It is funny how these top London lawyers have so much difficulty in understanding the lockdown rules. Their antennae are ready to detect subtle breaches of equality regulation. She's been hot on the trail of antisemites in the Jolly Old Labour Party -- but a simple rule on lockdown like "Do Not Travel to Your Second Home" is completely beyond her ken.
"I would like to apologise to the local community, where we feel deeply embedded," said Mrs Hilsenrath.
So, basically the Llanegryn locals were the happy Stasis 😁😁😁& got Gog Plod to chase her out of Wales on Xmas day & leaked the story so it is all over the press.
And yet the little second-homer (probably third-homer) still believes the locals love her ("deeply embedded").
If you live in Hertfordshire and your children all go to school in Hertfordshire and you work in London, you are not deeply embedded in a small Welsh village
Still, it sounds as though she is in for the 100 per cent DomCum treatment.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission said they will consider whether further action against its chief executive is needed. "She has apologised for this error of judgement," said EHRC chair Baroness Kishwer Falkner.
Whoooo, "need to consider whether further action is needed".
Baroness Falkner is a LibDem, so I am sure she'll take a generous view of the perils of owning many homes.
And if not perhaps an appeal to the pb SecondHome Club (it is solidly LibDem) ?
Wales was a particularly odd place for someone from England to want to spend Christmas, when for us already here, Christmas had to be cancelled by the hapless Drakeford. Johnson, on the other hand had been in the enviable position of having timed his pre-Christmas precautions such, that Christmas in England was safely saved.
The reasons are I guess:
(i) Gwynedd (at the moment) has one of the lowest rate of infections in the country, whilst Hertfordshire is one of the highest.
(ii) London lawyers are irredeemably selfish, the most selfish people on the planet (always excepting London bankers & skiers😁).
Londoners with second homes occupy a unique place in the nation. They think they are loved ("deeply embedded in the village"). In fact, everyone loathes and hates them.
They are unpopular with the Left (for their privilege) and the Right (for their faux-liberalism). Hypocrisy clings to this constituency like a stink.
Still, I expect the darling will suffer no longterm problems, if a LibDem Baroness is in charge of looking into whether she did anything wrong.
I hope her Council Tax payments are up to date -- there is surcharge on second homes in Gwynedd, but it is up to second-homers to declare, so it is widely evaded.
It will be embarrassing if a new set of excuses have to be devised for the Chief Executive of the Equality and Human Rights Commission if there is Council Tax underpayment from failing to self-declare the second home.
Small point of order: it's as common now on the right for people to object to genuine liberalism as it is for them to object to the faux version. The central political development of the past five years across the west has been the mainstreaming of illiberalism in the political right.
And a great number of those on the liberal right do not even realise they're in a struggle to the death over the soul of their ideology.
Cameron and Boris are both members of the liberal right which is why I support them both.
Theresa May was far more authoritarian, illiberal right which is why I opposed her.
Liberal right is doing OK in this country.
Boris is of course so liberal he has ended free movement to and from the EU
While liberalising movement with the rest of the world, which has got less attention.
Liberalising movement with the rest of the world and not discriminating in favour of predominantly white Europeans only is the right thing to do. It isn't what eg Farage would have done, or May.
He hasn't, all that has changed is EU migrants will now face the same immigration rules as rest of the world migrants.
Boris has introduced one of the biggest restrictions on immigration to the UK of any PM in UK history, Cameron may be a liberal, Boris is not
Wrong.
"The new rules make it easier for non-EU migrants to get a working visa in the UK"
What do we actually want from China? Do we want to remove the Communist regime and free the people? Because there seems to be no more than token dissent, and most of the population seems, rightly or wrongly, to be behind China's mission to achieve global pre-eminence, and its methods. Try to destroy China completely as a force and break it up into provinces? We can't really pretend that that would be a morally justifiable action. We need to decide what we want China to be, and what we want our interactions in the future to be like, before we can really put the policies in place to try and influence China toward this vision.
As the UK specifically, all I think we should do is be firm guardians of our technologies, try to keep skilled jobs in the UK wherever possible, be a friendly but straight talking competitor/partner, have a strong national defence policy, and be sure we can operate independently of every country when necessary. The Swiss way. It is not our job to try to stop the Chinese from becoming any richer or more powerful as an end in itself, and I don't believe it's possible anyway.
Good post.
The first thing, which some here (hiya @Casino ) are having trouble with, is accepting that China is the 600lb gorilla and a global titan only set to get stronger. Not a pleasant thought for those who go to bed in their Union Jack underpants but there is one mother of a country out there which, unlike the US, we didn't give birth to so we can't even patronise them.
Plus since Hong Kong became part of the PRC in 1989 and ceased being a British colony we no longer even have a direct interest in what goes on there.
China is over the other side of the world, Russia is significantly closer to the UK and more of a direct concern to us.
In any case as China is a superpower and we are only a medium sized power now even if we wanted to take them on there is little we could do alone, the only nations who can seriously challenge and contain China now are the USA and India
Sorry, should have been 'Plus since Hong Kong became part of the PRC in 1997 and ceased being a British colony'
China signed an International Agreement with Patten. The hell we should ignore its terms less than halfway through its duration! There lies anarchy.
I'm not sure China has broken its international agreement with the UK. It explicitly made no commitment in the Joint Declaration to elections or liberal democracy and reserved the right to impose whatever political system it sees fit on Hong Kong. There is a question whether locking up political activists breached the commitment it did make for freedom of assembly, rather than as punishment for infringement of some specific law.
In other words, it is in breach of the spirit of the agreement rather than the letter. It is the letter that China will go on particularly when it is generally accused of failing to keep commitments that it explicitly did not make.
So it is a breach but genuinely "in a limited and specific" way
Chinese people generally put a lot of store on face and get irritated by the casual way westerners enter into commitments. From their point of view if you commit to something you deliver on it. It means they can be somewhat reluctant to enter into firm commitments and can be a bit vague. This is a different question from whether China is being unreasonable
In this case the west is accusing China of failing to meet a commitment it didn't make. That won't play.
Is it now safe to assume that Trump has no chance of being the Republican 2024 nominee?
Yes. And I think this has become clear to everyone now. Which is a shame for me, bettingwise, since imo he had no chance before this latest outrage and I was looking forward to laying him at a false skinny price when the market formed.
It’s quite amazing to think of the trajectory for Trump, from looking pretty good against all the odds in the early morning of Nov 4th to a bit less good and then to a conclusive if contested defeat. However the absolute reputation pounding destruction with a big, fat L all over it has been engineered by Trump himself; fantastic material for a morality tale if you like that sort of thing (which I do in the case of this creature). Prosecution and imprisonment would just be the delicious icing on the cake.
Is it now safe to assume that Trump has no chance of being the Republican 2024 nominee?
Yes. And I think this has become clear to everyone now. Which is a shame for me, bettingwise, since imo he had no chance before this latest outrage and I was looking forward to laying him at a false skinny price when the market formed.
It’s quite amazing to think of the trajectory for Trump, from looking pretty good against all the odds in the early morning of Nov 4th to a bit less good and then to a conclusive if contested defeat. However the absolute reputation pounding destruction with a big, fat L all over it has been engineered by Trump himself; fantastic material for a morality tale if you like that sort of thing (which I do in the case of this creature). Prosecution and imprisonment would just be the delicious icing on the cake.
And unless I'm missing something it shows he is driven by his "urges" rather than longer view (i.e. beyond NOW) calculation. So we can bury the "evil genius" myth while we're at it, except as it relates to finding and feeding LCDs with his comms. Re prison, my strong hunch - and therefore prediction - is it will not happen but I hope to have got that wildly, hopelessly wrong.
Germany reports its highest 24-hour death toll so far – 1,188. There were 31,849 new infections, the Robert Koch Institute reports, but the actual figures may be higher still because of fewer tests done over Christmas
And people think that Kent COVID is still isolated to the UK? It's everywhere.
I don't think anyone thinks that Kent COVID is still isolated to the UK. However, I see that it is now accepted that Kent COVID did actually arise in Kent despite the earlier insistence of the British exceptionalists that it must have been imported from somewhere else and was merely first discovered in Kent!
As always you've got your finger on the button there.
🙄
I was one of those who pointed out how ridiculous this claim was, given the pattern of spread of the new variant across the UK and its scattered appearance in other countries. But no, others insisted that it was merely discovered in the UK thanks to our superior sequencing abilities and must have originated elsewhere.
Given that other countries have proven incapable of detecting the new variant in isolation from the existing one until recently and even now are only showing very few confirmed instances in spite of the massive increases in overall cases I would suggest this is still a very good possibility.
There seems to be no other way to reasonably account for some countries losing control of their outbreaks well before the new strain was even identified in the UK.
I see that 2021, where 2020 was pb's year of the Trump apologists, is going to be the year of the CCP apologists.
I think my biggest concern is that the Western hard-Left dismiss it on the grounds of being 'cloaked' racism, claiming it's 'their' culture etc, and then do a bit of 'whataboutery' on the British Empire and USA on top. Perhaps they'll add in that whatever the CCP do it can't be as bad as that, on top.
They will wake up eventually, of course. And China know this. But, they hope to foster enough political division internally within Western countries in the meantime so that by the time they do it's too late.
In an ideal world, what is your vision for what China is, and how it should behave?
This isn't hard. A democratic country like the USA, Japan or India, would do.
That's it.
The USA has military bases all over Britain, and we cannot operate our defences, our financial systems, etc., without their active cooperation. Are you saying you would be happy for that to be the case with China, provided the Communist regime is removed?
.
Ahem - Hinkley C nuclear plant? With no Communist regime removed...
Quite, but I am asking if you're happy with that situation provided no commies.
Personally I would envision a situation where Britain is friends with all nations, but not overly dependent on any. For that to happen, it's us that needs to change, not other countries.
When should we scrap Trident?
Straight away. It’s a mirage. There is no conceivable scenario in which we would be able to fire it independent of the US.
The US nuclear deterrent entirely covers everything that we could reasonably hope that our own would achieve.
The mystery is why the Tory Brexiters, who would quite happily subjugate large areas of our economy and public life to the US, do not see that leaving them to pay for the nuclear deterrent would benefit us to the tune of ££££?
Comments
It creates, how shall we say "A Level Playing Field" for immigration.
They can hardly object, can they?
In this case the west is accusing China of failing to meet a commitment it didn't make. That won't play.
There seems to be no other way to reasonably account for some countries losing control of their outbreaks well before the new strain was even identified in the UK.
The US nuclear deterrent entirely covers everything that we could reasonably hope that our own would achieve.
The mystery is why the Tory Brexiters, who would quite happily subjugate large areas of our economy and public life to the US, do not see that leaving them to pay for the nuclear deterrent would benefit us to the tune of ££££?