/what-really-happened-in-verbier/
They still seem to think that they are voting Remain. Which is nonsense.
The question they need to answer is what version of Leave they would like to see. Otherwise they lack credibility. The same applies to the LibDems and others planning to vote against. (But not the SNP since they have a different agenda.)
Allowing them to go on cheap holidays while workers continue to be restricted will not help social cohesion.