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Defence review – politicalbetting.com
Defence review – politicalbetting.com
Cheaper Turkish made drones won the Nagorno-Karabakh war. Now Britain's military wants them. Remote controlled weaponry going mainstream —>https://t.co/aUoGIh6Iwv
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I'd also bring back to the UK every single member of the armed forces for the next 6 months to adminster the vaccination programme.
Boris Johnson will NOT step down before the next election.
He will win a handsome majority of more than 40 seats. Most people who voted Conservative last time will do so again.
I’m still not sure if “HMS Princess of Wales” is a typo or deliberate.
A timely reminder that aside from Brexit and Coronaviruses, the world is still turning.
I’m astonished by what’s happened with private space flight in the last decade, with the likes of SpaceX and Blue Origin seemingly doing more than what NASA have been doing in the public sector with the usual contractors - but for half an order of magnitude cheaper.
Brilliant! Despite the topic haven’t laughed so much in ages.
But in respect of your last line, surely ‘last war but one’ would be some progress? Normally it’s the last war but six.
Modern defence systems are incredibly expensive to acquire and require a great deal of specialist, technical expertise to operate. That means for just about all nations that multinational collaboration is the only way to acquire complex capabilities.
The eurocent is starting to drop with the MoD. The MQ-9C UAS fleet is going to be jointly operated with the Belgian Air Component.
Covid school closures 'put children's lives on hold', says Ofsted chief
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55333685:
If they want to get schools open again, one quick way would be to close OFSTED, which was responsible for at least three school closures last term by holding unnecessary inspections with infected inspectors.
She also has a credibility gap given she has never worked in a school, has failed in every job she’s ever done (including a disastrous tenure at OFQUAL) is ignorant of everything to do with education (to the extent she was unaware of what safeguarding is) and generally gives the impression she would be out of her depth running a Sunday school. She’s also a nasty piece of work whom everyone hates.
They want to get schools open? Get Wilshaw to write something. He’s not popular but he’s both intelligent and respected. But I doubt if they’ll dare do that given he’s working in a school and knows what a shambles everything is.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/01/02/matt-hancock-cut-red-tape-stopping-retired-doctors-signing-covid/
“ He has ordered a review and made it clear that he intends to cut any red tape to make it as streamlined as possible for retired GPs to help with administering Covid-19 jabs.
The move has won the backing of Jeremy Hunt, the health and social care select committee chairman, who told The Telegraph on Saturday: "In this new post-Brexit era of getting rid of unnecessary red tape, this should be top of the list. Never have we needed the help of skilled volunteers more badly or more urgently." ”
Thanks for the recommendation, will take a look later today.
On the other side of the scale, it's really important that children are in school for their education, mental and physical health. The last two also apply to parents and carers. And the latter extends into the economy. If children have to be at home it's nigh-impossible to work. I've tried.
This is NOT an easy one. So everyone needs to take the heat out of this.
So it goes on.....
'I really hate children'
Every one of us who has been involved in education knows of some teachers, inspectors and educationalists of whom that could be said.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/03/global-britain-is-willing-to-trade-away-everything-including-scruples
"For example, a large chunk of Turkey-UK trade in previous years has comprised military sales to Ankara. According to Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Britain has exported £1.3bn worth of arms to Turkey since the 2013 Gezi Park popular uprising."
By the way, she isn’t a politician, she’s a civil servant.
We needed some kind of blended learning, or even a rota, so we could deliver the majority of education to the majority of the children. The fewer there are in schools at any one time, the easier it is to control outbreaks by keeping them further away
But the government as far as can be judged hasn’t even considered this, apart from next week’s concession on Year 11 and 13, which now probably won’t happen anyway.
Mr. 86, writ large, that's the same idiocy as when everyone approved the surprising decision to cut FOBT stakes to £2, then months later the BBC was bleating about 'unforeseen consequences' when betting firms had significant job losses.
Said it for a long time, but the low quality of political media is a serious problem.
Edit - although I was, in fairness to me, working on the assumption she had been ordered to write it by her Ministerial overseers.
Like it or not, defence is a massive industry that supports tens of thousands of UK jobs and generates billions of pounds in exports. We’re going to sell arms to pretty much anyone who wants them - apart from Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, against whom international sanctions apply.
Drawing salaries and expenses.
Cocking things up.
The rest, however...
It was only as lockdown was eased that compliance began to decrease. Partly, people felt the situation was safer. But other factors contributed too. For many, the new rules were simply too complex to understand. While during lockdown 90% of adults in the UK reported feeling they understood the rules, by August this figure was just 45% in England. Conflicting rules across UK nations, frequent changes to rules, and confusion about dates of announcement (as opposed to dates of implementation) exacerbated the situation.
But the message from the government about adherence also changed after the revelations about the actions of Dominic Cummings, which were followed by a decrease in compliance. Returning to a single event might seem like bearing a grudge, but it was pivotal for many reasons. During lockdown the message on compliance was clear: social restrictions were vital to stop the spread of the virus, so everyone had to play their part; no excuses, no exemptions. But Cummings changed the tone: if you could find a loophole in the rules, it somehow became acceptable (and defensible) to break them. The enemy changed from being the virus itself to being the measures designed to curb the virus.
This shift in tone did not go unnoticed, as our research at UCL showed. The same sacrifices people had willingly made in the spring as part of a collective social responsibility suddenly seemed less necessary. Goodwill turned to anger and upset, largely targeted towards the government that defended Cummings’ actions. Trust in the government to handle the pandemic took a sharp downward turn in England, from which it has not recovered since. Trust is crucial, as research has shown that it is one of the largest behavioural predictors of compliance during this pandemic: larger than mental health, belief in the health service or numerous other factors. As humans, we need to trust our authorities if we are to follow what they tell us to do.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/02/follow-covid-restrictions-break-rules-compliance
I come from the viewpoint that we should eliminate as much bureaucracy as possible, and justify from first principles what we are trying to achieve then look at how we can do it as easily as possible. The red tape holds back productivity, but in certain areas appears to be self-justifying by people who have a vested employment interest in keeping up the box-ticking.
It's very stupid, short-sighted international politics by a fairly economically desperate administration, not a show of confidence and a new Global Britain.
The EU doesn't have a leg to stand on morally, though, thanks to its recent Chinese deal. All in the West should be recognising we have a Second Cold War on our hands, and it could get hot in the seas to the south of China.
I’m thinking there’s a non-trivial chance that (c) is the highest figure, but that’s a guess and I was wondering what information is out there on it.
Because if it’s (c) odds are they will go back to abstaining, which might also be true for (a).
A bit like OFSTED, why not abolish the whole self serving edifice?
The problem is, it varies massively according to who leads it and what their priorities are. Under Wilshaw, his sole concern was to raise the standard of teaching where it was needed. And as a result, despite a lot of howling, he managed that pretty well. Just prior to the introduction of new GCSEs, standards in teaching were probably as high as they reasonably could be (you want to improve further? Cut class sizes). Under Woodhead, it was essentially a one-man ego trip, his attempt to make up for being driven from the teaching profession due to a series of blunders. Under Spielmann, it really does seem to have become a sinecure that serves no useful purpose at all and is actually doing a vast amount of damage.
I don’t have any instant fixes to that, but one obvious solution is to take control away from Ministers and hand it to the Education Select Committee. They’re doing a lot of good work right now and the wider spread of people on it means it’s less likely a dud will be appointed at the personal whim of a minister, as Morgan did with Spielmann.
The Chinese whispers of the instruction would eventually make it down to an HR manager in a Trust, who simply hears “recruit former staff” and follows the standard recruitment process with all the bollocks attached to it.
After a few days of the process being live, those trying to be recruited complain to the media and the minister quickly becomes aware, that all the bollocks is both slowing down applications or putting willing volunteers off bothering. Which is where we are now.
I believe the estimated 13bn shortfall is over a 10 year timeframe.
Do you have an idea what that would be as a percentage? And a guess as to what it may end up as as a percentage based on previous experience?
(Suspect that the first number will be surprisingly small, and the second one will be surprisingly large !)
Cheers
I agree we should increase our Defence spending and capabilities. Unfortunately, increasing that isn't seen as a vote-winner and cutting it doesn't get the pearl-clutching angst that attends other departments.
One of the few upsides of the incumbent imbecile's addiction to splurging on spending is that Defence might actually get some more cash.
Smoke rises.
https://onemileatatime.com/berlin-brandenburg-airport/
The problem I see with our armed forces is that some time ago now they fell below the critical mass which makes any hi tech program viable or economically sane. Politics means we still want to resource their needs domestically but the reality is that we need to stop pretending and buy US kit with its vastly larger production runs.
That project was a total mess from start to finish. If it wasn’t for the pride of the politicians wanting to fix it, they’d have demolished the terminal building and started again, it was that bad.
Have we really considered who and where our forces are ever going to fight?
Aircraft carriers for example are only useful for fighting wars out of range of UK and Cyprus SBA range, or friendly nearby countries. It seems absurd for nearly our entire navy to be designed to protect a single carrier, which seems likely to never participate in active combat.
Similarly the Army has a devotion to main battle tanks and heavy artillery that it is never going to be used. We are not going to be facing down Ivan on the North German plain again, or invading Iraq, and even there it was lighter, mobile forces that were needed.
Even more so the Trident subs, everything seems oriented to fight the Cold War, despite it ending 30 years ago, rather than the counter insurgency wars, or light expeditionary service that we actually do engage in.
Even @HYUFD with his plans to invade Wales and Scotland should surely concede that we are unlikely to want to pound Stirling Castle to rubble with heavy howitzers.
They split their major projects across European and US suppliers to keep them all hungry and (relatively) honest. They don't fuck around with the design or requirements because they think they're special or know better They build their own ships when it makes strategic sense but the government owns the military shipyards so the winning constructors have to lease the construction facilities from ASC.
Their defence budget is about 50% of the British but they've got a lot more than 50% of the capability.
Any Red Wall seat with a Lab+Brexit >Con score needs a good hard look.
For me, it doesn't feel like this long list of contraptions is really focused on actual defence of our country.
As opposed to keeping certain men nostalgic.
Though as with HM Armed Forces, what they’d do with that new weaponry is another question.
The Eastern Mediterranean is a lot nearer to the UK's base in Cyprus than the South China seas, and I think Erdogan presents a much more immediate and geographically proximate problem than China ; which is just one reason why the handling of this deal is so strategically inept.
OT:
https://twitter.com/ZachElsbury/status/1344904319657656321?s=20
https://twitter.com/koryodynasty/status/1345210486040666113?s=20
https://twitter.com/koryodynasty/status/1345210487378595841?s=20
Mind you, you'd get a low grade for misspelling Spielman's name.
What is missing is an appreciation of how hard online learning is. Almost all the children at my son's school have both the kit and the familiarity with it, they have adequate space and quiet in which to work, they have motivated parents (who after all are paying for this) who generally had at least University level learning themselves and they have staff in schools with adequate access to resources to make it work. Imagining that it is possible to duplicate these elements in a state school setting involves a higher level of fantasy than even the Defence Department are capable of, it really can't be done. And that is before you get to issues such as vulnerable and abused children whose school is an essential sanctuary where they are temporarily safe and fed and treated like a human being.
So online learning is in reality a sop with just enough reality attached to allow a pretense. The Education establishment might get away with it because they have once again removed any objective criteria in the "assessment" of children. Many of those in the upper years of schooling will effectively finish their school year in January if they get to sit prelims (mocks, I believe the benighted call them). Some will not even do that but be "assessed" on class work already done and, much more significantly, on what the schools know their conditional offers are.
If I sound a little bitter its because I am. My son has had his 2 most important years of schooling wreaked, his opportunity to show what he can do taken away from him forever, his hard work (and god he works hard, much harder than I ever did) put to waste. The combination of incompetent ministers and a profession that frankly doesn't always come across as especially professional means that he will have certificates that are degraded and devalued for the rest of his life.
Not a very accurate name though. I suppose she could be a joke, if she were only funny.
Where there was a serious Tory challenger enough Labour voters went all the way and voted Tory - and once you've crossed that rubicon it isn't an outrageous suggestion that they may stay there. Yes BXP picked up some of the non-voters who turned out to vote for Brexit but if you don't vote you don't vote, they won't stick around.
I can't claim to be an expert EU kremlinologist but more than 10 of my old students work in the commission now so I do have some insight. They all think that Scotland will have 'sa propre place' in the Union as Ayrault said and a way will be found to make it happen.
However, there are bad choices and worse choices. At every stage, every government in the United Kingdom has made the worse choice. This is partly because the worse choice is always the better for their own careers and pay packets, and that’s what they really care about.
So education, which was always going to be a serious problem, has become an unmitigated catastrophe.
And it’s the children who are the losers.
If I sound angry and bitter it’s because I am. I think as soon as I can get another job I will be leaving teaching, because I refuse to work for such utter scum.
For primary kids, I'd have thought all that was less true. Sure, they access the internet routinely too, but the issues about mental health and learning to mix may loom larger if you've hardly been to school yet.
Personally I'd shut down all schools and universities until the crisis eases. But if we're going to be selective, why not concentrate on the older kids?
I can command a class of year nine from the front with just my voice. It’s difficult, and it’s not good educationally, but it can just about be done. But I have taught Year 5 as well and it simply wasn’t possible to teach them the same way.
The UK has record numbers of Covid patients in hospital, and Cockney Covid still spreading rampantly, so to maintain the ability of the NHS to provide life-saving treatment we have no option but to take all steps to reduce Covid transmission.
The time for arguing that the government could keep schools open by tweaking the tiers, or improving tracing and isolation is passed. They need to close, probably until we have the number of Covid patients in hospital back below 20,000 - or at least until admissions are below 1,000 a day.
With 6 million people and good GDP per capita, Scotland would be a midsized EU country, particularly as the South Balkans will be making up the numbers too.
The strength of a union is more evident to the individually less powerful, indeed that is why unions are formed.
The classes I’m not sure what to do with are my Y11s; they were supposed to be doing mocks this week. I’m hoping they will do them next week, but do I have a revision lesson, or should I start on the next topic?
To accept the truth - that it was never safe and that once again their cretinism has killed people - is something they are too arrogant to consider.
I have two school-age kids who need an education. But you cannot run a school in a covid-secure manner, as witness by the illnesses and sadly one death that I know of amongst local teachers. Frankly it really isn't helped by the mentality of some parents who clearly don't understand or care what safe behaviour is.
We've just had Brexit. Leaving the EU, EEA and CU very clearly sets this country back yet it is supported because staying in was perceived as worse. The same is true in Scotland where the UK is increasingly the "other" that is repressing their ability to forge their own path.
Saying "leaving won't be easy" is to rerun the failed brexit remain campaign. Positive reasons to stay need to be argued - not just hot air ones but practicalities as to how Scotland can be made better inside a refreshed union. Not "rebellious Scots to crush" as advocated by the Baronet of Epping Forest.
It's not about who is best in post. It's about a good headline. And he can't get a good headline out of the reshuffle because of the pandemic.
So Pike stays in post.
Tragic.
This mixture of European idealism and strategic realpolitik is the same reason that Macron is taking such a firm stance against Erdogan at the moment. In purely cynical terms, given that Britain was so aware of this strategic aspect it was crucial in Modern Greece's independence, it would probably do well remember why it has a base in Cyprus in the first place.
However, I agree with you that there is a massive difference between the internet access available in some homes as opposed to that in others. Laptops and iPads have been supplied to the (disadvantaged) school where my grandson teaches, and leads on on-line learning, but by no means enough. Nor is there always adequate supervision at home. I also agree that for abused and vulnerable children there's often no place like school!
I would though, suggest that most of those of us who are parents become over-fixated on exam results. While I would agree that a First indicates a potential for 'success', I would suggest that 'ability to do the job' counts for a lot more in all levels of society than paper qualifications.
Whether that would be good for Scotland is another issue entirely. Greece has already been mentioned. It is interesting to find that as late as 2007, the SNP advocated a UK-wide referendum on EU membership (from a Leave perspective). I don't discern a bedrock of affection for the EU (does any country in Europe actually like the EU?) here either.
Also, for practical reasons - it’s easier to do revision than a new topic online, so it would help them ease into it; we don’t know where we’re going so familiarity brings reassurance; you can work on general things like exam technique which will do them no harm anyway.
I am not your line manager but if I still were a Head of Faculty that’s what I’d be saying.
"Schools are safe", he says, overlooking that it's the children bringing the virus home that isnt safe