Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
A large portion of the work force are in "high end jobs" - the ones where employers follow employment law by default (rather than being hammered into it by unions/legal action), conditions are good, pay etc.
The Labour party used to write such people off as Middle Class - i.e. shut up and vote for us. Blair made them central to his coalition.
It seems to me that the job of the Labour party was, ironically, to make such jobs the standard. Even though it makes a great deal of the traditional "working class" union/party structure redundant.
Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
Where’s the Tory moral compass?
Well, not as warped as to allow anti-semitism to run riot.
Tories being a bit shit is not on any level comparable to how low Labour sank under Corbyn.
"A bit s***", earns you the prize for understatement of the decade!
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
ManCock on LBC. Says people need to behave as we "only have a few more weeks of this" (restrictions)
Dafuq? Its MONTHS you prannock.
Single digit amount of weeks for the worst of restrictions I predict.
For the worst restrictions quite possibly. But it will be a slow climb back down the tiers as the R rate and the hospitalization rate decline.
The R rate is still the more important because it acts exponentially, whereas improvements in hospitalization rate only give you a constant factor on what case levels the health system can cope with.
On topic. If we aren't targeting the Red Wall seats that we lost last time and others like them that we have lost since 2005 then we are not the Labour Party.
Sorry, am not understanding your point re: Bork, who was a VERY conservative judge. Are you saying that he and Ronnie were ideologically incompatible or something like that?
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Once schools and universities are closed we are in a March-style lockdown. The former being open is the only difference I can see.
Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Yes we are probably just waiting for some kids to go back to school first so they can spread the virus around, and then wait for university students to travel to their universities before we tell them it will be online only.
Quite why we are waiting for the inevitable is hard to explain. Hancock quite clear this morning Tier 3 is not working, which we could have guessed with confidence two weeks ago, yet is still dithering, or more likely his boss is.
On topic. If we aren't targeting the Red Wall seats that we lost last time and others like them that we have lost since 2005 then we are not the Labour Party.
So it isn't a bank holiday or the weekend today so has the Dover/Calais border broken down yet? 🤔
How very unionist, it is a holiday in Scotland.
Wasn't the greatest of Hogmanay's though, was it? Very sadly.
Morning OKC, no though given I spent the previous one in A&E it was still an improvement. Weather has been lovely though , very cold and sunny. I manged to get the tops of my trees trimmed over the weekend so happy.
Sir Desmond Swayne, the New Forest West MP on plans to restrict people to one hour outdoors exercise a day:
"The whole thing is madness. It will be so ridiculous – what difference does it make if you are out in the fresh air for one hour or all day? It won't make a blind bit of difference. It's going beyond ridiculous."
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Once schools and universities are closed we are in a March-style lockdown. The former being open is the only difference I can see.
It is not about rules but behaviour. People are acting very differently to spring as the message then was stay at home. The message a significant minority heard from Boris for the last couple of weeks was enjoy Christmas, thats more important than the virus.
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Yes we are probably just waiting for some kids to go back to school first so they can spread the virus around, and then wait for university students to travel to their universities before we tell them it will be online only.
Quite why we are waiting for the inevitable is hard to explain. Hancock quite clear this morning Tier 3 is not working, which we could have guessed with confidence two weeks ago, yet is still dithering, or more likely his boss is.
Yesterday I predicted Johnson would be doing a 5pm hour of doom this evening announcing huge clampdown.
Surely he's not just going to just dither for a more few days?
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
Honestly what is the justification for not prosecuting? I get that it might not be the best play politically... but at some point you have to respect the law. Never heard of Brad Raffensperger but thank god he's an honest republican.
The justification for not prosecuting is that no-one wants to make a martyr out of Trump with millions of armed nutters.
The whole political class - on both sides - is as embarrassed as all hell that Trump's foul presence has polluted politics for four years. Republicans, that he was their figurehead. Democrats, that they were so demonstrably shite they couldn't stop him. All sides just want him gone, forgotten, a footnote.
Get to Biden's inauguration - and all can relax that the turd has been flushed.
I rather suspect that there's a number of GOP Senators quietly very satisfied with how the election went.
He wouldn't admit it but I'm sure Mitch would rather a Biden Presidency and he is Senate Majority Leader than a second Trump term but a Democrat controlled Senate.
ManCock on LBC. Says people need to behave as we "only have a few more weeks of this" (restrictions)
Dafuq? Its MONTHS you prannock.
Single digit amount of weeks for the worst of restrictions I predict.
For the worst restrictions quite possibly. But it will be a slow climb back down the tiers as the R rate and the hospitalization rate decline.
The R rate is still the more important because it acts exponentially, whereas improvements in hospitalization rate only give you a constant factor on what case levels the health system can cope with.
If we are very lucky , given the ineptitude and crookedness of the government, it will be the summer minimum before we are anywhere near coming out of it and even at that I have my doubts.
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
Honestly what is the justification for not prosecuting? I get that it might not be the best play politically... but at some point you have to respect the law. Never heard of Brad Raffensperger but thank god he's an honest republican.
The justification for not prosecuting is that no-one wants to make a martyr out of Trump with millions of armed nutters.
The whole political class - on both sides - is as embarrassed as all hell that Trump's foul presence has polluted politics for four years. Republicans, that he was their figurehead. Democrats, that they were so demonstrably shite they couldn't stop him. All sides just want him gone, forgotten, a footnote.
Get to Biden's inauguration - and all can relax that the turd has been flushed.
Trump will be prosecuted at the state level first. This will take years - and may well be serial, as one state prosecutes and convicts him at a time.
Biden will be happy with that - he can stay above the fray. To his supporters - "Trump is being prosecuted". To others - "Trump is being prosecuted by the states. I can't interfere - States! Rights!"
This will mean that it will be sometime, late in Kamela Harris second term, when the decision to prosecute Trump federally will come up at the DOJ.
Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
Where’s the Tory moral compass?
More to the point, where's the Tory middle ground ?
Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
Where’s the Tory moral compass?
Sold for a quick profit
Whereas Labour just chucked theirs away
At least not shown to be real crooks at this point.
Labour has more seats in Sussex than Scotland. If recent years tell us anything, there are no safe seats. The blue underbelly is very soft and a few seats should be targeted.
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Once schools and universities are closed we are in a March-style lockdown. The former being open is the only difference I can see.
Other differences would include only being allowed out for one hour of exercise a day and not being allowed to meet anyone at all outside.
Athenian democracy did lead to an imperial protection racket and the mob executing a dozen or so admirals after they won a notable battle, which had the perhaps expected impact of proving more helpful to the enemy than the Athenians.
Good morning.
However, if we'd reproduced its structure, social context and failings literally, or those of classical science, drama and much else, we'd have no civilisation to speak of. We've all been adapting rather than cloning Classical ideas for 700 years.
Yes. We have evolved a democracy that works over a thousand years. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Our current representational model far from works, unforunately ; hence Trump, enormous buy-in to conspiracy theories and disaffection with democracy, and much else.
And a random selection of citizens helps combat that how?
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
Agreed. The Trumpian right enjoys the outrage of their opponents; being held in contempt, not so much.
Btw, what did you make of the letter from all the former US defence secretaries. ?
Excellent analysis - thank you Mr Meeks. All this opens up the big long term questions: What is the party for? And in what way does that identity make clear choices between rational options? And what does it offer that others don't? Despite its obvious and multilateral problems I can answer that question for the Tories much more clearly than I can for Labour.
One other comment: The party appeals strongly to the comfortably well off, especially in the public sector, who possess a social conscience of sorts and also to the most deprived urban communities. This has much to commend it; but if it is not the party of the aspirational working class and middling sorts throughout the UK - and the evidence is overwhelming that it isn't - it cannot win, and cannot be Labour in heart and soul.
Corbynism has trashed the brand for middle Britain. If it had not they would be 25 points ahead right now. Until Labour have a cultural change - and this involves the wholesale removal of the Pidcock tendency - they are stuck.
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
In a parallel universe Republicans use this affair to draw a line under the Trump era, by making a big thing about protecting democracy and the constitution, agreeing to quick impeachment proceedings to symbolically chuck Trump out of office a few days early and more importantly bar him from office in the future.
Instead they are bringing lawsuits against the people who recorded the tapes.
Classic 'how dare people hear this' outrage to distract from the actual content and argue it therefore doesn't matter what is said.
I fear that will prove optimistic. Given the infectivity of the new variant even closing all schools will not get R below 1. All we can hope to achieve now is to reduce the rate of increase until the vaccine is rolled out in sufficient numbers to slow this down.
On present trends I see the NHS overwhelmed within 10 days. Nearly all of that is already baked in. We must do everything we can not to make it worse which means, amongst other things, no schools open in January.
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Once schools and universities are closed we are in a March-style lockdown. The former being open is the only difference I can see.
Other differences would include only being allowed out for one hour of exercise a day and not being allowed to meet anyone at all outside.
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Once schools and universities are closed we are in a March-style lockdown. The former being open is the only difference I can see.
Other differences would include only being allowed out for one hour of exercise a day and not being allowed to meet anyone at all outside.
Plus the support bubbles but they should be kept no matter what.
Athenian democracy did lead to an imperial protection racket and the mob executing a dozen or so admirals after they won a notable battle, which had the perhaps expected impact of proving more helpful to the enemy than the Athenians.
Good morning.
However, if we'd reproduced its structure, social context and failings literally, or those of classical science, drama and much else, we'd have no civilisation to speak of. We've all been adapting rather than cloning Classical ideas for 700 years.
Yes. We have evolved a democracy that works over a thousand years. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Our current representational model far from works, unforunately ; hence Trump, enormous buy-in to conspiracy theories and disaffection with democracy, and much else.
And a random selection of citizens helps combat that how?
I feel like this is an underpants gnome plan.
"The worst system of government, except for all the rest"
Democracy's (modern) saving grace is a the *potential* overthrow of the government every 4-7 years (depends on the country)
That's all the joy joy of a coup without the piles of dead people.
It is the classic fish-don't-see-the-water thing. Most people in democracies don't appreciate the *massive* difference this makes.
Sir Desmond Swayne, the New Forest West MP on plans to restrict people to one hour outdoors exercise a day:
"The whole thing is madness. It will be so ridiculous – what difference does it make if you are out in the fresh air for one hour or all day? It won't make a blind bit of difference. It's going beyond ridiculous."
Sir Bufton Tufton is right. The government must ensure that whatever are the new restrictions, they make sense individually and hang together as a coherent hole. Otherwise transgressions are inevitable not because the public are bloody-minded but simply because they cannot keep up.
If there is to be a curfew, for instance, it should be justified. The virus is not scared of the dark. Why is it all right to drink while nursing a Scotch egg but not otherwise, or OK to eat a Scotch egg while drinking? If the aerosolised virus is quickly dispersed in the open air, why limit time spent outside? Why are cabs safe but cars not, even if masks are worn? And so on.
If within a day of the new Tier 5 or Tier 99, Cabinet ministers give contradictory advice about coffee shops and the like, that is incontrovertible evidence the new rules are too confusing. Likewise if the Prime Minister himself manages to contradict the guidelines even in the same sentence he announces them (...stay at home, and I'm looking forward to visiting my mother).
Certain posters' hysterics to the contrary, AZN aren't massively far behind. Pfizer I think are a little further: they expected 10m by the end of last year and missed by an order of magnitude.
--AS
It seems too many posters have got used to AmazonPrime.
I clicked on 100 m COVID vaccines, where are my parcels?
They’re using Hermes?
Edit: ah, I see that sitter has already been snaffled up!
Excellent analysis - thank you Mr Meeks. All this opens up the big long term questions: What is the party for? And in what way does that identity make clear choices between rational options? And what does it offer that others don't? Despite its obvious and multilateral problems I can answer that question for the Tories much more clearly than I can for Labour.
One other comment: The party appeals strongly to the comfortably well off, especially in the public sector, who possess a social conscience of sorts and also to the most deprived urban communities. This has much to commend it; but if it is not the party of the aspirational working class and middling sorts throughout the UK - and the evidence is overwhelming that it isn't - it cannot win, and cannot be Labour in heart and soul.
Corbynism has trashed the brand for middle Britain. If it had not they would be 25 points ahead right now. Until Labour have a cultural change - and this involves the wholesale removal of the Pidcock tendency - they are stuck.
The problem is that many in the Labour party find the idea that Labour should be arguing to spend 5% more GDP on public services as part of a closeted and funded budget (say) boring. Or not radical enough.
Actually making the trains run on time (something that the slap head Italian journalist never actually managed) is boring. But worthwhile.
A benefits system that actually worked - even if you didn't change the spend very much - would improve lives for a lot of people. But that would be boring.
Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
Where’s the Tory moral compass?
Sold for a quick profit
Whereas Labour just chucked theirs away
At least not shown to be real crooks at this point.
You forgot the last time they were in power already?
Excellent analysis - thank you Mr Meeks. All this opens up the big long term questions: What is the party for? And in what way does that identity make clear choices between rational options? And what does it offer that others don't? Despite its obvious and multilateral problems I can answer that question for the Tories much more clearly than I can for Labour.
One other comment: The party appeals strongly to the comfortably well off, especially in the public sector, who possess a social conscience of sorts and also to the most deprived urban communities. This has much to commend it; but if it is not the party of the aspirational working class and middling sorts throughout the UK - and the evidence is overwhelming that it isn't - it cannot win, and cannot be Labour in heart and soul.
Corbynism has trashed the brand for middle Britain. If it had not they would be 25 points ahead right now. Until Labour have a cultural change - and this involves the wholesale removal of the Pidcock tendency - they are stuck.
I think that this is really the point. Alastair has done some excellent work in identifying what seats Labour can hope to win but his piece doesn't address the more difficult question of what those seats want, other than pointing out that they are more southern, more prosperous and more middle class. But if Labour is no longer for the working class what is the point of it? Can public sector middle managers create something with enough appeal to build a new Blairite coalition?
Blair won because he took over a significant part of the Tories' home turf whilst being able to rely on traditional Labour (Scotland and red wall) to deliver. SKS does not have that assurance. It is not impossible for this new coalition to win but it is going to be very difficult. Unless an incompetent government gives it to them on a plate of course.
ManCock on LBC. Says people need to behave as we "only have a few more weeks of this" (restrictions)
Dafuq? Its MONTHS you prannock.
Single digit amount of weeks for the worst of restrictions I predict.
For the worst restrictions quite possibly. But it will be a slow climb back down the tiers as the R rate and the hospitalization rate decline.
The R rate is still the more important because it acts exponentially, whereas improvements in hospitalization rate only give you a constant factor on what case levels the health system can cope with.
Maybe.
But vaccinations if they reduce/prevent spread should reduce R in themselves too as well as preventing deaths. So as more people are vaccinated the R should ceteris paribus start to come down for the same level of restrictions.
Given how many care home and hospital acquired infections there are this should already be having a very marginal impact but that should kick up a gear as the rollout does.
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
Agreed. The Trumpian right enjoys the outrage of their opponents; being held in contempt, not so much.
Btw, what did you make of the letter from all the former US defence secretaries. ?
Remarkable that they had to write it. And incredibly sad.
WHAT would George Washington say? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Or even Andrew Jackson & Douglas MacArthur?
Any new measures must be coupled with a clear timeline for vaccination of the vulnerable.
Show us how we reach 15m in 7-9 weeks, by the end of the winter. Then explain how the country will be opened up in early spring.
Call for a nationwide volunteer drive to increase vaccination rates.
Even school closures all winter will be tolerated if there is a clear timetable and end goal.
Why do I fear the government will be incapable of building such a strategy?
They've had nine bloody months to build a vaccination strategy. Maybe we will see some serious action tomorrow.
It’s simply pathetic that having ordered 100m AZ doses, they start off tomorrow with just 500k, and we have only learned of this in the last few days. They need to step everything up, and fast. Get this done.
Once again: how? They ordered vaccine and the manufacturer is slow due to production problems. What do you propose that they do about it?
Illegally nationalize the UK facility and attempt to run it themselves? That a) is unlikely to make it happen faster, and b) would have shall we say unfortunate consequences for the future of the pharma sector in the UK.
Build their own facility? You know it's actually quite complicated and difficult, and can't be done at short notice?
--AS
Annoyingly, we pretty much HAVE our own facility. Almost.
They brought forwards the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre at Harwell to accelerate its creation. This was the state from outside as of the end of August (I took a shot from the air)
Why the hell they haven't been doing 24/7 shifts to get this finished and start churning out ChAdOx1 under licence beats me.
By the end of August, it was pretty clear that at least one, probably more, of the vaccine candidates was going to be successful. They should have finished this off, negotiated to produce one of them under licence through November, and been in full on production by the start of December.
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
In a parallel universe Republicans use this affair to draw a line under the Trump era, by making a big thing about protecting democracy and the constitution, agreeing to quick impeachment proceedings to symbolically chuck Trump out of office a few days early and more importantly bar him from office in the future.
Instead they are bringing lawsuits against the people who recorded the tapes.
Classic 'how dare people hear this' outrage to distract from the actual content and argue it therefore doesn't matter what is said.
There are absolutely no grounds for not sharing a conversation between two public officials, with lawyers present on both sides.
This was neither a private conversation, nor an official matter subject to limits on disclosure.
Having two strains of virus running concurrently that require different vaccines (one of which hasn't been developed yet) must be the Government's worse case scenario.
That they have allowed it to happen because of a total failure to prevent exposure to that second strain is quite possibly the biggest mis-step to date. And one for which the Government seems to have no rational answer as to why it has happened.
So it isn't a bank holiday or the weekend today so has the Dover/Calais border broken down yet? 🤔
Has traffic restarted yet? Remember we only get queues when trucks go through in large numbers. When they don't, no queue.
Even a man of your intellectual flexibility can work that one out.
Point well made. Note though even under current limited use a lorry of strawberries has been lost and a number of lorries have been turned away with faulty paperwork.
I fear that will prove optimistic. Given the infectivity of the new variant even closing all schools will not get R below 1. All we can hope to achieve now is to reduce the rate of increase until the vaccine is rolled out in sufficient numbers to slow this down.
On present trends I see the NHS overwhelmed within 10 days. Nearly all of that is already baked in. We must do everything we can not to make it worse which means, amongst other things, no schools open in January.
Cases in London and the South East are showing signs of slowing down. And they've been stable in Wales for a few days (although that might be the decline of the old strains masking the increase of the new one). But it's all with Christmas still in there and the message of how bad it is not having got through yet properly. So I think there is still hope of getting below 1.
But you're right, a large further increase is already baked in, and reopening schools is madness. As is having parts of the country like Liverpool still in tier 3.
Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
Where’s the Tory moral compass?
Sold for a quick profit
Whereas Labour just chucked theirs away
At least not shown to be real crooks at this point.
You forgot the last time they were in power already?
At least Labour were contrite enough to try and hide their cash for honours affairs. The current bunch are so set in their own self- importance, that they feel they can do it under the cover of broad daylight.
Sir Desmond Swayne, the New Forest West MP on plans to restrict people to one hour outdoors exercise a day:
"The whole thing is madness. It will be so ridiculous – what difference does it make if you are out in the fresh air for one hour or all day? It won't make a blind bit of difference. It's going beyond ridiculous."
Sir Bufton Tufton is right. The government must ensure that whatever are the new restrictions, they make sense individually and hang together as a coherent hole. Otherwise transgressions are inevitable not because the public are bloody-minded but simply because they cannot keep up.
If there is to be a curfew, for instance, it should be justified. The virus is not scared of the dark. Why is it all right to drink while nursing a Scotch egg but not otherwise, or OK to eat a Scotch egg while drinking? If the aerosolised virus is quickly dispersed in the open air, why limit time spent outside? Why are cabs safe but cars not, even if masks are worn? And so on.
If within a day of the new Tier 5 or Tier 99, Cabinet ministers give contradictory advice ...
If ? This 16 year old is probably not unrepresentative.
“A lot of the nation has lost its trust and faith in the government because of the confusing messages and lack of clarity. There are too many unanswered questions.
“My generation is becoming much more involved in politics. We’re beginning to ask ourselves if they really know what they’re talking about. A lot of people have realised that they can’t depend on anything they’re being told...
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
Honestly what is the justification for not prosecuting? I get that it might not be the best play politically... but at some point you have to respect the law. Never heard of Brad Raffensperger but thank god he's an honest republican.
The justification for not prosecuting is that no-one wants to make a martyr out of Trump with millions of armed nutters.
The whole political class - on both sides - is as embarrassed as all hell that Trump's foul presence has polluted politics for four years. Republicans, that he was their figurehead. Democrats, that they were so demonstrably shite they couldn't stop him. All sides just want him gone, forgotten, a footnote.
Get to Biden's inauguration - and all can relax that the turd has been flushed.
So basically we should ignore the law if it would upset some people? As long as you have crazy supporters you can stay out of jail. Not sure that's such a great incentive...
I'm not seeing a great deal of evidence that Republicans are embarrassed of Trump. Some are privately I am sure. But I think 12 Senators are going to claim he actually won the election!
Crazy to think 2024 might see Trump elected republican nominee from a prison cell.
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
Agreed. The Trumpian right enjoys the outrage of their opponents; being held in contempt, not so much.
Btw, what did you make of the letter from all the former US defence secretaries. ?
Remarkable that they had to write it. And incredibly sad.
WHAT would George Washington say? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Or even Andrew Jackson & Douglas MacArthur?
Andrew Jackson would cheer it on. He is Trumpsky's role model. 'The voters have made their decision, now let them enforce it'
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Yes we are probably just waiting for some kids to go back to school first so they can spread the virus around, and then wait for university students to travel to their universities before we tell them it will be online only.
Quite why we are waiting for the inevitable is hard to explain. Hancock quite clear this morning Tier 3 is not working, which we could have guessed with confidence two weeks ago, yet is still dithering, or more likely his boss is.
Yesterday I predicted Johnson would be doing a 5pm hour of doom this evening announcing huge clampdown.
Surely he's not just going to just dither for a more few days?
He needs to hear what Nicola says to do before he does it.
Certain posters' hysterics to the contrary, AZN aren't massively far behind. Pfizer I think are a little further: they expected 10m by the end of last year and missed by an order of magnitude.
--AS
It seems too many posters have got used to AmazonPrime.
I clicked on 100 m COVID vaccines, where are my parcels?
They’re using Hermes?
Edit: ah, I see that sitter has already been snaffled up!
In that case have a look in your black wheelie bin, or they might have thrown the fragile packs of vials over the garden gate.
Sir Desmond Swayne, the New Forest West MP on plans to restrict people to one hour outdoors exercise a day:
"The whole thing is madness. It will be so ridiculous – what difference does it make if you are out in the fresh air for one hour or all day? It won't make a blind bit of difference. It's going beyond ridiculous."
Sir Bufton Tufton is right. The government must ensure that whatever are the new restrictions, they make sense individually and hang together as a coherent hole. Otherwise transgressions are inevitable not because the public are bloody-minded but simply because they cannot keep up.
If there is to be a curfew, for instance, it should be justified. The virus is not scared of the dark. Why is it all right to drink while nursing a Scotch egg but not otherwise, or OK to eat a Scotch egg while drinking? If the aerosolised virus is quickly dispersed in the open air, why limit time spent outside? Why are cabs safe but cars not, even if masks are worn? And so on.
If within a day of the new Tier 5 or Tier 99, Cabinet ministers give contradictory advice about coffee shops and the like, that is incontrovertible evidence the new rules are too confusing. Likewise if the Prime Minister himself manages to contradict the guidelines even in the same sentence he announces them (...stay at home, and I'm looking forward to visiting my mother).
I'm working on the assumption that the closure of all schools in England and Wales for at least six weeks is announced at some point in the next few days.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Once schools and universities are closed we are in a March-style lockdown. The former being open is the only difference I can see.
Other differences would include only being allowed out for one hour of exercise a day and not being allowed to meet anyone at all outside.
Plus the support bubbles but they should be kept no matter what.
Do we have any evidence yet for transmission outside amongst socially distanced individuals?
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
Having two strains of virus running concurrently that require different vaccines (one of which hasn't been developed yet) must be the Government's worse case scenario.
That they have allowed it to happen because of a total failure to prevent exposure to that second strain is quite possibly the biggest mis-step to date. And one for which the Government seems to have no rational answer as to why it has happened.
As far as I can see no one is even challenging the government on this. I presume because the media class is made up of people who see airtravel as 'essential'
Having two strains of virus running concurrently that require different vaccines (one of which hasn't been developed yet) must be the Government's worse case scenario.
That they have allowed it to happen because of a total failure to prevent exposure to that second strain is quite possibly the biggest mis-step to date. And one for which the Government seems to have no rational answer as to why it has happened.
As far as I can see no one is even challenging the government on this. I presume because the media class is made up of people who see airtravel as 'essential'
That Burley woman - retrieving the initial problem by flying to South Africa for a holiday. Genius.
Certain posters' hysterics to the contrary, AZN aren't massively far behind. Pfizer I think are a little further: they expected 10m by the end of last year and missed by an order of magnitude.
--AS
It seems too many posters have got used to AmazonPrime.
I clicked on 100 m COVID vaccines, where are my parcels?
They’re using Hermes?
Edit: ah, I see that sitter has already been snaffled up!
In that case have a look in your black wheelie bin, or they might have thrown the fragile packs of vials over the garden gate.
So a year after every election there will be a Brexit review. The govt want it to stay at the top of the public and electoral agenda. To the usual moaners, don't blame ex-remainers for this!
You have forgotten the first rule of Brexit: everything is the fault of Remainers.
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
Honestly what is the justification for not prosecuting? I get that it might not be the best play politically... but at some point you have to respect the law. Never heard of Brad Raffensperger but thank god he's an honest republican.
The justification for not prosecuting is that no-one wants to make a martyr out of Trump with millions of armed nutters.
The whole political class - on both sides - is as embarrassed as all hell that Trump's foul presence has polluted politics for four years. Republicans, that he was their figurehead. Democrats, that they were so demonstrably shite they couldn't stop him. All sides just want him gone, forgotten, a footnote.
Get to Biden's inauguration - and all can relax that the turd has been flushed.
Agree with most of this. Except
a) Trumpsky, like McCarthy, will never be JUST a footnote; and b) we can NOT relax not for many years; danger of both Trumpsky revival (like "the New Nixon" of 1968) OR more likely a successor, just as Barry Goldwater begat Ronald Reagan.
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
Look, it's this sort of attitude that is the problem. This whole thing that Trump is evil, the Devil etc etc, it is the sort of stuff that is poisoning the atmosphere. What exactly has he done that justifies that language.
I don't support Joe Biden. Did he know something about what his son, Hunter, was doing? Either that or he is at least incredibly gullible (and he hasn't categorically denied he didn't know anything). Could Tara Reade's claims be true and he is a predator? Possibly but that story was quickly pushed out of the news. But do I think that makes Joe Biden the Devil Incarnate? Absolutely not. I just think he is a weak candidate who won't get anything done and will end up being a massive disappointment.
As for investigating Trump for his actions, we will see what happens but I'm fairly confident nothing will be done on this for the simple reason that the Democrats will not want to go there. And that might tell you something - if you would stop to think - about how confident they are that claims of election malpractice are 100% Bullsh1t.
I fear that will prove optimistic. Given the infectivity of the new variant even closing all schools will not get R below 1. All we can hope to achieve now is to reduce the rate of increase until the vaccine is rolled out in sufficient numbers to slow this down.
On present trends I see the NHS overwhelmed within 10 days. Nearly all of that is already baked in. We must do everything we can not to make it worse which means, amongst other things, no schools open in January.
Cases in London and the South East are showing signs of slowing down. And they've been stable in Wales for a few days (although that might be the decline of the old strains masking the increase of the new one). But it's all with Christmas still in there and the message of how bad it is not having got through yet properly. So I think there is still hope of getting below 1.
But you're right, a large further increase is already baked in, and reopening schools is madness. As is having parts of the country like Liverpool still in tier 3.
I am not sure I believe the statistics currently coming out of Wales, they seem to have failed to cope with the holiday period. The charts shared here last night did not indicate a slowing down in London or the SE even if there was a hint that the rate of increase was moderating somewhat. This showed to me that even tier 4 doesn't work against the new variant. Its just too easy to catch.
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
I am not sure "the working people" want Labour anymore. They have their "clown prince", Brexit, and cheap terms for a leased Mercedes, what more do they need?
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
Honestly what is the justification for not prosecuting? I get that it might not be the best play politically... but at some point you have to respect the law. Never heard of Brad Raffensperger but thank god he's an honest republican.
The justification for not prosecuting is that no-one wants to make a martyr out of Trump with millions of armed nutters.
The whole political class - on both sides - is as embarrassed as all hell that Trump's foul presence has polluted politics for four years. Republicans, that he was their figurehead. Democrats, that they were so demonstrably shite they couldn't stop him. All sides just want him gone, forgotten, a footnote.
Get to Biden's inauguration - and all can relax that the turd has been flushed.
I think the armed nutters are a red herring. You read lots of stuff about lone shooters and absolutely nothing about sustained gun battles (nutters vs feds) because the feds are always going to win the gun battle. SARs are fine for multi-murder followed by suicide, useless for sustained insurrection. Nutters = pussies.
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
Agreed. The Trumpian right enjoys the outrage of their opponents; being held in contempt, not so much.
Btw, what did you make of the letter from all the former US defence secretaries. ?
Remarkable that they had to write it. And incredibly sad.
WHAT would George Washington say? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Or even Andrew Jackson & Douglas MacArthur?
Andrew Jackson would cheer it on. He is Trumpsky's role model. 'The voters have made their decision, now let them enforce it'
You do make a point. BUT would like to think his sense of the honor and duty of a soldier would outweigh that.
Any new measures must be coupled with a clear timeline for vaccination of the vulnerable.
Show us how we reach 15m in 7-9 weeks, by the end of the winter. Then explain how the country will be opened up in early spring.
Call for a nationwide volunteer drive to increase vaccination rates.
Even school closures all winter will be tolerated if there is a clear timetable and end goal.
Why do I fear the government will be incapable of building such a strategy?
I of course fully agree with maximising vaccination efforts (assuming doses are available), but setting fixed dates for opening up is exactly what got us into the second wave in the first place. The opening up needs to be gradual. Whenever R drops a good way below 1, go down a tier, and then wait three weeks to see how things go and make the next decision.
And right now it's all about getting the epidemic back under control in the first place. Otherwise the vaccines will be too late.
There needs to be a clear timetable to get the 15m in priority groups inoculated. R won’t be as key a metric if the most vulnerable are immune. (Although it should naturally fall too)
R will still be critical. Do not forget that the vaccines only provide partial protection: around 70% according to the AZ trial, and similar is guesstimated for a single Pfizer shot.
So if you let it rip after 15M vaccinated, the health system would still get overloaded. Indeed there'd probably still be far too many serious cases just among the "non-vulnerable".
The vaccines will gradually bring R down (assuming they reduce virus spread as well as disease), and that should be the driver for gradual reopening.
The vast majority of deaths and hospitalisations currently are in the priority groups, so we should be able to reduce restrictions significantly (not completely) once we have worked through the first 15m.
Do not underestimate the power of exponential spread. A 70% reduction in hospitalisations per case is only worth a week and a half at R=2.
90% of deaths are in the 65+ age group. There are 12 million people in that category in the UK, so we ought to be able to get them vaccinated within about 10 weeks. That should reduce the death toll by around 90%.
Precisely.
So long as hospitalisation rates don't exponentially explode which will result in under-65s who can currently survive with prompt treatment no longer doing so.
I've done a quick-and-dirty approximation of the ratios of hospitalisations to deaths in each age band.
85+: 2:1 75-84: 3:1 65-74: Between 4:1 and 5:1 45-64: Between 7:1 and 10:1 15-44: Between 40:1 and 50:1 Under 15s: Around 100:1
It reflects the far better chance you have of pulling through with medical help, the younger you are. The numbers seriously ill also go down as you go down the age bands, but the death rate differential is from a double whammy: fewer seriously ill multiplied by a far better chance of survival if you are seriously ill.
The default assumption that the IFR is invariant relies on an implicit assumption that medical intervention is invariant. If the hospitals get overwhelmed, that assumption breaks.
The younger categories have got far more scope for their IFRs to multiply upwards. In practice, of course, the hospitals would triage and simply not intervene for the older bands.
Great header. Agree that option 1 (2005 was a very narrow victory anyway) is least likely to work.
Starmer is polling much better than 2019 result. But needs votes where it matters.
Could increase of working from home mean more middle class people move out of London and tip marginal seats Labour's way?
What we have actually been seeing is the opposite - older people have been selling up (or keeping their old home for letting) and moving out, and London has been getting younger as the rooms in what was formerly a family house are occupied by one person in each. The relationship between voting and age is much stronger than class, the latter being remarkable currently for the way in which the previously strong correlation has pretty much disappeared.
Whilst some are talking in terms of a future where working class people vote Tory and middle class Labour, that isn’t where we are now. Those working class people who vote Tory are mostly retired, and many of the young from those areas are living in London bedsits.
Yep, age is the key determining factor these days, not class. In 2017, crossover from Labour to Tory was 47, I think. In 2019, it was 39. That's what got the Tories their majority. Right now, Labour has a strong lead among the under 50s, the Tories a strong one among the over 50s. If that continues, it is going to lead to a hung Parliament. If Labour can get a lead among all working age voters, the Tories will be in serious danger of losing power.
Yes, I think that Labour needs to think through policies and agendas that appeal to the middle aged employed. More than the middle or working class, these are the swing voters now.
Must get off though. Looks to be a busy week ahead.
Class is still important though albeit mainly only in the minds of senior / aged Labour members. Fighting for "the working class" remains totemic despite most not having a clue how to define it in the modern age.
Blair won two landslides and a comfortable majority by talking to the majority of people in the middle - people who work as opposed to "working class". Where Labour lost its way in the last decade is that these people were largely ignored with (even in the 2015 campaign) policies only really focused on the top and bottom deciles.
I can't understand how the party has so utterly lost this connection with the middle ground considering that so many of its members are from that 80%.
Ahem - Corbyn? That middle ground membership elected him, fawned over him, overlooked the rampant anti-semitism the leadership was also overlooking (yes, Starmer, I include your 3 years as part of Corbyn's Shadow Cabinet within that).
Labour is a Party whose moral compass has rusted to dust. The wider middle ground knows this.
Where’s the Tory moral compass?
Sold for a quick profit
Whereas Labour just chucked theirs away
At least not shown to be real crooks at this point.
You forgot the last time they were in power already?
At least Labour were contrite enough to try and hide their cash for honours affairs. The current bunch are so set in their own self- importance, that they feel they can do it under the cover of broad daylight.
ManCock on LBC. Says people need to behave as we "only have a few more weeks of this" (restrictions)
Dafuq? Its MONTHS you prannock.
Single digit amount of weeks for the worst of restrictions I predict.
For the worst restrictions quite possibly. But it will be a slow climb back down the tiers as the R rate and the hospitalization rate decline.
The R rate is still the more important because it acts exponentially, whereas improvements in hospitalization rate only give you a constant factor on what case levels the health system can cope with.
Maybe.
But vaccinations if they reduce/prevent spread should reduce R in themselves too as well as preventing deaths. So as more people are vaccinated the R should ceteris paribus start to come down for the same level of restrictions.
Given how many care home and hospital acquired infections there are this should already be having a very marginal impact but that should kick up a gear as the rollout does.
Yes of course the vaccines should reduce R (although the trials have only looked at reducing disease rather than spread). But not as quickly as the decrease in hospitalization rate you get from vaccinating the most vulnerable first.
In fact decreasing the R rate would be better served by vaccinating those with the most contacts first: health/care workers (which of course are top of the list already), teachers, supermarket workers, hairdressers ...
But say vaccinating 20% of the population does give you a 20% reduction in R. Now you can use a restriction level that might otherwise have an R of 1.25. But you certainly can't just drop all restrictions as the "natural" R is far above that.
Sir Desmond Swayne, the New Forest West MP on plans to restrict people to one hour outdoors exercise a day:
"The whole thing is madness. It will be so ridiculous – what difference does it make if you are out in the fresh air for one hour or all day? It won't make a blind bit of difference. It's going beyond ridiculous."
Sir Bufton Tufton is right. The government must ensure that whatever are the new restrictions, they make sense individually and hang together as a coherent hole. Otherwise transgressions are inevitable not because the public are bloody-minded but simply because they cannot keep up.
If there is to be a curfew, for instance, it should be justified. The virus is not scared of the dark. Why is it all right to drink while nursing a Scotch egg but not otherwise, or OK to eat a Scotch egg while drinking? If the aerosolised virus is quickly dispersed in the open air, why limit time spent outside? Why are cabs safe but cars not, even if masks are worn? And so on.
If within a day of the new Tier 5 or Tier 99, Cabinet ministers give contradictory advice ...
If ? This 16 year old is probably not unrepresentative.
“A lot of the nation has lost its trust and faith in the government because of the confusing messages and lack of clarity. There are too many unanswered questions.
“My generation is becoming much more involved in politics. We’re beginning to ask ourselves if they really know what they’re talking about. A lot of people have realised that they can’t depend on anything they’re being told...
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
I'd agree with that but there is a wider issue here in that politics - as in the US - is increasingly about cultural values (immigration, BLM etc etc) and, for many of Labour's ex-voters, the Labour Party not only does not recognise their concerns but actively despises them. SKS gets that from a logical standpoint but his problem is he just cannot identify with many of these people given his background etc.
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
You've identified the Labour totems. Ownership and unions. And frankly neither of them are really relevant any more.
Ownership doesn't matter if regulation works. Providing your energy market fulfils both national strategic requirements and offers a fair and competitive range of products to consumers does it matter who owns them?
Unions aren't something I have really bothered and the same is true for the majority of working people. I think that they remain an important bulwark in principle, in practice they aren't relevant to the modern workforce.
Blair understood this instinctively and framed both policies and messages to reflect this - I will deliver to you a fair society without having to renationalise everything and recreating the closed shop.
Labour would connect with the majority of people again if it accepted the world as it is and started talking about how it could be improved, rather than railing against the modern world seeking a transformation of 2020 so that it looks more like 1970.
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
Honestly what is the justification for not prosecuting? I get that it might not be the best play politically... but at some point you have to respect the law. Never heard of Brad Raffensperger but thank god he's an honest republican.
The justification for not prosecuting is that no-one wants to make a martyr out of Trump with millions of armed nutters.
The whole political class - on both sides - is as embarrassed as all hell that Trump's foul presence has polluted politics for four years. Republicans, that he was their figurehead. Democrats, that they were so demonstrably shite they couldn't stop him. All sides just want him gone, forgotten, a footnote.
Get to Biden's inauguration - and all can relax that the turd has been flushed.
Agree with most of this. Except
a) Trumpsky, like McCarthy, will never be JUST a footnote; and b) we can NOT relax not for many years; danger of both Trumpsky revival (like "the New Nixon" of 1968) OR more likely a successor, just as Barry Goldwater begat Ronald Reagan.
Barry Goldwater was wretched.
Ronald Reagan is America's best post war President.
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
Agreed. The Trumpian right enjoys the outrage of their opponents; being held in contempt, not so much.
Btw, what did you make of the letter from all the former US defence secretaries. ?
Remarkable that they had to write it. And incredibly sad.
WHAT would George Washington say? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Or even Andrew Jackson & Douglas MacArthur?
Andrew Jackson would cheer it on. He is Trumpsky's role model. 'The voters have made their decision, now let them enforce it'
You do make a point. BUT would like to think his sense of the honor and duty of a soldier would outweigh that.
Plus, if Jackson was alive....
- Trump would insult Rachel in a speech - Jackson would get the duelling pistols out
So a year after every election there will be a Brexit review. The govt want it to stay at the top of the public and electoral agenda. To the usual moaners, don't blame ex-remainers for this!
You have forgotten the first rule of Brexit: everything is the fault of Remainers.
You are perhaps presuming on election timing?
I thought the Fixed Term Parliaments Act was due to be defenestrated.
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
Far too many in Labour think "the working people" are racist, Brexiteer oiks who hang the cross of St. George from their windows and who wouldn't know how to prepare an avocado if their life depended on it.
Labour is down to holding the seats where it feels comfortable. And some of them are hanging on a gossamer thread. If it wants power, it is going to have move W-A-Y out of its comfort zone - and start embracing people it really doesn't like.
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
Far too many in Labour think "the working people" are racist, Brexiteer oiks who hang the cross of St. George from their windows and who wouldn't know how to prepare an avocado if their life depended on it.
Labour is down to holding the seats where it feels comfortable. And some of them are hanging on a gossamer thread. If it wants power, it is going to have move W-A-Y out of its comfort zone - and start embracing people it really doesn't like.
Is that what the Conservatives did? Do you not like your voters?
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
You've identified the Labour totems. Ownership and unions. And frankly neither of them are really relevant any more.
Ownership doesn't matter if regulation works. Providing your energy market fulfils both national strategic requirements and offers a fair and competitive range of products to consumers does it matter who owns them?
Unions aren't something I have really bothered and the same is true for the majority of working people. I think that they remain an important bulwark in principle, in practice they aren't relevant to the modern workforce.
Blair understood this instinctively and framed both policies and messages to reflect this - I will deliver to you a fair society without having to renationalise everything and recreating the closed shop.
Labour would connect with the majority of people again if it accepted the world as it is and started talking about how it could be improved, rather than railing against the modern world seeking a transformation of 2020 so that it looks more like 1970.
Trade unions are relevant to the individual when in conflict with employer, they have no real place in collective bargaining.
They have their "clown prince", Brexit, and cheap terms for a leased Mercedes, what more do they need?
MB leasing must have terrifyingly effective sales incentives. My bin man has a leased E53 EQ Boost. Not my cup of tea but it's got lots of interesting tech in it. The whole electric system is 48V with solid state relays.
Sopel reporting the Trump tapes: remarkable that it leaked in the first place, widespread astonishment from the US political establishment. Says interfering in an election is an offence that would get you three years in prison. Says Biden admin wont want to get dragged into a legal fight with Trump, but others will be keener and may act.
Honestly what is the justification for not prosecuting? I get that it might not be the best play politically... but at some point you have to respect the law. Never heard of Brad Raffensperger but thank god he's an honest republican.
The justification for not prosecuting is that no-one wants to make a martyr out of Trump with millions of armed nutters.
The whole political class - on both sides - is as embarrassed as all hell that Trump's foul presence has polluted politics for four years. Republicans, that he was their figurehead. Democrats, that they were so demonstrably shite they couldn't stop him. All sides just want him gone, forgotten, a footnote.
Get to Biden's inauguration - and all can relax that the turd has been flushed.
Agree with most of this. Except
a) Trumpsky, like McCarthy, will never be JUST a footnote; and b) we can NOT relax not for many years; danger of both Trumpsky revival (like "the New Nixon" of 1968) OR more likely a successor, just as Barry Goldwater begat Ronald Reagan.
Barry Goldwater was wretched.
Ronald Reagan is America's best post war President.
And could be argued to be a racist given his comment that Africans were monkeys.
Would anyone take the vaccine but not take it delivered by a vet? Wouldn't bother me in the slightest if it was a vet jabbing me.
I put the well-being of my dog in their hands - and my dog is a member of my family. Of couure I'd take a jab from a vet. I'd probably be happy for them to take my appendix out too, if the immediate prospect of it bursting was the alternative. Brain surgery - might take a pass.
We need to be getting hundreds of thousands of jabs a day. By whatever safe means we can concoct. Based around upermarket car-parks. People who are going out and about to supermarkets are not people holed up - so are more likley to be a vector for transfer. Jab any adult shopping that wants one.
In my experience the one person you don't want sticking anything into you is a doctor.
I fear that will prove optimistic. Given the infectivity of the new variant even closing all schools will not get R below 1. All we can hope to achieve now is to reduce the rate of increase until the vaccine is rolled out in sufficient numbers to slow this down.
On present trends I see the NHS overwhelmed within 10 days. Nearly all of that is already baked in. We must do everything we can not to make it worse which means, amongst other things, no schools open in January.
Cases in London and the South East are showing signs of slowing down. And they've been stable in Wales for a few days (although that might be the decline of the old strains masking the increase of the new one). But it's all with Christmas still in there and the message of how bad it is not having got through yet properly. So I think there is still hope of getting below 1.
But you're right, a large further increase is already baked in, and reopening schools is madness. As is having parts of the country like Liverpool still in tier 3.
I am not sure I believe the statistics currently coming out of Wales, they seem to have failed to cope with the holiday period. The charts shared here last night did not indicate a slowing down in London or the SE even if there was a hint that the rate of increase was moderating somewhat. This showed to me that even tier 4 doesn't work against the new variant. Its just too easy to catch.
I concede it might be wishful thinking clouding my interpretation of the charts.
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
Far too many in Labour think "the working people" are racist, Brexiteer oiks who hang the cross of St. George from their windows and who wouldn't know how to prepare an avocado if their life depended on it.
Labour is down to holding the seats where it feels comfortable. And some of them are hanging on a gossamer thread. If it wants power, it is going to have move W-A-Y out of its comfort zone - and start embracing people it really doesn't like.
Who doesn't know how to prepare an avocado? You cut it in half and remove the stone. It's not rocket science.
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
The problem I think is that Labour knows what it is *for* in a very abstract sense ("the working people") but the Blair era eviscerated it of what that meant in practical terms ("redistribution", "public ownership"), and actually took it away from more than just "clause 4" of the objects. I'm specifically thinking of Clause 2 re: Unions, and clauses 6 and 7 re: internationalization, which have been lost in the overseas wars of the Blair era, and the acceptance of Brexit today - they seem to be afraid of being too outward looking in the current climate.
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
Far too many in Labour think "the working people" are racist, Brexiteer oiks who hang the cross of St. George from their windows and who wouldn't know how to prepare an avocado if their life depended on it.
Labour is down to holding the seats where it feels comfortable. And some of them are hanging on a gossamer thread. If it wants power, it is going to have move W-A-Y out of its comfort zone - and start embracing people it really doesn't like.
Problem with that strategy is that it only works if people feel vaguely convinced you are genuine, and there is no way the modern Labour Party can pull that trick off.
Having two strains of virus running concurrently that require different vaccines (one of which hasn't been developed yet) must be the Government's worse case scenario.
That they have allowed it to happen because of a total failure to prevent exposure to that second strain is quite possibly the biggest mis-step to date. And one for which the Government seems to have no rational answer as to why it has happened.
As far as I can see no one is even challenging the government on this. I presume because the media class is made up of people who see airtravel as 'essential'
There was a journo on twitter that posted he'd flown 300,000 miles in 2019 the other day.
OF COURSE Trumpsky's incredible, stark commission of a crime recorded in real time is startling.
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" - Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
Agreed. The Trumpian right enjoys the outrage of their opponents; being held in contempt, not so much.
Btw, what did you make of the letter from all the former US defence secretaries. ?
Remarkable that they had to write it. And incredibly sad.
WHAT would George Washington say? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Or even Andrew Jackson & Douglas MacArthur?
Andrew Jackson would cheer it on. He is Trumpsky's role model. 'The voters have made their decision, now let them enforce it'
You do make a point. BUT would like to think his sense of the honor and duty of a soldier would outweigh that.
Jackson would be too busy committing genocide to care.
Comments
The Labour party used to write such people off as Middle Class - i.e. shut up and vote for us. Blair made them central to his coalition.
It seems to me that the job of the Labour party was, ironically, to make such jobs the standard. Even though it makes a great deal of the traditional "working class" union/party structure redundant.
This may form part of a new March-style national lockdown, with the same sort of restrictions we had then.
Labour is nowhere near regaining power yet. It seems to think not being Corbyn and moving on from Brexit is enough, but it isn't.
FWIW, I think Starmer understands this at a visceral level but has so far struggled to be consistent and is trying to cover too many flanks.
More relevant than ever:-
1. https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/03/11/political-rights-and-wrongs/
2. https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/03/12/amber-warnings-what-might-be-the-signals-that-all-is-not-well-in-a-democracy/
The R rate is still the more important because it acts exponentially, whereas improvements in hospitalization rate only give you a constant factor on what case levels the health system can cope with.
We are under a new Tier 4 that didn't exist. While nobody at all is under Tier 2 anymore.
Sorry, am not understanding your point re: Bork, who was a VERY conservative judge. Are you saying that he and Ronnie were ideologically incompatible or something like that?
Saturday Nigh Massacre, Bork... Nixon?
Quite why we are waiting for the inevitable is hard to explain. Hancock quite clear this morning Tier 3 is not working, which we could have guessed with confidence two weeks ago, yet is still dithering, or more likely his boss is.
"The whole thing is madness. It will be so ridiculous – what difference does it make if you are out in the fresh air for one hour or all day? It won't make a blind bit of difference. It's going beyond ridiculous."
But my own instinct is to NOT go into full-outrage mode. Which God knows is legally, ethnically, politically justified. However, outrage is NOT emotionally or psychologically propitious. NOT right now.
Strong criticism, sure. Rush to action, investigation, etc, etc by Congress, courts, administration, etc. etc, no thanks. Not just now.
Let's get Uncle Joe finally ELECTED and INAUGURATED as President of the United States BEFORE we do anything else.
AND let's give the incoming and seriously challenged (regardless of GA) Biden administration a wee bit of breathing room.
ABOVE ALL, lets NOT feed The Beast aka The Donald.
Outrage is the oxygen that fuels Trumpsky's rocket from Hell. That is why he is always eager to stoke it up - among his supporters AND his opponents.
He is truly the Moloch. Like his inspiration and role model, the foul false god Baal, Trumpsky feeds on the blood of others AND upon the publicity generated by his crimes and blasphemies.
Outage is not the answer. Not at present. But maybe contempt, disgust, mockery and ridicule are good starting points.
"You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
- Joseph Welch to Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wisconsin), June 9, 1954
The parent company of Ladbrokes and Coral has confirmed it has received a takeover proposal from US casino giant MGM Resorts International.
https://www.racingpost.com/news/latest/us-casino-giant-makes-takeover-bid-for-ladbrokes-and-coral-owner-entain/466547
This follows the American purchase of William Hill.
Surely he's not just going to just dither for a more few days?
He wouldn't admit it but I'm sure Mitch would rather a Biden Presidency and he is Senate Majority Leader than a second Trump term but a Democrat controlled Senate.
I am nonetheless resolutely of the opinion that "oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them".
Biden will be happy with that - he can stay above the fray. To his supporters - "Trump is being prosecuted". To others - "Trump is being prosecuted by the states. I can't interfere - States! Rights!"
This will mean that it will be sometime, late in Kamela Harris second term, when the decision to prosecute Trump federally will come up at the DOJ.
Are there still flights from SA?
I feel like this is an underpants gnome plan.
Btw, what did you make of the letter from all the former US defence secretaries. ?
One other comment: The party appeals strongly to the comfortably well off, especially in the public sector, who possess a social conscience of sorts and also to the most deprived urban communities. This has much to commend it; but if it is not the party of the aspirational working class and middling sorts throughout the UK - and the evidence is overwhelming that it isn't - it cannot win, and cannot be Labour in heart and soul.
Corbynism has trashed the brand for middle Britain. If it had not they would be 25 points ahead right now. Until Labour have a cultural change - and this involves the wholesale removal of the Pidcock tendency - they are stuck.
On present trends I see the NHS overwhelmed within 10 days. Nearly all of that is already baked in. We must do everything we can not to make it worse which means, amongst other things, no schools open in January.
http://www.reading.ac.uk/news-and-events/releases/PR841058.aspx
Democracy's (modern) saving grace is a the *potential* overthrow of the government every 4-7 years (depends on the country)
That's all the joy joy of a coup without the piles of dead people.
It is the classic fish-don't-see-the-water thing. Most people in democracies don't appreciate the *massive* difference this makes.
If there is to be a curfew, for instance, it should be justified. The virus is not scared of the dark. Why is it all right to drink while nursing a Scotch egg but not otherwise, or OK to eat a Scotch egg while drinking? If the aerosolised virus is quickly dispersed in the open air, why limit time spent outside? Why are cabs safe but cars not, even if masks are worn? And so on.
If within a day of the new Tier 5 or Tier 99, Cabinet ministers give contradictory advice about coffee shops and the like, that is incontrovertible evidence the new rules are too confusing. Likewise if the Prime Minister himself manages to contradict the guidelines even in the same sentence he announces them (...stay at home, and I'm looking forward to visiting my mother).
So we can do it. All we need to do now is impose travel restrictions from everywhere.
Edit: ah, I see that sitter has already been snaffled up!
Actually making the trains run on time (something that the slap head Italian journalist never actually managed) is boring. But worthwhile.
A benefits system that actually worked - even if you didn't change the spend very much - would improve lives for a lot of people. But that would be boring.
Blair won because he took over a significant part of the Tories' home turf whilst being able to rely on traditional Labour (Scotland and red wall) to deliver. SKS does not have that assurance. It is not impossible for this new coalition to win but it is going to be very difficult. Unless an incompetent government gives it to them on a plate of course.
But vaccinations if they reduce/prevent spread should reduce R in themselves too as well as preventing deaths. So as more people are vaccinated the R should ceteris paribus start to come down for the same level of restrictions.
Given how many care home and hospital acquired infections there are this should already be having a very marginal impact but that should kick up a gear as the rollout does.
WHAT would George Washington say? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Or even Andrew Jackson & Douglas MacArthur?
Almost.
They brought forwards the Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre at Harwell to accelerate its creation.
This was the state from outside as of the end of August (I took a shot from the air)
Why the hell they haven't been doing 24/7 shifts to get this finished and start churning out ChAdOx1 under licence beats me.
By the end of August, it was pretty clear that at least one, probably more, of the vaccine candidates was going to be successful. They should have finished this off, negotiated to produce one of them under licence through November, and been in full on production by the start of December.
This was neither a private conversation, nor an official matter subject to limits on disclosure.
That they have allowed it to happen because of a total failure to prevent exposure to that second strain is quite possibly the biggest mis-step to date. And one for which the Government seems to have no rational answer as to why it has happened.
January 03 at 8
p.m. The Ministry of Health tells CovidTracker that 516 people were vaccinated on January 1, 2021, after consolidations.
https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/
It seems the French government prefers to curfew its people rather than vaccinate them.
But you're right, a large further increase is already baked in, and reopening schools is madness. As is having parts of the country like Liverpool still in tier 3.
This 16 year old is probably not unrepresentative.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/03/generation-z-and-the-covid-pandemic-im-100-more-politicised
...“During a crisis, we need clarity. Matt Hancock keeps using the word ‘robust’ but what’s robust about a £22bn system that gives completely inconsistent advice? The responsibility lies with the government: they drew up the guidelines and they created the systems. There have been too many U-turns.
“A lot of the nation has lost its trust and faith in the government because of the confusing messages and lack of clarity. There are too many unanswered questions.
“My generation is becoming much more involved in politics. We’re beginning to ask ourselves if they really know what they’re talking about. A lot of people have realised that they can’t depend on anything they’re being told...
As long as you have crazy supporters you can stay out of jail. Not sure that's such a great incentive...
I'm not seeing a great deal of evidence that Republicans are embarrassed of Trump. Some are privately I am sure.
But I think 12 Senators are going to claim he actually won the election!
Crazy to think 2024 might see Trump elected republican nominee from a prison cell.
Typo of the year already?
So they need both a compass, and a map, and a plan, and that's a very challenging place to start from. They do at least have that north star of being for "the working people"/"the workers", and that is probably the place from which to build.
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/culture/2021/01/703_301845.html
Those exact remarks were made earlier 😂
a) Trumpsky, like McCarthy, will never be JUST a footnote; and
b) we can NOT relax not for many years; danger of both Trumpsky revival (like "the New Nixon" of 1968) OR more likely a successor, just as Barry Goldwater begat Ronald Reagan.
I don't support Joe Biden. Did he know something about what his son, Hunter, was doing? Either that or he is at least incredibly gullible (and he hasn't categorically denied he didn't know anything). Could Tara Reade's claims be true and he is a predator? Possibly but that story was quickly pushed out of the news. But do I think that makes Joe Biden the Devil Incarnate? Absolutely not. I just think he is a weak candidate who won't get anything done and will end up being a massive disappointment.
As for investigating Trump for his actions, we will see what happens but I'm fairly confident nothing will be done on this for the simple reason that the Democrats will not want to go there. And that might tell you something - if you would stop to think - about how confident they are that claims of election malpractice are 100% Bullsh1t.
85+: 2:1
75-84: 3:1
65-74: Between 4:1 and 5:1
45-64: Between 7:1 and 10:1
15-44: Between 40:1 and 50:1
Under 15s: Around 100:1
It reflects the far better chance you have of pulling through with medical help, the younger you are. The numbers seriously ill also go down as you go down the age bands, but the death rate differential is from a double whammy: fewer seriously ill multiplied by a far better chance of survival if you are seriously ill.
The default assumption that the IFR is invariant relies on an implicit assumption that medical intervention is invariant. If the hospitals get overwhelmed, that assumption breaks.
The younger categories have got far more scope for their IFRs to multiply upwards. In practice, of course, the hospitals would triage and simply not intervene for the older bands.
That's how many the UK vaccinated in December!
Shut the damn border.
In fact decreasing the R rate would be better served by vaccinating those with the most contacts first: health/care workers (which of course are top of the list already), teachers, supermarket workers, hairdressers ...
But say vaccinating 20% of the population does give you a 20% reduction in R. Now you can use a restriction level that might otherwise have an R of 1.25. But you certainly can't just drop all restrictions as the "natural" R is far above that.
Ownership doesn't matter if regulation works. Providing your energy market fulfils both national strategic requirements and offers a fair and competitive range of products to consumers does it matter who owns them?
Unions aren't something I have really bothered and the same is true for the majority of working people. I think that they remain an important bulwark in principle, in practice they aren't relevant to the modern workforce.
Blair understood this instinctively and framed both policies and messages to reflect this - I will deliver to you a fair society without having to renationalise everything and recreating the closed shop.
Labour would connect with the majority of people again if it accepted the world as it is and started talking about how it could be improved, rather than railing against the modern world seeking a transformation of 2020 so that it looks more like 1970.
Ronald Reagan is America's best post war President.
- Trump would insult Rachel in a speech
- Jackson would get the duelling pistols out
I thought the Fixed Term Parliaments Act was due to be defenestrated.
Labour is down to holding the seats where it feels comfortable. And some of them are hanging on a gossamer thread. If it wants power, it is going to have move W-A-Y out of its comfort zone - and start embracing people it really doesn't like.
The UK’s European question is far from over
‘Brexit’ stemmed from the takeover of the Tory party by its Eurosceptic fringe, whose prejudices will now collide with reality.
https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-uks-european-question-is-far-from-over