Despite the high vaccination rate, Israel figures do seem stubbornly high (multiply by 9 for the UK). Certainly they too have antivaxers in the Arab and Haredi communities, but even so, shouldn't rates be dropping faster?
I think part of the issue is that - now older people are increasingly protected - younger people are abandoning all social distancing.
The rate has stopped falling in my borough for the last couple of weeks - according to the Zoe app, there are currently 406 active cases, up 127 on last week. It doesn't feel like a moment to be relaxing, but perhaps that's just a local thing, as the national data look OK.
Despite the high vaccination rate, Israel figures do seem stubbornly high (multiply by 9 for the UK). Certainly they too have antivaxers in the Arab and Haredi communities, but even so, shouldn't rates be dropping faster?
I read somewhere that Haredi are ~12% of the population, but 40% of cases.
German doctors are reportedly concerned about the large proportion of people from minority ethnic backgrounds among coronavirus patients in intensive care, citing a lack of proper communication with Muslim communities in particular about the dangers of the disease.
Lothar Wieler, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control agency, confirmed that the issue was discussed with senior medical consultants last month, though he stressed the meeting was informal.
...
He is quoted as saying Muslims make up 4.8% of Germany’s population, “but amongst those lying on the intensive care wards, this group makes up considerably more than 50%”.
Muslims make up roughly 5% of the UK. Surely they can't be taking up 50%+ of ICU beds here? Why should the proportion who end up in ICU be so much higher in Germany?
That's the equivalent of 600 deaths in the UK though.
Though I'm sure the actual count in Brazil (excess deaths), is far higher. I saw one chart that suggested the UK was one of the few countries whose Covid death toll was actually on par with our excess death toll, making our outbreak look worse compared to other countries'.
Well for many weeks in Manaus, the situation is so bad, you don't even bother with the hospital, family members go and pick up oxgyen tanks to administer to their relatives at home....so chances of accurate counting in such chaos...
That's the equivalent of 600 deaths in the UK though.
Though I'm sure the actual count in Brazil (excess deaths), is far higher. I saw one chart that suggested the UK was one of the few countries whose Covid death toll was actually on par with our excess death toll, making our outbreak look worse compared to other countries'.
Very surprisingly Brazil's excess death figures aren't much worse than their official figures, at least until Boxing Day when their stats end for now. Though they haven't had a major surge point yet its been pretty flat throughout.
That's the equivalent of 600 deaths in the UK though.
Though I'm sure the actual count in Brazil (excess deaths), is far higher. I saw one chart that suggested the UK was one of the few countries whose Covid death toll was actually on par with our excess death toll, making our outbreak look worse compared to other countries'.
Well for many weeks in Manaus, the situation is so bad, you don't even bother with the hospital, family members go and pick up oxgyen tanks to administer to their relatives at home....so chances of accurate counting in such chaos...
A pretty visceral account of the Manaus nightmare from the NYT. They ran out of oxygen so scores suffocated to death. In the end doctors were killing patients with injections rather than see them suffer
Despite the high vaccination rate, Israel figures do seem stubbornly high (multiply by 9 for the UK). Certainly they too have antivaxers in the Arab and Haredi communities, but even so, shouldn't rates be dropping faster?
I think part of the issue is that - now older people are increasingly protected - younger people are abandoning all social distancing.
The rate has stopped falling in my borough for the last couple of weeks - according to the Zoe app, there are currently 406 active cases, up 127 on last week. It doesn't feel like a moment to be relaxing, but perhaps that's just a local thing, as the national data look OK.
We're up Hart as well. There seems so be a bit of a levelling across the Blackwater
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
Politicians like to be able to fly anywhere when they want to and the government didn't want to upset them.
Media types like to be able to fly anywhere when they want to and the government didn't want to upset them.
Holiday obsessives like to be able to fly anywhere when they want to and the government didn't want to upset them.
The airlines and airports seem to have a lot of political pull, they also employ lots of people.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
That picture calls to mind a quite longstanding puzzle. All these bodies full of virus being buried. What happens to the virus? Does it all just die when the host dies? Or does it lurk in the soil?
I came into this discussion thinking that the legacy UK parties were permafucked and the SNP would simply romp to yet another victory.
However, I granted our guest authors the courtesy of reading their piece in full, anyway.
The legacy UK parties are probably* permafucked and the SNP is probably* going to romp to yet another victory.
*By probably I mean certainly, of course. The Conservatives and Labour don't merely have 'a lot of work to do in the next two months' to make significant progress. They need to build, test and commission a mind-control field generator that can successfully reprogram the brains of the entire population. Not even the Chinese have figured out how to make that happen.
You could gave written that about Labour in Scotland 30 years ago
So maybe the SNP only has thirty years left in power? You may very well be right. It depends rather on how long it actually takes them to get independence over the finishing line.
I don't doubt that there are Scots who still feel British but they're a minority and, I think you'll find, a shrinking one at that - something that will be brutally laid bare by the results of this year's census, when I expect that the ratio of British to English/Scottish/Welsh/(Northern) Irish identification will have changed markedly all over the UK since 2011.
The only thing that's holding the Union together now is money. If the average Scottish voter thought that she would be £1 per year better off out than in, she'd be off like a shot.
The most recent poll was 50/50 and independence falling in the polls and this before these hearings
It is no means certain that Scotland will vote for independence
Well, there's a long way to go, and we shall see.
The Achilles' heel of the independence movement is, as I said before, money. If a large part of the Scottish electorate didn't believe that separation would put their taxes up then they'd have voted to go in 2014. And it could yet do for the nationalists again - although quite why the maintenance of a state that's held together mainly by bribery is something that is either morally healthy or to be desired is never adequately explained.
OTOH 'you will be poorer if you do this' was the central theme of David Cameron's campaign to vanquish Brexit, and look what became of him.
You’re somewhat ignoring the 30-40% of Scots who are passionately Unionist. There’s plenty of them. Probably about the same as there are passionate Nats.
This is one reason I believe Indy would be a tragedy - for Scotland. It would make Brexit look like a harmonious decision which brought peace to the nation. Indy would unleash demons, and sow decades of bitterness. Ending a 300 year old union would be emotionally explosive (and economically ruinous)
Scotland is not Ireland in 1921 when the large majority of Catholics had a settled will for secession. Scotland is grievously divided.
If Sturgeon gets her maj and seeks Indy, Boris must be the statesman, which will be hard for him. Even as he refuses a vote he must search for compromise, to save Scots and Brits from many more years of rancour
62% of the Scottish population answered the national identity question in the 2011 census as "Scottish only" and the number will only have moved in one direction in the subsequent decade. I don't believe that there's this vast reservoir of committed unionists. There will certainly be some committed unionists, and another tranche of pragmatic unionists, and a fair number of people who just sort of sit around in the middle as well, but I somehow doubt that there's this ocean of pro-Union sentiment out there in Scotland, any more than there was of pro-EU sentiment in Britain in 2016. It's a niche interest.
As I said, the swing vote in Scotland consists of middle-class waverers who fear that independence will hit them in their bank balances and pension pots. It's why the campaign in 2014 revolved principally around sterling, state pensions and the Barnett formula. Britain is held together by money. There is nothing else left.
Sturgeon just has to convince enough that the Brussels money tree will replace London's. (It won't of course but by the time they realise that it will be too late).
I suspect too many of us are thinking of the SNP as a mere political party rather than an African style liberation movement. Corruption and incompetence are irrelevant to the faithful, only the cause matters. Hatred of the Tories (i.e. the English) has become for nationalists a defining characteristic of Scottish identity just as Anglophobia is in Ireland. If independence comes to pass the SNP will continue to blame London for Scotland's problems (probably successfully) for at least 30 years.
I am surprised how sanguine so many others are at the prospect of the break up of the UK. If Lincoln had had the same attitude in 1861 we might still have actual slave traders today rather than just old statues of them.
The relaxed attitude amazes me as well. Oh, Scottish independence, no problem
Scottish independence would guarantee political chaos for a decade. As we disentangle 300 years of union. More immediately it means instant economic emergency. Sindy Scotland would default immediately, and be plunged into Depression. rUK would follow with an intense recession, or worse. All this as we try to recover from the worst crisis since WW2. With debt over 100%
London might itself default, or be forced to print money like Mugabe
It is insane
Worth it if we don't have to listen to the whinging whining Scots any more...
Well, you could argue that if you wanted to stir the pot, but more to the point the difficulty of unpicking the Union is overdone - at least from the point of view of the remainder of the UK, which is about 11 or 12 times the size of Scotland.
Apart from having to move many thousands of admin jobs South (a lot of central Government work in pensions and overseas aid administration is located in and around Glasgow, IIRC,) the main source of disruption to Westminster is what on Earth to do with Trident. Who knows what it might decide? The Government could lease the base whilst it built a new one in England, ask the Americans if we could park the submarines over there whilst we built a new base in England, or it could disarm.
And that's it. The main problem. The rest of it is all down to the division of assets and liabilities, which would either be done on a population proportionate basis, or with the UK taking on the lot and Scotland starting with a clean slate. What's left of the UK could then proceed on its way; other thorny issues such as what to do about the currency, the budget deficit and relations with the EU would self-evidently be matters for the Scots to worry about, not us.
None of this is to understate the level of disruption that the separation process would entail, or the potential for it to turn poisonous. After all, the moment Scotland votes to secede then Westminster's responsibility becomes securing the best terms for the remainder of the country, and the Scottish Government is well used to nursing grievances against Westminster to bolster its own popularity. But it is manageable, and would most definitely not constitute an 'economic emergency.' If we can survive Brexit without imploding then we can certainly survive, say, a hard border with Scotland, which is vastly less important than the EU as a trading partner.
If things are more awkward for them, well, under those circumstances that would no longer be our problem.
You don’t understand. A bankrupt Scotland using sterling would oblige us to help out. We’d have to, even tho we wouldn’t want to.
Moreover, the UK will be reliant on the kindness of strangers - AKA ‘borrowing’ - for the next decade. Debt over 100%
Will people still be happy to lend to us at generous interest rates, as we lose a third of the nation by size, and exhibit signs of chronic instability? Because all this will come on top of Covid and Brexit.
Personally I’d only lend to us if I could exact a stiff premium. We will pay more to borrow at a time when we are borrowing trillions. It is the exact recipe for disaster, for Scots and English alike
Your arguments don't hold water.
Firstly, London only becomes responsible for rescuing Edinburgh if (1) it screws its finances up *and* (2) we agree a currency union, like the Eurozone. Which we would be mad to do, and wouldn't do. States like Panama that adopt a policy of dollarization are obliged to manage their finances very carefully, because the United States is quite explicitly not expected to bail them out if they get into trouble. If Scotland attempted sterlingisation (which I wouldn't expect it to do, because that would be extremely silly) then it would find itself in the same position.
Secondly, there is no reason why the UK's borrowing costs should suddenly spike when it sheds a territory that's a net drain on the resources of the Treasury. If Wessex became a thing again and left then it might cause that sort of problem. Not so Scotland.
Remember we had to help bail out Ireland during the eurocrisis. We weren’t legally obliged to, but in economic terms, pragmatically, we had to. Because we are so interlinked
‘Osborne told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "But we have also made a commitment to consider a bilateral loan that reflects the fact we are not part of the euro… but Ireland is our very closest economic neighbour."’
A bankrupt Scotland using the £ would be five times worse
It was primarily an act of solidarity towards a neighbour that was also a fellow member of the EU at the time.
Denmark and Sweden also made similar bilateral loans to Dublin IIRC. Ireland isn't, insofar as I'm aware, particularly closely entangled with the Scandinavian financial system.
I am confident that Scotland won't go bankrupt because it will be obliged to adjust its balance of taxation, spending and borrowing to suit its circumstances once its public spending is no longer supported by fiscal transfers. The Scottish Government isn't wholly incapable. It will have to make decisions that voters don't like, and will probably get away with them by finding an excuse to keep on blaming us, but the fundamental fact is that the ship is highly unlikely to sink. Scotland is wealthy. Independence wouldn't magically transform it into a Grecian basket case.
However, even if it did, not our problem to solve.
"fellow member of the EU at the time" had nothing to do with it.
Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain were the other ones needing bailouts and we told them that it was not our problem and we weren't helping them. They were our fellow EU members too.
We helped Ireland because it was cheaper to help Ireland than see Ireland fail.
Ireland wouldn't have failed though as it would have ultimately been bailed out by the EU.
I suspect there was a strong element of Cameron wanting to play 'lord bountiful' and maybe hoping to create goodwill for the future.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
I agree, the earlier the better. It's mindboggling why this didn't happen, not just here but everywhere.
Despite the high vaccination rate, Israel figures do seem stubbornly high (multiply by 9 for the UK). Certainly they too have antivaxers in the Arab and Haredi communities, but even so, shouldn't rates be dropping faster?
Cases or hospitalisations? What does it matter if people test positive for covid but don’t get ill from it?
That per capita hospitalisation rate is much the same as ours at present. Apparently from the nonvaccinated communities though.
That picture calls to mind a quite longstanding puzzle. All these bodies full of virus being buried. What happens to the virus? Does it all just die when the host dies? Or does it lurk in the soil?
Good evening, everyone.
A question posed early in the pandemic and never really answered. Supposedly the Italians favoured cremation. For this reason
That's the equivalent of 600 deaths in the UK though.
Though I'm sure the actual count in Brazil (excess deaths), is far higher. I saw one chart that suggested the UK was one of the few countries whose Covid death toll was actually on par with our excess death toll, making our outbreak look worse compared to other countries'.
Very surprisingly Brazil's excess death figures aren't much worse than their official figures, at least until Boxing Day when their stats end for now. Though they haven't had a major surge point yet its been pretty flat throughout.
That's the one. Thanks. An excellent bit of journalism from the Economist. These are the only figures that count when it comes to comparing countries, though as a related article mentioned, some countries (for example most in Africa) don't have accurate registers of deaths at all, so the impact on those countries is unknown.
I had also better take back that comment about 'few'. Most European countries seem to have the counts roughly equal.
Striking that there are quite a few countries at the bottom of the list that have actually saved lives over this period compared to the long term average.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
What about in July/August when Covid rates across the UK were virtually nil? Could we have eliminated it then, and spent this last winter in a New Zealand-style situation?
I suppose politically that would have been completely impossible at the time, though had we taken that course we could well be thankful for it now.
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I find Civ6 a bit samey, even with the new civilizations. It's also rather easy.
Civ4 had more depth I think, and less predictability, although it had the terrifyingly impossible stacks of doom, which were poor AI and could really ruin a game.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I'm instinctively against subscription models. My kneejerk reaction is that time was they'd include stuff as standard, now we see it as a reward, and fork out early when in some cases the game won't be worth investing time in until later updates make it so. And I've defended plenty of DLC content in the past.
Maybe it is a reasonable model, but my hackles rise at the thought. How much could they have included up front? How substantial are the updates really, so is the cost reasonable?
I doubt that headline 25% rate of corporation tax will ever happen.
Today was about to signalling to the markets and the general public that the Government is deadly serious about rebalancing the books in the medium-term.
Are there not other ways of signalling such desire without potentially scaring off new business, while the likes of Amazon who have had a bumper Covid are largely uneffected either way.
I sound like Jezza Corbyn banging on about Amazon :-)
Indeed, welcome comrade. One left-wing theory about high tax rates and big investment subsidies is that they tempt businesses to invest in the short term instead of paying dividends. Then everyone gets rich and you tax them. I've never been entirely convinced, though - having a sudden splurge of investment that you weren't otherwise going to do is rarely good business practice.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We certainly seem to have imported strains from Europe. The question is, whether the infection rate would have picked up anyway, if people had holidayed in the UK would they have engaged in equally risky behaviour? By late summer, we were only allowing people to travel to low-prevalence countries.
Jim Hacker, on being asked for a loan to save Aston Wanderers, was told it would give him a safe seat for life as a local hero.
‘Yes,’ he mused. ‘That might strike the press, too. And the opposition. And the judge.’
Pretty sure the rather silly named Richmond (Yorks) seat is already a safe seat for life.
The message to other red wall towns is:
Vote Tory, get £1 billion.
Not exactly subtle but it may well work given so many of them are now marginal.
(Incidentally, what’s so silly about naming a seat after the main town in it?)
Actually, isn't Northallerton bigger?
Depends on whether you include the Catterick base or not.
Although I agree, it would make more sense to call it ‘Richmond and Northallerton.’ There cannot be many county towns anywhere in the UK that don’t have their names in the local constituency.
Brixham is bigger than Totnes - but not in the constituency name.
And Ponteland is bigger than Hexham. And Prudhoe almost as well.
I wonder what the smallest place in the UK to have its name in a constituency name is?
Welcome to PB! City of London/Westminster?
That's got to be worth a shout...
I found this site back in 2019 when I was looking for good political blog posts about the parliamentary crisis. I only slowly migrated onto looking at the comments but since then I have come to the conclusion this is one of the best discussion forums I've lurked in. Not just politics, great analysis of all sorts of things going on here.
I've never felt the need to post as someone else has usually made the point or asked the question, and put it better too.
But a vote of thanks from me, and any other lurkers who feel the same way.
Having broken the duck I may post if the mood takes.
Welcome. You do that. Badenoch has to be a contender. Never heard of it other than the succinctly named Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. Which is nailed on for least user friendly name.
I think Radnor must have it, if that is discounted as being really a reference to the old shire of Radnor then Meriden would seem to be the one. Fascinating stuff.
Yes, I think that is the only four part name?
Technically the name of the constituency is ‘Brecon and Radnorshire,’ even though it’s always called ‘Brecon and Radnor,’ so I’m thinking @another_richard has got it with Meriden.
Surely it is Dinefwr, as in Carmarthen East & Dinefwr ?
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We never eliminated it domestically.
We came pretty close all things considered.
When Malmesbury started his data analysis most local authorities were showing 0 cases. Only about 5 authorities were in red originally.
Had it not been reseeded with the holidays it would have made a major difference.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We never eliminated it domestically.
True but there's no doubt that we imported a load more last summer.
As the great Drakeford said yesterday:
It worries me hugely to hear the prime minister say that he intends to reopen international travel in May of this year.
Our September in Wales was made far more difficult by the fact that we had a big importation of the virus from France, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey. Every day I will be reading of new outbreaks of people who have gone away, caught the virus and brought it back with them.
If ever there was a year to be staying at home and to be enjoying all the fantastic things Wales has to offer, this must be it.
I would build the walls higher for now against the risk that we would bring into this country the variants that could be brewing in any part of the world, and could then put at risk all the careful work we have done to try and keep Wales safe.
That's the equivalent of 600 deaths in the UK though.
Though I'm sure the actual count in Brazil (excess deaths), is far higher. I saw one chart that suggested the UK was one of the few countries whose Covid death toll was actually on par with our excess death toll, making our outbreak look worse compared to other countries'.
Very surprisingly Brazil's excess death figures aren't much worse than their official figures, at least until Boxing Day when their stats end for now. Though they haven't had a major surge point yet its been pretty flat throughout.
That's the one. Thanks. An excellent bit of journalism from the Economist. These are the only figures that count when it comes to comparing countries, though as a related article mentioned, some countries (for example most in Africa) don't have accurate registers of deaths at all, so the impact on those countries is unknown.
I had also better take back that comment about 'few'. Most European countries seem to have the counts roughly equal.
Striking that there are quite a few countries at the bottom of the list that have actually saved lives over this period compared to the long term average.
It's odd how the UK is practically the only country where excess deaths are actually lower than the official Covid-19 total. Anyone know why?
The government's bad-faith unilateral extension of the grace period on NI-GB border checks is, I think, the single most stupid thing I've ever seen a UK government do in the 50 years I've been following politics. What the hell do they think they are playing at? We have masses of areas where we desperately need cooperation and goodwill from our EU ex-friends. Of course the Internal Market Bill was also really disastrous, but at least you could vaguely see why an idiot might have thought it was a good way to put pressure on the EU in the negotiations. It wasn't, of course - quite the opposite - but if you squinted really hard and ignored the realities you could half-persuade yourself that it might be,
“Asked if a vote of no confidence plan, with Jeremy Corbyn becoming caretaker prime minister, was dead in the water, Starmer told Today: “No, but I think it’s important today that we pull people together and agree if we can a plan.”
The Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, said she was “not precious” about who a caretaker prime minister would be following a successful vote of no confidence, but she did not believe Corbyn was the right choice.“
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We never eliminated it domestically.
True but there's no doubt that we imported a load more last summer.
As the great Drakeford said yesterday:
It worries me hugely to hear the prime minister say that he intends to reopen international travel in May of this year.
Our September in Wales was made far more difficult by the fact that we had a big importation of the virus from France, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey. Every day I will be reading of new outbreaks of people who have gone away, caught the virus and brought it back with them.
If ever there was a year to be staying at home and to be enjoying all the fantastic things Wales has to offer, this must be it.
I would build the walls higher for now against the risk that we would bring into this country the variants that could be brewing in any part of the world, and could then put at risk all the careful work we have done to try and keep Wales safe.
The Trumpian "Build the Wall" sounds so sweet when the Great Drakeford says it.
That's the equivalent of 600 deaths in the UK though.
Though I'm sure the actual count in Brazil (excess deaths), is far higher. I saw one chart that suggested the UK was one of the few countries whose Covid death toll was actually on par with our excess death toll, making our outbreak look worse compared to other countries'.
Very surprisingly Brazil's excess death figures aren't much worse than their official figures, at least until Boxing Day when their stats end for now. Though they haven't had a major surge point yet its been pretty flat throughout.
That's the one. Thanks. An excellent bit of journalism from the Economist. These are the only figures that count when it comes to comparing countries, though as a related article mentioned, some countries (for example most in Africa) don't have accurate registers of deaths at all, so the impact on those countries is unknown.
I had also better take back that comment about 'few'. Most European countries seem to have the counts roughly equal.
Striking that there are quite a few countries at the bottom of the list that have actually saved lives over this period compared to the long term average.
It's odd how the UK is practically the only country where excess deaths are actually lower than the official Covid-19 total. Anyone know why?
Most of the countries at the bottom of the list are in the same situation. Easy enough when you have no Covid and lockdown has prevented other transmissible diseases. I think all it takes is accurate and thorough reporting of Covid deaths, combined with a situation where a number of people are dying of Covid who would have died of other things anyway (logically, this number is the difference between the two counts).
That's the equivalent of 600 deaths in the UK though.
Though I'm sure the actual count in Brazil (excess deaths), is far higher. I saw one chart that suggested the UK was one of the few countries whose Covid death toll was actually on par with our excess death toll, making our outbreak look worse compared to other countries'.
Very surprisingly Brazil's excess death figures aren't much worse than their official figures, at least until Boxing Day when their stats end for now. Though they haven't had a major surge point yet its been pretty flat throughout.
That's the one. Thanks. An excellent bit of journalism from the Economist. These are the only figures that count when it comes to comparing countries, though as a related article mentioned, some countries (for example most in Africa) don't have accurate registers of deaths at all, so the impact on those countries is unknown.
I had also better take back that comment about 'few'. Most European countries seem to have the counts roughly equal.
Striking that there are quite a few countries at the bottom of the list that have actually saved lives over this period compared to the long term average.
It's odd how the UK is practically the only country where excess deaths are actually lower than the official Covid-19 total. Anyone know why?
It depends on how organised a country is in recording the causes of deaths and how honest a country is in recording the causes of deaths.
“Asked if a vote of no confidence plan, with Jeremy Corbyn becoming caretaker prime minister, was dead in the water, Starmer told Today: “No, but I think it’s important today that we pull people together and agree if we can a plan.”
The Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, said she was “not precious” about who a caretaker prime minister would be following a successful vote of no confidence, but she did not believe Corbyn was the right choice.“
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I'm instinctively against subscription models. My kneejerk reaction is that time was they'd include stuff as standard, now we see it as a reward, and fork out early when in some cases the game won't be worth investing time in until later updates make it so. And I've defended plenty of DLC content in the past.
Maybe it is a reasonable model, but my hackles rise at the thought. How much could they have included up front? How substantial are the updates really, so is the cost reasonable?
One game I absolutely love is Crusader Kings II, which for years was updated with a free update and a DLC expansion pack every few months. I own all 15 of the expansion packs, it is an amazing game and there's only one or two of the expansion packs I would not recommend in hindsight. Paying ~£10 every 6 months for an expansion was never expensive.
Only issue is that to buy all the expansions now would cost well over £100 so they've launched a subscription service that gives new players all expansions immediately for £4 a month. There's no need for me to subscribe since I already own it all, but its an alternative instead of paying upfront for everything at once to get access to the entire back catalogue.
I've not bought CKIII yet. I'm waiting a year or so, I always find Paradox games get patched very heavily after first release which isn't a criticism, the base game is typically good but they keep their game alive by evolving and updating it in response to fan feedback.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We certainly seem to have imported strains from Europe. The question is, whether the infection rate would have picked up anyway, if people had holidayed in the UK would they have engaged in equally risky behaviour? By late summer, we were only allowing people to travel to low-prevalence countries.
I suspect that covid was a lot more prevalent than some of the 'low prevalence countries' were claiming.
The excess deaths to covid deaths ratio might be a indicator of this:
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We certainly seem to have imported strains from Europe. The question is, whether the infection rate would have picked up anyway, if people had holidayed in the UK would they have engaged in equally risky behaviour? By late summer, we were only allowing people to travel to low-prevalence countries.
I suspect that covid was a lot more prevalent than some of the 'low prevalence countries' were claiming.
The excess deaths to covid deaths ratio might be a indicator of this:
Does anybody really believe that only about 10-20 people a day die of COVID in Nigeria? Like really? A country of 200 million people and they have less deaths per day than a small town in the UK.
“Asked if a vote of no confidence plan, with Jeremy Corbyn becoming caretaker prime minister, was dead in the water, Starmer told Today: “No, but I think it’s important today that we pull people together and agree if we can a plan.”
The Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, said she was “not precious” about who a caretaker prime minister would be following a successful vote of no confidence, but she did not believe Corbyn was the right choice.“
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We certainly seem to have imported strains from Europe. The question is, whether the infection rate would have picked up anyway, if people had holidayed in the UK would they have engaged in equally risky behaviour? By late summer, we were only allowing people to travel to low-prevalence countries.
I suspect that covid was a lot more prevalent than some of the 'low prevalence countries' were claiming.
The excess deaths to covid deaths ratio might be a indicator of this:
Does anybody really believe that only about 10-20 people a day die of COVID in Nigeria? Like really? A country of 200 million people and they have less deaths per day than a small town in the UK.
No. I don't think the figures in most countries are particularly reliable. They're probably doing the best they can in the circumstances, but it's impossible to get accurate data.
That picture calls to mind a quite longstanding puzzle. All these bodies full of virus being buried. What happens to the virus? Does it all just die when the host dies? Or does it lurk in the soil?
Good evening, everyone.
Good evening Anne.
It depends. On the specific virus, on the conditions of burial and longer term environment in the grave.
It is known that some viruses have the ability to effectively put themselves into suspended animation. They are a simple crystalline system and can, under the right conditions become an inert substance which can sustain almost indefinitely. There was a fear when scientists went looking for samples of the Spanish Flu in graves up in Spitzbergen a few years ago that the virus could still be active due to the permafrost conditions in which the bodies were deposited. They failed to find any evidence of the virus.
But I believe it is generally accepted that cold and flu viruses do not survive long outside a living human host except in the most specific of circumstances - such as perhaps outer space.
As archaeologists we are far more worried about bacterial pathogens such as bubonic plague or Anthrax, both of which are known to be able to survive for a considerable period of time in the right ground conditions. In France they talk about "champs maudits" or cursed fields where the carcasses of sheep that died with anthrax are buried and the bacterium survives for decades to later reinfect other livestock in the right conditions.
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We certainly seem to have imported strains from Europe. The question is, whether the infection rate would have picked up anyway, if people had holidayed in the UK would they have engaged in equally risky behaviour? By late summer, we were only allowing people to travel to low-prevalence countries.
I suspect that covid was a lot more prevalent than some of the 'low prevalence countries' were claiming.
The excess deaths to covid deaths ratio might be a indicator of this:
That picture calls to mind a quite longstanding puzzle. All these bodies full of virus being buried. What happens to the virus? Does it all just die when the host dies? Or does it lurk in the soil?
Good evening, everyone.
Good evening Anne.
It depends. On the specific virus, on the conditions of burial and longer term environment in the grave.
It is known that some viruses have the ability to effectively put themselves into suspended animation. They are a simple crystalline system and can, under the right conditions become an inert substance which can sustain almost indefinitely. There was a fear when scientists went looking for samples of the Spanish Flu in graves up in Spitzbergen a few years ago that the virus could still be active due to the permafrost conditions in which the bodies were deposited. They failed to find any evidence of the virus.
But I believe it is generally accepted that cold and flu viruses do not survive long outside a living human host except in the most specific of circumstances - such as perhaps outer space.
As archaeologists we are far more worried about bacterial pathogens such as bubonic plague or Anthrax, both of which are known to be able to survive for a considerable period of time in the right ground conditions. In France they talk about "champs maudits" or cursed fields where the carcasses of sheep that died with anthrax are buried and the bacterium survives for decades to later reinfect other livestock in the right conditions.
I came into this discussion thinking that the legacy UK parties were permafucked and the SNP would simply romp to yet another victory.
However, I granted our guest authors the courtesy of reading their piece in full, anyway.
The legacy UK parties are probably* permafucked and the SNP is probably* going to romp to yet another victory.
*By probably I mean certainly, of course. The Conservatives and Labour don't merely have 'a lot of work to do in the next two months' to make significant progress. They need to build, test and commission a mind-control field generator that can successfully reprogram the brains of the entire population. Not even the Chinese have figured out how to make that happen.
You could gave written that about Labour in Scotland 30 years ago
So maybe the SNP only has thirty years left in power? You may very well be right. It depends rather on how long it actually takes them to get independence over the finishing line.
I don't doubt that there are Scots who still feel British but they're a minority and, I think you'll find, a shrinking one at that - something that will be brutally laid bare by the results of this year's census, when I expect that the ratio of British to English/Scottish/Welsh/(Northern) Irish identification will have changed markedly all over the UK since 2011.
The only thing that's holding the Union together now is money. If the average Scottish voter thought that she would be £1 per year better off out than in, she'd be off like a shot.
The most recent poll was 50/50 and independence falling in the polls and this before these hearings
It is no means certain that Scotland will vote for independence
Well, there's a long way to go, and we shall see.
The Achilles' heel of the independence movement is, as I said before, money. If a large part of the Scottish electorate didn't believe that separation would put their taxes up then they'd have voted to go in 2014. And it could yet do for the nationalists again - although quite why the maintenance of a state that's held together mainly by bribery is something that is either morally healthy or to be desired is never adequately explained.
OTOH 'you will be poorer if you do this' was the central theme of David Cameron's campaign to vanquish Brexit, and look what became of him.
You’re somewhat ignoring the 30-40% of Scots who are passionately Unionist. There’s plenty of them. Probably about the same as there are passionate Nats.
This is one reason I believe Indy would be a tragedy - for Scotland. It would make Brexit look like a harmonious decision which brought peace to the nation. Indy would unleash demons, and sow decades of bitterness. Ending a 300 year old union would be emotionally explosive (and economically ruinous)
Scotland is not Ireland in 1921 when the large majority of Catholics had a settled will for secession. Scotland is grievously divided.
If Sturgeon gets her maj and seeks Indy, Boris must be the statesman, which will be hard for him. Even as he refuses a vote he must search for compromise, to save Scots and Brits from many more years of rancour
62% of the Scottish population answered the national identity question in the 2011 census as "Scottish only" and the number will only have moved in one direction in the subsequent decade. I don't believe that there's this vast reservoir of committed unionists. There will certainly be some committed unionists, and another tranche of pragmatic unionists, and a fair number of people who just sort of sit around in the middle as well, but I somehow doubt that there's this ocean of pro-Union sentiment out there in Scotland, any more than there was of pro-EU sentiment in Britain in 2016. It's a niche interest.
As I said, the swing vote in Scotland consists of middle-class waverers who fear that independence will hit them in their bank balances and pension pots. It's why the campaign in 2014 revolved principally around sterling, state pensions and the Barnett formula. Britain is held together by money. There is nothing else left.
Sturgeon just has to convince enough that the Brussels money tree will replace London's. (It won't of course but by the time they realise that it will be too late).
I suspect too many of us are thinking of the SNP as a mere political party rather than an African style liberation movement. Corruption and incompetence are irrelevant to the faithful, only the cause matters. Hatred of the Tories (i.e. the English) has become for nationalists a defining characteristic of Scottish identity just as Anglophobia is in Ireland. If independence comes to pass the SNP will continue to blame London for Scotland's problems (probably successfully) for at least 30 years.
I am surprised how sanguine so many others are at the prospect of the break up of the UK. If Lincoln had had the same attitude in 1861 we might still have actual slave traders today rather than just old statues of them.
The relaxed attitude amazes me as well. Oh, Scottish independence, no problem
Scottish independence would guarantee political chaos for a decade. As we disentangle 300 years of union. More immediately it means instant economic emergency. Sindy Scotland would default immediately, and be plunged into Depression. rUK would follow with an intense recession, or worse. All this as we try to recover from the worst crisis since WW2. With debt over 100%
London might itself default, or be forced to print money like Mugabe
It is insane
Worth it if we don't have to listen to the whinging whining Scots any more...
Well, you could argue that if you wanted to stir the pot, but more to the point the difficulty of unpicking the Union is overdone - at least from the point of view of the remainder of the UK, which is about 11 or 12 times the size of Scotland.
Apart from having to move many thousands of admin jobs South (a lot of central Government work in pensions and overseas aid administration is located in and around Glasgow, IIRC,) the main source of disruption to Westminster is what on Earth to do with Trident. Who knows what it might decide? The Government could lease the base whilst it built a new one in England, ask the Americans if we could park the submarines over there whilst we built a new base in England, or it could disarm.
And that's it. The main problem. The rest of it is all down to the division of assets and liabilities, which would either be done on a population proportionate basis, or with the UK taking on the lot and Scotland starting with a clean slate. What's left of the UK could then proceed on its way; other thorny issues such as what to do about the currency, the budget deficit and relations with the EU would self-evidently be matters for the Scots to worry about, not us.
None of this is to understate the level of disruption that the separation process would entail, or the potential for it to turn poisonous. After all, the moment Scotland votes to secede then Westminster's responsibility becomes securing the best terms for the remainder of the country, and the Scottish Government is well used to nursing grievances against Westminster to bolster its own popularity. But it is manageable, and would most definitely not constitute an 'economic emergency.' If we can survive Brexit without imploding then we can certainly survive, say, a hard border with Scotland, which is vastly less important than the EU as a trading partner.
If things are more awkward for them, well, under those circumstances that would no longer be our problem.
You don’t understand. A bankrupt Scotland using sterling would oblige us to help out. We’d have to, even tho we wouldn’t want to.
Moreover, the UK will be reliant on the kindness of strangers - AKA ‘borrowing’ - for the next decade. Debt over 100%
Will people still be happy to lend to us at generous interest rates, as we lose a third of the nation by size, and exhibit signs of chronic instability? Because all this will come on top of Covid and Brexit.
Personally I’d only lend to us if I could exact a stiff premium. We will pay more to borrow at a time when we are borrowing trillions. It is the exact recipe for disaster, for Scots and English alike
Your arguments don't hold water.
Firstly, London only becomes responsible for rescuing Edinburgh if (1) it screws its finances up *and* (2) we agree a currency union, like the Eurozone. Which we would be mad to do, and wouldn't do. States like Panama that adopt a policy of dollarization are obliged to manage their finances very carefully, because the United States is quite explicitly not expected to bail them out if they get into trouble. If Scotland attempted sterlingisation (which I wouldn't expect it to do, because that would be extremely silly) then it would find itself in the same position.
Secondly, there is no reason why the UK's borrowing costs should suddenly spike when it sheds a territory that's a net drain on the resources of the Treasury. If Wessex became a thing again and left then it might cause that sort of problem. Not so Scotland.
Remember we had to help bail out Ireland during the eurocrisis. We weren’t legally obliged to, but in economic terms, pragmatically, we had to. Because we are so interlinked
‘Osborne told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "But we have also made a commitment to consider a bilateral loan that reflects the fact we are not part of the euro… but Ireland is our very closest economic neighbour."’
A bankrupt Scotland using the £ would be five times worse
It was primarily an act of solidarity towards a neighbour that was also a fellow member of the EU at the time.
Denmark and Sweden also made similar bilateral loans to Dublin IIRC. Ireland isn't, insofar as I'm aware, particularly closely entangled with the Scandinavian financial system.
I am confident that Scotland won't go bankrupt because it will be obliged to adjust its balance of taxation, spending and borrowing to suit its circumstances once its public spending is no longer supported by fiscal transfers. The Scottish Government isn't wholly incapable. It will have to make decisions that voters don't like, and will probably get away with them by finding an excuse to keep on blaming us, but the fundamental fact is that the ship is highly unlikely to sink. Scotland is wealthy. Independence wouldn't magically transform it into a Grecian basket case.
However, even if it did, not our problem to solve.
"fellow member of the EU at the time" had nothing to do with it.
Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain were the other ones needing bailouts and we told them that it was not our problem and we weren't helping them. They were our fellow EU members too.
We helped Ireland because it was cheaper to help Ireland than see Ireland fail.
Ireland wouldn't have failed though as it would have ultimately been bailed out by the EU.
I suspect there was a strong element of Cameron wanting to play 'lord bountiful' and maybe hoping to create goodwill for the future.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that.
At that time, the Eurozone (*cough* Germany...) was trying to "encourage" Ireland to accept a common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone. Ireland was very resistant. Our support for them enabled them to stand up to Berlin more than might otherwise have been the case.
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I find Civ6 a bit samey, even with the new civilizations. It's also rather easy.
Civ4 had more depth I think, and less predictability, although it had the terrifyingly impossible stacks of doom, which were poor AI and could really ruin a game.
I dislike the fact that - on the hardest levels - it's all the same AI, they just start with more units.
So, you're playing massive catchup for the entire game, which forces one of about three play styles.
(Also, Germany is ridiculously overpowered due to the Hansa and the ability to build one more district than the population cap. It means you can go broad and shallow very quickly and win surprisingly early in the game.)
I came into this discussion thinking that the legacy UK parties were permafucked and the SNP would simply romp to yet another victory.
However, I granted our guest authors the courtesy of reading their piece in full, anyway.
The legacy UK parties are probably* permafucked and the SNP is probably* going to romp to yet another victory.
*By probably I mean certainly, of course. The Conservatives and Labour don't merely have 'a lot of work to do in the next two months' to make significant progress. They need to build, test and commission a mind-control field generator that can successfully reprogram the brains of the entire population. Not even the Chinese have figured out how to make that happen.
You could gave written that about Labour in Scotland 30 years ago
So maybe the SNP only has thirty years left in power? You may very well be right. It depends rather on how long it actually takes them to get independence over the finishing line.
I don't doubt that there are Scots who still feel British but they're a minority and, I think you'll find, a shrinking one at that - something that will be brutally laid bare by the results of this year's census, when I expect that the ratio of British to English/Scottish/Welsh/(Northern) Irish identification will have changed markedly all over the UK since 2011.
The only thing that's holding the Union together now is money. If the average Scottish voter thought that she would be £1 per year better off out than in, she'd be off like a shot.
The most recent poll was 50/50 and independence falling in the polls and this before these hearings
It is no means certain that Scotland will vote for independence
Well, there's a long way to go, and we shall see.
The Achilles' heel of the independence movement is, as I said before, money. If a large part of the Scottish electorate didn't believe that separation would put their taxes up then they'd have voted to go in 2014. And it could yet do for the nationalists again - although quite why the maintenance of a state that's held together mainly by bribery is something that is either morally healthy or to be desired is never adequately explained.
OTOH 'you will be poorer if you do this' was the central theme of David Cameron's campaign to vanquish Brexit, and look what became of him.
You’re somewhat ignoring the 30-40% of Scots who are passionately Unionist. There’s plenty of them. Probably about the same as there are passionate Nats.
This is one reason I believe Indy would be a tragedy - for Scotland. It would make Brexit look like a harmonious decision which brought peace to the nation. Indy would unleash demons, and sow decades of bitterness. Ending a 300 year old union would be emotionally explosive (and economically ruinous)
Scotland is not Ireland in 1921 when the large majority of Catholics had a settled will for secession. Scotland is grievously divided.
If Sturgeon gets her maj and seeks Indy, Boris must be the statesman, which will be hard for him. Even as he refuses a vote he must search for compromise, to save Scots and Brits from many more years of rancour
62% of the Scottish population answered the national identity question in the 2011 census as "Scottish only" and the number will only have moved in one direction in the subsequent decade. I don't believe that there's this vast reservoir of committed unionists. There will certainly be some committed unionists, and another tranche of pragmatic unionists, and a fair number of people who just sort of sit around in the middle as well, but I somehow doubt that there's this ocean of pro-Union sentiment out there in Scotland, any more than there was of pro-EU sentiment in Britain in 2016. It's a niche interest.
As I said, the swing vote in Scotland consists of middle-class waverers who fear that independence will hit them in their bank balances and pension pots. It's why the campaign in 2014 revolved principally around sterling, state pensions and the Barnett formula. Britain is held together by money. There is nothing else left.
Sturgeon just has to convince enough that the Brussels money tree will replace London's. (It won't of course but by the time they realise that it will be too late).
I suspect too many of us are thinking of the SNP as a mere political party rather than an African style liberation movement. Corruption and incompetence are irrelevant to the faithful, only the cause matters. Hatred of the Tories (i.e. the English) has become for nationalists a defining characteristic of Scottish identity just as Anglophobia is in Ireland. If independence comes to pass the SNP will continue to blame London for Scotland's problems (probably successfully) for at least 30 years.
I am surprised how sanguine so many others are at the prospect of the break up of the UK. If Lincoln had had the same attitude in 1861 we might still have actual slave traders today rather than just old statues of them.
The relaxed attitude amazes me as well. Oh, Scottish independence, no problem
Scottish independence would guarantee political chaos for a decade. As we disentangle 300 years of union. More immediately it means instant economic emergency. Sindy Scotland would default immediately, and be plunged into Depression. rUK would follow with an intense recession, or worse. All this as we try to recover from the worst crisis since WW2. With debt over 100%
London might itself default, or be forced to print money like Mugabe
It is insane
Worth it if we don't have to listen to the whinging whining Scots any more...
Well, you could argue that if you wanted to stir the pot, but more to the point the difficulty of unpicking the Union is overdone - at least from the point of view of the remainder of the UK, which is about 11 or 12 times the size of Scotland.
Apart from having to move many thousands of admin jobs South (a lot of central Government work in pensions and overseas aid administration is located in and around Glasgow, IIRC,) the main source of disruption to Westminster is what on Earth to do with Trident. Who knows what it might decide? The Government could lease the base whilst it built a new one in England, ask the Americans if we could park the submarines over there whilst we built a new base in England, or it could disarm.
And that's it. The main problem. The rest of it is all down to the division of assets and liabilities, which would either be done on a population proportionate basis, or with the UK taking on the lot and Scotland starting with a clean slate. What's left of the UK could then proceed on its way; other thorny issues such as what to do about the currency, the budget deficit and relations with the EU would self-evidently be matters for the Scots to worry about, not us.
None of this is to understate the level of disruption that the separation process would entail, or the potential for it to turn poisonous. After all, the moment Scotland votes to secede then Westminster's responsibility becomes securing the best terms for the remainder of the country, and the Scottish Government is well used to nursing grievances against Westminster to bolster its own popularity. But it is manageable, and would most definitely not constitute an 'economic emergency.' If we can survive Brexit without imploding then we can certainly survive, say, a hard border with Scotland, which is vastly less important than the EU as a trading partner.
If things are more awkward for them, well, under those circumstances that would no longer be our problem.
You don’t understand. A bankrupt Scotland using sterling would oblige us to help out. We’d have to, even tho we wouldn’t want to.
Moreover, the UK will be reliant on the kindness of strangers - AKA ‘borrowing’ - for the next decade. Debt over 100%
Will people still be happy to lend to us at generous interest rates, as we lose a third of the nation by size, and exhibit signs of chronic instability? Because all this will come on top of Covid and Brexit.
Personally I’d only lend to us if I could exact a stiff premium. We will pay more to borrow at a time when we are borrowing trillions. It is the exact recipe for disaster, for Scots and English alike
Your arguments don't hold water.
Firstly, London only becomes responsible for rescuing Edinburgh if (1) it screws its finances up *and* (2) we agree a currency union, like the Eurozone. Which we would be mad to do, and wouldn't do. States like Panama that adopt a policy of dollarization are obliged to manage their finances very carefully, because the United States is quite explicitly not expected to bail them out if they get into trouble. If Scotland attempted sterlingisation (which I wouldn't expect it to do, because that would be extremely silly) then it would find itself in the same position.
Secondly, there is no reason why the UK's borrowing costs should suddenly spike when it sheds a territory that's a net drain on the resources of the Treasury. If Wessex became a thing again and left then it might cause that sort of problem. Not so Scotland.
Remember we had to help bail out Ireland during the eurocrisis. We weren’t legally obliged to, but in economic terms, pragmatically, we had to. Because we are so interlinked
‘Osborne told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "But we have also made a commitment to consider a bilateral loan that reflects the fact we are not part of the euro… but Ireland is our very closest economic neighbour."’
A bankrupt Scotland using the £ would be five times worse
It was primarily an act of solidarity towards a neighbour that was also a fellow member of the EU at the time.
Denmark and Sweden also made similar bilateral loans to Dublin IIRC. Ireland isn't, insofar as I'm aware, particularly closely entangled with the Scandinavian financial system.
I am confident that Scotland won't go bankrupt because it will be obliged to adjust its balance of taxation, spending and borrowing to suit its circumstances once its public spending is no longer supported by fiscal transfers. The Scottish Government isn't wholly incapable. It will have to make decisions that voters don't like, and will probably get away with them by finding an excuse to keep on blaming us, but the fundamental fact is that the ship is highly unlikely to sink. Scotland is wealthy. Independence wouldn't magically transform it into a Grecian basket case.
However, even if it did, not our problem to solve.
"fellow member of the EU at the time" had nothing to do with it.
Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain were the other ones needing bailouts and we told them that it was not our problem and we weren't helping them. They were our fellow EU members too.
We helped Ireland because it was cheaper to help Ireland than see Ireland fail.
Ireland wouldn't have failed though as it would have ultimately been bailed out by the EU.
I suspect there was a strong element of Cameron wanting to play 'lord bountiful' and maybe hoping to create goodwill for the future.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that.
At that time, the Eurozone (*cough* Germany...) was trying to "encourage" Ireland to accept a common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone. Ireland was very resistant. Our support for them enabled them to stand up to Berlin more than might otherwise have been the case.
And why was that in our interest?
A common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone would have led to us being the outsider with the competitive rate surely?
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We certainly seem to have imported strains from Europe. The question is, whether the infection rate would have picked up anyway, if people had holidayed in the UK would they have engaged in equally risky behaviour? By late summer, we were only allowing people to travel to low-prevalence countries.
I don't think we'd have wiped it out, but we might have been able to buy 2-3 weeks. Which - given how CV19 grows exponentially - would have saved both lives and time in lockdown.
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I'm instinctively against subscription models. My kneejerk reaction is that time was they'd include stuff as standard, now we see it as a reward, and fork out early when in some cases the game won't be worth investing time in until later updates make it so. And I've defended plenty of DLC content in the past.
Maybe it is a reasonable model, but my hackles rise at the thought. How much could they have included up front? How substantial are the updates really, so is the cost reasonable?
Not sure about that. I used to subscribe to SPI magazine (board games in every issue, every 2 months) - obviously they weren't all equally good, but they were nearly all interesting to try. If you have a talented team and you liked the original game, why wouldn't they keep producing new additions that add to it? Would it really be better if they did it all up front (taking an extra year to do it) and then sat around doing nothing?
In the specific Civ 6 case, yes, I think we're getting some genuinely new gameplay, not just some new permutation of the spreadsheets.
“Asked if a vote of no confidence plan, with Jeremy Corbyn becoming caretaker prime minister, was dead in the water, Starmer told Today: “No, but I think it’s important today that we pull people together and agree if we can a plan.”
The Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, said she was “not precious” about who a caretaker prime minister would be following a successful vote of no confidence, but she did not believe Corbyn was the right choice.“
Looking back I have to doff my cap to them - the front, the lairyness, the cojones to stand there straight faced and say they genuinely thought there should be another vote, this time ‘a people’s vote’, and that it wasn’t just them refusing to accept they’d lost fair & square took an amount of brass neck I struggle to believe is possible.
Tories should just play Starmer calling for a ‘people’s vote’ on a loop at the next GE
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I'm instinctively against subscription models. My kneejerk reaction is that time was they'd include stuff as standard, now we see it as a reward, and fork out early when in some cases the game won't be worth investing time in until later updates make it so. And I've defended plenty of DLC content in the past.
Maybe it is a reasonable model, but my hackles rise at the thought. How much could they have included up front? How substantial are the updates really, so is the cost reasonable?
Not sure about that. I used to subscribe to SPI magazine (board games in every issue, every 2 months) - obviously they weren't all equally good, but they were nearly all interesting to try. If you have a talented team and you liked the original game, why wouldn't they keep producing new additions that add to it? Would it really be better if they did it all up front (taking an extra year to do it) and then sat around doing nothing?
In the specific Civ 6 case, yes, I think we're getting some genuinely new gameplay, not just some new permutation of the spreadsheets.
Depends how much the base game was. Fair enough to build on it, but it needs to be compelling and substantial enough to begin with.
I came into this discussion thinking that the legacy UK parties were permafucked and the SNP would simply romp to yet another victory.
However, I granted our guest authors the courtesy of reading their piece in full, anyway.
The legacy UK parties are probably* permafucked and the SNP is probably* going to romp to yet another victory.
*By probably I mean certainly, of course. The Conservatives and Labour don't merely have 'a lot of work to do in the next two months' to make significant progress. They need to build, test and commission a mind-control field generator that can successfully reprogram the brains of the entire population. Not even the Chinese have figured out how to make that happen.
You could gave written that about Labour in Scotland 30 years ago
So maybe the SNP only has thirty years left in power? You may very well be right. It depends rather on how long it actually takes them to get independence over the finishing line.
I don't doubt that there are Scots who still feel British but they're a minority and, I think you'll find, a shrinking one at that - something that will be brutally laid bare by the results of this year's census, when I expect that the ratio of British to English/Scottish/Welsh/(Northern) Irish identification will have changed markedly all over the UK since 2011.
The only thing that's holding the Union together now is money. If the average Scottish voter thought that she would be £1 per year better off out than in, she'd be off like a shot.
The most recent poll was 50/50 and independence falling in the polls and this before these hearings
It is no means certain that Scotland will vote for independence
Well, there's a long way to go, and we shall see.
The Achilles' heel of the independence movement is, as I said before, money. If a large part of the Scottish electorate didn't believe that separation would put their taxes up then they'd have voted to go in 2014. And it could yet do for the nationalists again - although quite why the maintenance of a state that's held together mainly by bribery is something that is either morally healthy or to be desired is never adequately explained.
OTOH 'you will be poorer if you do this' was the central theme of David Cameron's campaign to vanquish Brexit, and look what became of him.
You’re somewhat ignoring the 30-40% of Scots who are passionately Unionist. There’s plenty of them. Probably about the same as there are passionate Nats.
This is one reason I believe Indy would be a tragedy - for Scotland. It would make Brexit look like a harmonious decision which brought peace to the nation. Indy would unleash demons, and sow decades of bitterness. Ending a 300 year old union would be emotionally explosive (and economically ruinous)
Scotland is not Ireland in 1921 when the large majority of Catholics had a settled will for secession. Scotland is grievously divided.
If Sturgeon gets her maj and seeks Indy, Boris must be the statesman, which will be hard for him. Even as he refuses a vote he must search for compromise, to save Scots and Brits from many more years of rancour
62% of the Scottish population answered the national identity question in the 2011 census as "Scottish only" and the number will only have moved in one direction in the subsequent decade. I don't believe that there's this vast reservoir of committed unionists. There will certainly be some committed unionists, and another tranche of pragmatic unionists, and a fair number of people who just sort of sit around in the middle as well, but I somehow doubt that there's this ocean of pro-Union sentiment out there in Scotland, any more than there was of pro-EU sentiment in Britain in 2016. It's a niche interest.
As I said, the swing vote in Scotland consists of middle-class waverers who fear that independence will hit them in their bank balances and pension pots. It's why the campaign in 2014 revolved principally around sterling, state pensions and the Barnett formula. Britain is held together by money. There is nothing else left.
Sturgeon just has to convince enough that the Brussels money tree will replace London's. (It won't of course but by the time they realise that it will be too late).
I suspect too many of us are thinking of the SNP as a mere political party rather than an African style liberation movement. Corruption and incompetence are irrelevant to the faithful, only the cause matters. Hatred of the Tories (i.e. the English) has become for nationalists a defining characteristic of Scottish identity just as Anglophobia is in Ireland. If independence comes to pass the SNP will continue to blame London for Scotland's problems (probably successfully) for at least 30 years.
I am surprised how sanguine so many others are at the prospect of the break up of the UK. If Lincoln had had the same attitude in 1861 we might still have actual slave traders today rather than just old statues of them.
The relaxed attitude amazes me as well. Oh, Scottish independence, no problem
Scottish independence would guarantee political chaos for a decade. As we disentangle 300 years of union. More immediately it means instant economic emergency. Sindy Scotland would default immediately, and be plunged into Depression. rUK would follow with an intense recession, or worse. All this as we try to recover from the worst crisis since WW2. With debt over 100%
London might itself default, or be forced to print money like Mugabe
It is insane
Worth it if we don't have to listen to the whinging whining Scots any more...
Well, you could argue that if you wanted to stir the pot, but more to the point the difficulty of unpicking the Union is overdone - at least from the point of view of the remainder of the UK, which is about 11 or 12 times the size of Scotland.
Apart from having to move many thousands of admin jobs South (a lot of central Government work in pensions and overseas aid administration is located in and around Glasgow, IIRC,) the main source of disruption to Westminster is what on Earth to do with Trident. Who knows what it might decide? The Government could lease the base whilst it built a new one in England, ask the Americans if we could park the submarines over there whilst we built a new base in England, or it could disarm.
And that's it. The main problem. The rest of it is all down to the division of assets and liabilities, which would either be done on a population proportionate basis, or with the UK taking on the lot and Scotland starting with a clean slate. What's left of the UK could then proceed on its way; other thorny issues such as what to do about the currency, the budget deficit and relations with the EU would self-evidently be matters for the Scots to worry about, not us.
None of this is to understate the level of disruption that the separation process would entail, or the potential for it to turn poisonous. After all, the moment Scotland votes to secede then Westminster's responsibility becomes securing the best terms for the remainder of the country, and the Scottish Government is well used to nursing grievances against Westminster to bolster its own popularity. But it is manageable, and would most definitely not constitute an 'economic emergency.' If we can survive Brexit without imploding then we can certainly survive, say, a hard border with Scotland, which is vastly less important than the EU as a trading partner.
If things are more awkward for them, well, under those circumstances that would no longer be our problem.
You don’t understand. A bankrupt Scotland using sterling would oblige us to help out. We’d have to, even tho we wouldn’t want to.
Moreover, the UK will be reliant on the kindness of strangers - AKA ‘borrowing’ - for the next decade. Debt over 100%
Will people still be happy to lend to us at generous interest rates, as we lose a third of the nation by size, and exhibit signs of chronic instability? Because all this will come on top of Covid and Brexit.
Personally I’d only lend to us if I could exact a stiff premium. We will pay more to borrow at a time when we are borrowing trillions. It is the exact recipe for disaster, for Scots and English alike
Your arguments don't hold water.
Firstly, London only becomes responsible for rescuing Edinburgh if (1) it screws its finances up *and* (2) we agree a currency union, like the Eurozone. Which we would be mad to do, and wouldn't do. States like Panama that adopt a policy of dollarization are obliged to manage their finances very carefully, because the United States is quite explicitly not expected to bail them out if they get into trouble. If Scotland attempted sterlingisation (which I wouldn't expect it to do, because that would be extremely silly) then it would find itself in the same position.
Secondly, there is no reason why the UK's borrowing costs should suddenly spike when it sheds a territory that's a net drain on the resources of the Treasury. If Wessex became a thing again and left then it might cause that sort of problem. Not so Scotland.
Remember we had to help bail out Ireland during the eurocrisis. We weren’t legally obliged to, but in economic terms, pragmatically, we had to. Because we are so interlinked
‘Osborne told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "But we have also made a commitment to consider a bilateral loan that reflects the fact we are not part of the euro… but Ireland is our very closest economic neighbour."’
A bankrupt Scotland using the £ would be five times worse
It was primarily an act of solidarity towards a neighbour that was also a fellow member of the EU at the time.
Denmark and Sweden also made similar bilateral loans to Dublin IIRC. Ireland isn't, insofar as I'm aware, particularly closely entangled with the Scandinavian financial system.
I am confident that Scotland won't go bankrupt because it will be obliged to adjust its balance of taxation, spending and borrowing to suit its circumstances once its public spending is no longer supported by fiscal transfers. The Scottish Government isn't wholly incapable. It will have to make decisions that voters don't like, and will probably get away with them by finding an excuse to keep on blaming us, but the fundamental fact is that the ship is highly unlikely to sink. Scotland is wealthy. Independence wouldn't magically transform it into a Grecian basket case.
However, even if it did, not our problem to solve.
"fellow member of the EU at the time" had nothing to do with it.
Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain were the other ones needing bailouts and we told them that it was not our problem and we weren't helping them. They were our fellow EU members too.
We helped Ireland because it was cheaper to help Ireland than see Ireland fail.
Ireland wouldn't have failed though as it would have ultimately been bailed out by the EU.
I suspect there was a strong element of Cameron wanting to play 'lord bountiful' and maybe hoping to create goodwill for the future.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that.
At that time, the Eurozone (*cough* Germany...) was trying to "encourage" Ireland to accept a common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone. Ireland was very resistant. Our support for them enabled them to stand up to Berlin more than might otherwise have been the case.
And why was that in our interest?
A common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone would have led to us being the outsider with the competitive rate surely?
Fair point. I think we just like to play the Germans against the French, the Italians against the Dutch...
I came into this discussion thinking that the legacy UK parties were permafucked and the SNP would simply romp to yet another victory.
However, I granted our guest authors the courtesy of reading their piece in full, anyway.
The legacy UK parties are probably* permafucked and the SNP is probably* going to romp to yet another victory.
*By probably I mean certainly, of course. The Conservatives and Labour don't merely have 'a lot of work to do in the next two months' to make significant progress. They need to build, test and commission a mind-control field generator that can successfully reprogram the brains of the entire population. Not even the Chinese have figured out how to make that happen.
You could gave written that about Labour in Scotland 30 years ago
So maybe the SNP only has thirty years left in power? You may very well be right. It depends rather on how long it actually takes them to get independence over the finishing line.
I don't doubt that there are Scots who still feel British but they're a minority and, I think you'll find, a shrinking one at that - something that will be brutally laid bare by the results of this year's census, when I expect that the ratio of British to English/Scottish/Welsh/(Northern) Irish identification will have changed markedly all over the UK since 2011.
The only thing that's holding the Union together now is money. If the average Scottish voter thought that she would be £1 per year better off out than in, she'd be off like a shot.
The most recent poll was 50/50 and independence falling in the polls and this before these hearings
It is no means certain that Scotland will vote for independence
Well, there's a long way to go, and we shall see.
The Achilles' heel of the independence movement is, as I said before, money. If a large part of the Scottish electorate didn't believe that separation would put their taxes up then they'd have voted to go in 2014. And it could yet do for the nationalists again - although quite why the maintenance of a state that's held together mainly by bribery is something that is either morally healthy or to be desired is never adequately explained.
OTOH 'you will be poorer if you do this' was the central theme of David Cameron's campaign to vanquish Brexit, and look what became of him.
You’re somewhat ignoring the 30-40% of Scots who are passionately Unionist. There’s plenty of them. Probably about the same as there are passionate Nats.
This is one reason I believe Indy would be a tragedy - for Scotland. It would make Brexit look like a harmonious decision which brought peace to the nation. Indy would unleash demons, and sow decades of bitterness. Ending a 300 year old union would be emotionally explosive (and economically ruinous)
Scotland is not Ireland in 1921 when the large majority of Catholics had a settled will for secession. Scotland is grievously divided.
If Sturgeon gets her maj and seeks Indy, Boris must be the statesman, which will be hard for him. Even as he refuses a vote he must search for compromise, to save Scots and Brits from many more years of rancour
62% of the Scottish population answered the national identity question in the 2011 census as "Scottish only" and the number will only have moved in one direction in the subsequent decade. I don't believe that there's this vast reservoir of committed unionists. There will certainly be some committed unionists, and another tranche of pragmatic unionists, and a fair number of people who just sort of sit around in the middle as well, but I somehow doubt that there's this ocean of pro-Union sentiment out there in Scotland, any more than there was of pro-EU sentiment in Britain in 2016. It's a niche interest.
As I said, the swing vote in Scotland consists of middle-class waverers who fear that independence will hit them in their bank balances and pension pots. It's why the campaign in 2014 revolved principally around sterling, state pensions and the Barnett formula. Britain is held together by money. There is nothing else left.
Sturgeon just has to convince enough that the Brussels money tree will replace London's. (It won't of course but by the time they realise that it will be too late).
I suspect too many of us are thinking of the SNP as a mere political party rather than an African style liberation movement. Corruption and incompetence are irrelevant to the faithful, only the cause matters. Hatred of the Tories (i.e. the English) has become for nationalists a defining characteristic of Scottish identity just as Anglophobia is in Ireland. If independence comes to pass the SNP will continue to blame London for Scotland's problems (probably successfully) for at least 30 years.
I am surprised how sanguine so many others are at the prospect of the break up of the UK. If Lincoln had had the same attitude in 1861 we might still have actual slave traders today rather than just old statues of them.
The relaxed attitude amazes me as well. Oh, Scottish independence, no problem
Scottish independence would guarantee political chaos for a decade. As we disentangle 300 years of union. More immediately it means instant economic emergency. Sindy Scotland would default immediately, and be plunged into Depression. rUK would follow with an intense recession, or worse. All this as we try to recover from the worst crisis since WW2. With debt over 100%
London might itself default, or be forced to print money like Mugabe
It is insane
Worth it if we don't have to listen to the whinging whining Scots any more...
Well, you could argue that if you wanted to stir the pot, but more to the point the difficulty of unpicking the Union is overdone - at least from the point of view of the remainder of the UK, which is about 11 or 12 times the size of Scotland.
Apart from having to move many thousands of admin jobs South (a lot of central Government work in pensions and overseas aid administration is located in and around Glasgow, IIRC,) the main source of disruption to Westminster is what on Earth to do with Trident. Who knows what it might decide? The Government could lease the base whilst it built a new one in England, ask the Americans if we could park the submarines over there whilst we built a new base in England, or it could disarm.
And that's it. The main problem. The rest of it is all down to the division of assets and liabilities, which would either be done on a population proportionate basis, or with the UK taking on the lot and Scotland starting with a clean slate. What's left of the UK could then proceed on its way; other thorny issues such as what to do about the currency, the budget deficit and relations with the EU would self-evidently be matters for the Scots to worry about, not us.
None of this is to understate the level of disruption that the separation process would entail, or the potential for it to turn poisonous. After all, the moment Scotland votes to secede then Westminster's responsibility becomes securing the best terms for the remainder of the country, and the Scottish Government is well used to nursing grievances against Westminster to bolster its own popularity. But it is manageable, and would most definitely not constitute an 'economic emergency.' If we can survive Brexit without imploding then we can certainly survive, say, a hard border with Scotland, which is vastly less important than the EU as a trading partner.
If things are more awkward for them, well, under those circumstances that would no longer be our problem.
You don’t understand. A bankrupt Scotland using sterling would oblige us to help out. We’d have to, even tho we wouldn’t want to.
Moreover, the UK will be reliant on the kindness of strangers - AKA ‘borrowing’ - for the next decade. Debt over 100%
Will people still be happy to lend to us at generous interest rates, as we lose a third of the nation by size, and exhibit signs of chronic instability? Because all this will come on top of Covid and Brexit.
Personally I’d only lend to us if I could exact a stiff premium. We will pay more to borrow at a time when we are borrowing trillions. It is the exact recipe for disaster, for Scots and English alike
Your arguments don't hold water.
Firstly, London only becomes responsible for rescuing Edinburgh if (1) it screws its finances up *and* (2) we agree a currency union, like the Eurozone. Which we would be mad to do, and wouldn't do. States like Panama that adopt a policy of dollarization are obliged to manage their finances very carefully, because the United States is quite explicitly not expected to bail them out if they get into trouble. If Scotland attempted sterlingisation (which I wouldn't expect it to do, because that would be extremely silly) then it would find itself in the same position.
Secondly, there is no reason why the UK's borrowing costs should suddenly spike when it sheds a territory that's a net drain on the resources of the Treasury. If Wessex became a thing again and left then it might cause that sort of problem. Not so Scotland.
Remember we had to help bail out Ireland during the eurocrisis. We weren’t legally obliged to, but in economic terms, pragmatically, we had to. Because we are so interlinked
‘Osborne told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "But we have also made a commitment to consider a bilateral loan that reflects the fact we are not part of the euro… but Ireland is our very closest economic neighbour."’
A bankrupt Scotland using the £ would be five times worse
It was primarily an act of solidarity towards a neighbour that was also a fellow member of the EU at the time.
Denmark and Sweden also made similar bilateral loans to Dublin IIRC. Ireland isn't, insofar as I'm aware, particularly closely entangled with the Scandinavian financial system.
I am confident that Scotland won't go bankrupt because it will be obliged to adjust its balance of taxation, spending and borrowing to suit its circumstances once its public spending is no longer supported by fiscal transfers. The Scottish Government isn't wholly incapable. It will have to make decisions that voters don't like, and will probably get away with them by finding an excuse to keep on blaming us, but the fundamental fact is that the ship is highly unlikely to sink. Scotland is wealthy. Independence wouldn't magically transform it into a Grecian basket case.
However, even if it did, not our problem to solve.
"fellow member of the EU at the time" had nothing to do with it.
Portugal, Greece, Italy and Spain were the other ones needing bailouts and we told them that it was not our problem and we weren't helping them. They were our fellow EU members too.
We helped Ireland because it was cheaper to help Ireland than see Ireland fail.
Ireland wouldn't have failed though as it would have ultimately been bailed out by the EU.
I suspect there was a strong element of Cameron wanting to play 'lord bountiful' and maybe hoping to create goodwill for the future.
Actually, it's a bit more complicated than that.
At that time, the Eurozone (*cough* Germany...) was trying to "encourage" Ireland to accept a common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone. Ireland was very resistant. Our support for them enabled them to stand up to Berlin more than might otherwise have been the case.
And why was that in our interest?
A common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone would have led to us being the outsider with the competitive rate surely?
Fair point. I think we just like to play the Germans against the French, the Italians against the Dutch...
Jim Hacker, on being asked for a loan to save Aston Wanderers, was told it would give him a safe seat for life as a local hero.
‘Yes,’ he mused. ‘That might strike the press, too. And the opposition. And the judge.’
Pretty sure the rather silly named Richmond (Yorks) seat is already a safe seat for life.
The message to other red wall towns is:
Vote Tory, get £1 billion.
Not exactly subtle but it may well work given so many of them are now marginal.
(Incidentally, what’s so silly about naming a seat after the main town in it?)
Actually, isn't Northallerton bigger?
Depends on whether you include the Catterick base or not.
Although I agree, it would make more sense to call it ‘Richmond and Northallerton.’ There cannot be many county towns anywhere in the UK that don’t have their names in the local constituency.
Brixham is bigger than Totnes - but not in the constituency name.
And Ponteland is bigger than Hexham. And Prudhoe almost as well.
I wonder what the smallest place in the UK to have its name in a constituency name is?
Welcome to PB! City of London/Westminster?
That's got to be worth a shout...
I found this site back in 2019 when I was looking for good political blog posts about the parliamentary crisis. I only slowly migrated onto looking at the comments but since then I have come to the conclusion this is one of the best discussion forums I've lurked in. Not just politics, great analysis of all sorts of things going on here.
I've never felt the need to post as someone else has usually made the point or asked the question, and put it better too.
But a vote of thanks from me, and any other lurkers who feel the same way.
Having broken the duck I may post if the mood takes.
Welcome. You do that. Badenoch has to be a contender. Never heard of it other than the succinctly named Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. Which is nailed on for least user friendly name.
I think Radnor must have it, if that is discounted as being really a reference to the old shire of Radnor then Meriden would seem to be the one. Fascinating stuff.
Yes, I think that is the only four part name?
Technically the name of the constituency is ‘Brecon and Radnorshire,’ even though it’s always called ‘Brecon and Radnor,’ so I’m thinking @another_richard has got it with Meriden.
Surely it is Dinefwr, as in Carmarthen East & Dinefwr ?
They think it's all over. It is now. A late, late winner!
I wonder whether we're ever going to find out why the experts recommended not shutting down international travel last March/April. That was obviously the wrong decision but I haven't heard any explanations for it so far.
It needed shutting down in February, though. By March/April I don't think it mattered
It certainly mattered later in the year when the UK imported covid again.
We certainly seem to have imported strains from Europe. The question is, whether the infection rate would have picked up anyway, if people had holidayed in the UK would they have engaged in equally risky behaviour? By late summer, we were only allowing people to travel to low-prevalence countries.
I don't think we'd have wiped it out, but we might have been able to buy 2-3 weeks. Which - given how CV19 grows exponentially - would have saved both lives and time in lockdown.
The theory that moving between countries with equal prevalence caused no increase in risk was a valid one (excepting the bit where you share a poorly ventilated tube with a lot of people to get there and back).
Unfortunately it seems that some countries underestimated their prevalence for political/economic reasons or because they had nowhere near our amount of testing.
The government should definitely learn from that and be very cautious opening up again.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask, mind, because I won't be going on travels in any case.
The corporation tax hike won't look so bad when other countries decide to pay their Covid costs that way.
Exactly - the assumption that all of our competitors will fund their recovery without touching business taxes at all is pretty unrealistic.
I think many of our competitors are going to fund their recoveries by continuing to monetize debt.
The economies of some of our competitors either did not shrink as much as ours, or were never closed down as much as ours, or are opening up much faster than ours.
Or have a different mix between services and manufacturing
The corporation tax hike won't look so bad when other countries decide to pay their Covid costs that way.
Exactly - the assumption that all of our competitors will fund their recovery without touching business taxes at all is pretty unrealistic.
I think many of our competitors are going to fund their recoveries by continuing to monetize debt.
The economies of some of our competitors either did not shrink as much as ours, or were never closed down as much as ours, or are opening up much faster than ours.
Or have a different mix between services and manufacturing
Or count wages paid rather than value added as GDP.
That picture calls to mind a quite longstanding puzzle. All these bodies full of virus being buried. What happens to the virus? Does it all just die when the host dies? Or does it lurk in the soil?
Good evening, everyone.
Good evening Anne.
It depends. On the specific virus, on the conditions of burial and longer term environment in the grave.
It is known that some viruses have the ability to effectively put themselves into suspended animation. They are a simple crystalline system and can, under the right conditions become an inert substance which can sustain almost indefinitely. There was a fear when scientists went looking for samples of the Spanish Flu in graves up in Spitzbergen a few years ago that the virus could still be active due to the permafrost conditions in which the bodies were deposited. They failed to find any evidence of the virus.
But I believe it is generally accepted that cold and flu viruses do not survive long outside a living human host except in the most specific of circumstances - such as perhaps outer space.
As archaeologists we are far more worried about bacterial pathogens such as bubonic plague or Anthrax, both of which are known to be able to survive for a considerable period of time in the right ground conditions. In France they talk about "champs maudits" or cursed fields where the carcasses of sheep that died with anthrax are buried and the bacterium survives for decades to later reinfect other livestock in the right conditions.
Thank you, that's very interesting. I remember they had to burn all those diseased cattle some years back. Terrible sights.
The corporation tax hike won't look so bad when other countries decide to pay their Covid costs that way.
Exactly - the assumption that all of our competitors will fund their recovery without touching business taxes at all is pretty unrealistic.
I think many of our competitors are going to fund their recoveries by continuing to monetize debt.
The economies of some of our competitors either did not shrink as much as ours, or were never closed down as much as ours, or are opening up much faster than ours.
Or have a different mix between services and manufacturing
Or count wages paid rather than value added as GDP.
All the different ways of measuring GDP come out the same in the end. It's just some get more rapidly to the right answer than others.
The corporation tax hike won't look so bad when other countries decide to pay their Covid costs that way.
Exactly - the assumption that all of our competitors will fund their recovery without touching business taxes at all is pretty unrealistic.
I think many of our competitors are going to fund their recoveries by continuing to monetize debt.
The economies of some of our competitors either did not shrink as much as ours, or were never closed down as much as ours, or are opening up much faster than ours.
Or have a different mix between services and manufacturing
Or count wages paid rather than value added as GDP.
All the different ways of measuring GDP come out the same in the end. It's just some get more rapidly to the right answer than others.
True, but it does mean we aren't quite as bad as it first appears (or, rather, others may be worse than they appear).
If you have not yet had a chance to play Hitman 3, then you should. It's a ridiculously good game topping off a genuinely excellent trilogy.
If you look at my video game playing, 90% of it in the last five years has been Civ6 and Hitman.
Do you want a new massive time sink? Try Europa universalis.
Or Crusader Kings.
Or Hearts of Iron. All Paradox Games. But they're not just long. They're good...
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
Civ is honestly a bit stale after having played Europa.
Fundamentally she thinks that palace servants are “servants” in the way that Hollywood A listers - like she believes she is - abuse their staff. She doesn’t understand the more nuanced relationships the UK royals have with them
I don't get this idea that you get the most out of your staff if you abuse them.
It must be a status thing in the USA, because it sure enough isn't decent, or effective.
There was an interesting scene in The Crown when Tommy Lascelles explains that sometimes it was his job to save the Royals from themselves, to protect the Crown - even at the expense of individuals within it, however senior. I think an element of that still exists and it means that staff in the Royal household do not simply see themselves solely as employees of any individual Royal. Hard for an outsider to understand that.
Plus lots of people are not necessarily good at dealing with employees - whether they are employed at work or in the home. How many bad or indifferent managers have many of us on here experienced? Bad managers are - regrettably - much more common than good ones and I don't suppose actors or ex-military men are any exception to that.
I rarely comment on matters Royal but the orchestrated character assassination of the Duchess of Sussex has been a wonder to behold. However bad it might have been for Jeremy Corbyn, it's been worse for Meghan. Last weekend, the interview with her and Harry was excoriated for being done while Prince Philip was in hospital. Today, she's an unapologetic bully (well, supposedly the Home Secretary might be one as well and she seems popular with a number here) which you can believe or not but it's clearly designed to repel her with the British public.
I comment on matters Scottish even less frequently and I'm not changing that tonight.
Hmm ..... you are making a big assumption that there is no possibility of there being any truth to the allegations. Simply because Meghan is bi-racial does not mean that she is automatically a saint. Or vice versa of course.
The Sussexes want to give a no holds barred interview. Fine. But then others affected are much more likely to feel free to want to have their say too, especially if they feel that their normal discretion is being abused. Once you put stuff out into the public domain you cannot guarantee that you get the only or the last word.
Stupid to involve the press at all IMO, especially if you claim you want a private life without press intrusion.
Fundamentally she thinks that palace servants are “servants” in the way that Hollywood A listers - like she believes she is - abuse their staff. She doesn’t understand the more nuanced relationships the UK royals have with them
I don't get this idea that you get the most out of your staff if you abuse them.
It must be a status thing in the USA, because it sure enough isn't decent, or effective.
There was an interesting scene in The Crown when Tommy Lascelles explains that sometimes it was his job to save the Royals from themselves, to protect the Crown - even at the expense of individuals within it, however senior. I think an element of that still exists and it means that staff in the Royal household do not simply see themselves solely as employees of any individual Royal. Hard for an outsider to understand that.
Plus lots of people are not necessarily good at dealing with employees - whether they are employed at work or in the home. How many bad or indifferent managers have many of us on here experienced? Bad managers are - regrettably - much more common than good ones and I don't suppose actors or ex-military men are any exception to that.
I rarely comment on matters Royal but the orchestrated character assassination of the Duchess of Sussex has been a wonder to behold. However bad it might have been for Jeremy Corbyn, it's been worse for Meghan. Last weekend, the interview with her and Harry was excoriated for being done while Prince Philip was in hospital. Today, she's an unapologetic bully (well, supposedly the Home Secretary might be one as well and she seems popular with a number here) which you can believe or not but it's clearly designed to repel her with the British public.
I comment on matters Scottish even less frequently and I'm not changing that tonight.
Hmm ..... you are making a big assumption that there is no possibility of there being any truth to the allegations. Simply because Meghan is bi-racial does not mean that she is automatically a saint. Or vice versa of course.
The Sussexes want to give a no holds barred interview. Fine. But then others affected are much more likely to feel free to want to have their say too, especially if they feel that their normal discretion is being abused. Once you put stuff out into the public domain you cannot guarantee that you get the only or the last word.
Stupid to involve the press at all IMO, especially if you claim you want a private life without press intrusion.
I have no idea if Meghan is awful (many "celebrities" are) or acceptable. I do know that I wouldn't want to work for her.
But I must admit that there's a small element of truth in what @stodge says: it does look like a bit of a concerted "trash Meghan" PR campaign.
Fundamentally she thinks that palace servants are “servants” in the way that Hollywood A listers - like she believes she is - abuse their staff. She doesn’t understand the more nuanced relationships the UK royals have with them
I don't get this idea that you get the most out of your staff if you abuse them.
It must be a status thing in the USA, because it sure enough isn't decent, or effective.
There was an interesting scene in The Crown when Tommy Lascelles explains that sometimes it was his job to save the Royals from themselves, to protect the Crown - even at the expense of individuals within it, however senior. I think an element of that still exists and it means that staff in the Royal household do not simply see themselves solely as employees of any individual Royal. Hard for an outsider to understand that.
Plus lots of people are not necessarily good at dealing with employees - whether they are employed at work or in the home. How many bad or indifferent managers have many of us on here experienced? Bad managers are - regrettably - much more common than good ones and I don't suppose actors or ex-military men are any exception to that.
I rarely comment on matters Royal but the orchestrated character assassination of the Duchess of Sussex has been a wonder to behold. However bad it might have been for Jeremy Corbyn, it's been worse for Meghan. Last weekend, the interview with her and Harry was excoriated for being done while Prince Philip was in hospital. Today, she's an unapologetic bully (well, supposedly the Home Secretary might be one as well and she seems popular with a number here) which you can believe or not but it's clearly designed to repel her with the British public.
I comment on matters Scottish even less frequently and I'm not changing that tonight.
Hmm ..... you are making a big assumption that there is no possibility of there being any truth to the allegations. Simply because Meghan is bi-racial does not mean that she is automatically a saint. Or vice versa of course.
The Sussexes want to give a no holds barred interview. Fine. But then others affected are much more likely to feel free to want to have their say too, especially if they feel that their normal discretion is being abused. Once you put stuff out into the public domain you cannot guarantee that you get the only or the last word.
Stupid to involve the press at all IMO, especially if you claim you want a private life without press intrusion.
I have no idea if Meghan is awful (many "celebrities" are) or acceptable. I do know that I wouldn't want to work for her.
But I must admit that there's a small element of truth in what @stodge says: it does look like a bit of a concerted "trash Meghan" PR campaign.
You may be right. Equally, there seems to be a concerted PR campaign by the Sussexes to paint themselves as victims and act discourteously to HMQ despite her repeatedly saying how loved and cherished they are.
They would all be best advised to say nothing and get on with their now separate lives. The more they talk the greater the likelihood that more (but only a partial story) will come out which will be to no-one's credit.
"GPs will prescribe diets for more than 700,000 people to combat obesity as report blames being overweight for UK's high Covid death toll and WHO brands it a 'wake-up call' to westerners"
"GPs will prescribe diets for more than 700,000 people to combat obesity as report blames being overweight for UK's high Covid death toll and WHO brands it a 'wake-up call' to westerners"
The only way it goes 5 if it is one of those other extreme wickets you get in India were it is deadly slow, doesn't spin and a score of 600 isn't enough.
"GPs will prescribe diets for more than 700,000 people to combat obesity as report blames being overweight for UK's high Covid death toll and WHO brands it a 'wake-up call' to westerners"
FAT SHAMING......WHAT ABOUT BODY POSITIVITY.....YOU CAN BE FAT AND FIT...and other bollocks will be incoming.
That looks quite positive.
NHS is getting good at Public Health interventions. I think I have mentioned before that rolling back Diabetes Type II is becoming more common over the last several years. Even keeping people more healthy for a few years has a major benefit in terms of expensive complications.
The smoking stuff also seems good.
The body positivity stuff is ... as you say ... largely bollocks, like much of all the identity politics stuff.
To build a whole life around a victim narrative is demeaning yourself imo.
"GPs will prescribe diets for more than 700,000 people to combat obesity as report blames being overweight for UK's high Covid death toll and WHO brands it a 'wake-up call' to westerners"
FAT SHAMING......WHAT ABOUT BODY POSITIVITY.....YOU CAN BE FAT AND FIT...and other bollocks will be incoming.
While it is no doubt true something should be done about obesity, the WHO study underlying this report is based on comparing Covid death rates with countries' obesity rates, so is perhaps not quite as copper-bottomed as you'd hope, absent more direct evidence (which probably does exist assuming hospitals record patients' height and weight on admission).
"GPs will prescribe diets for more than 700,000 people to combat obesity as report blames being overweight for UK's high Covid death toll and WHO brands it a 'wake-up call' to westerners"
FAT SHAMING......WHAT ABOUT BODY POSITIVITY.....YOU CAN BE FAT AND FIT...and other bollocks will be incoming.
While it is no doubt true something should be done about obesity, the WHO study underlying this report is based on comparing Covid death rates with countries' obesity rates, so is perhaps not quite as copper-bottomed as you'd hope, absent more direct evidence (which probably does exist assuming hospitals record patients' height and weight on admission).
My point is there is a nonsense movement around significantly overweight people denying there is any issue, in fact it is a positive thing and it is wrong to ever mention to them that it is bad. Regardless of being obese increases your risk vs COVID, we know for certain it is definitely going to increase your risk via a whole range of other health conditions.
I am not saying going all Marjorie Dawes, but just buying into this post-truth bollocks, because it might offend some people, is not the right way to go about things.
Jim Hacker, on being asked for a loan to save Aston Wanderers, was told it would give him a safe seat for life as a local hero.
‘Yes,’ he mused. ‘That might strike the press, too. And the opposition. And the judge.’
Pretty sure the rather silly named Richmond (Yorks) seat is already a safe seat for life.
The message to other red wall towns is:
Vote Tory, get £1 billion.
Not exactly subtle but it may well work given so many of them are now marginal.
(Incidentally, what’s so silly about naming a seat after the main town in it?)
Actually, isn't Northallerton bigger?
Depends on whether you include the Catterick base or not.
Although I agree, it would make more sense to call it ‘Richmond and Northallerton.’ There cannot be many county towns anywhere in the UK that don’t have their names in the local constituency.
Brixham is bigger than Totnes - but not in the constituency name.
And Ponteland is bigger than Hexham. And Prudhoe almost as well.
I wonder what the smallest place in the UK to have its name in a constituency name is?
Welcome to PB! City of London/Westminster?
That's got to be worth a shout...
I found this site back in 2019 when I was looking for good political blog posts about the parliamentary crisis. I only slowly migrated onto looking at the comments but since then I have come to the conclusion this is one of the best discussion forums I've lurked in. Not just politics, great analysis of all sorts of things going on here.
I've never felt the need to post as someone else has usually made the point or asked the question, and put it better too.
But a vote of thanks from me, and any other lurkers who feel the same way.
Having broken the duck I may post if the mood takes.
Welcome. You do that. Badenoch has to be a contender. Never heard of it other than the succinctly named Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey. Which is nailed on for least user friendly name.
I think Radnor must have it, if that is discounted as being really a reference to the old shire of Radnor then Meriden would seem to be the one. Fascinating stuff.
Yes, I think that is the only four part name?
Technically the name of the constituency is ‘Brecon and Radnorshire,’ even though it’s always called ‘Brecon and Radnor,’ so I’m thinking @another_richard has got it with Meriden.
Surely it is Dinefwr, as in Carmarthen East & Dinefwr ?
As I've said, there is an opening for a party that is committed to staying in the Union, but is not a branch of a UK party, and is only loosely affiliated, or not at all, with another UK party.
The main opposition parties seem to have realised this to an extent, and you see a lot of things like Douglas Ross saying that his 'demands' for Sunak's budget have all been met (as opposed to just cheerleading for the budget), however, it lacks credibility.
There is a new party that actually fits this model - Alliance for Unity, George Galloway's latest project, but at the moment they are not using their unique set up as a Scottish Unionist Party as a selling point, and they probably won't field candidates for Westminster, where this type of party would make the most sense.
Lucky, George's fruibat losers and nutjobs will not even register, you will be able to count their votes on two hands. If you think they are the saviours you are barking.
What can stop the SNP juggernaut? Short of a Salmondista splinter party, I'm not sure anything can,
No reason why that would stop it , actually it would enhance it as it would mean a super majority for Independence and would force SNP to keep in line.
Comments
Very surprisingly Brazil's excess death figures aren't much worse than their official figures, at least until Boxing Day when their stats end for now. Though they haven't had a major surge point yet its been pretty flat throughout.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/world/americas/Brazil-covid-variant.html
Media types like to be able to fly anywhere when they want to and the government didn't want to upset them.
Holiday obsessives like to be able to fly anywhere when they want to and the government didn't want to upset them.
The airlines and airports seem to have a lot of political pull, they also employ lots of people.
Have to be 'open for business'.
Good evening, everyone.
I suspect there was a strong element of Cameron wanting to play 'lord bountiful' and maybe hoping to create goodwill for the future.
I had also better take back that comment about 'few'. Most European countries seem to have the counts roughly equal.
Striking that there are quite a few countries at the bottom of the list that have actually saved lives over this period compared to the long term average.
Has anyone else being trying the Civ 6 subscription model - a new scenario and two new civilisations every two months? It's clever (given their ability to maintain the standard) - gives them revenue up front and keeps game enjoyment fresh. I'm up for another round when the current bunch finishes.
I suppose politically that would have been completely impossible at the time, though had we taken that course we could well be thankful for it now.
Civ4 had more depth I think, and less predictability, although it had the terrifyingly impossible stacks of doom, which were poor AI and could really ruin a game.
Maybe it is a reasonable model, but my hackles rise at the thought. How much could they have included up front? How substantial are the updates really, so is the cost reasonable?
When Malmesbury started his data analysis most local authorities were showing 0 cases. Only about 5 authorities were in red originally.
Had it not been reseeded with the holidays it would have made a major difference.
As the great Drakeford said yesterday:
It worries me hugely to hear the prime minister say that he intends to reopen international travel in May of this year.
Our September in Wales was made far more difficult by the fact that we had a big importation of the virus from France, Spain, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey. Every day I will be reading of new outbreaks of people who have gone away, caught the virus and brought it back with them.
If ever there was a year to be staying at home and to be enjoying all the fantastic things Wales has to offer, this must be it.
I would build the walls higher for now against the risk that we would bring into this country the variants that could be brewing in any part of the world, and could then put at risk all the careful work we have done to try and keep Wales safe.
North Parade was the northernmost part of the Royalist defences in the Civil War. Guess what South Parade was?
Sorry. Lovely Oxford etiological myth, but no truth in it. Just the boundaries of farm estates, probably.
But this is just stark, raving, bonkers.
Labour is the party of remain, says Keir Starmer
“Asked if a vote of no confidence plan, with Jeremy Corbyn becoming caretaker prime minister, was dead in the water, Starmer told Today: “No, but I think it’s important today that we pull people together and agree if we can a plan.”
The Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, said she was “not precious” about who a caretaker prime minister would be following a successful vote of no confidence, but she did not believe Corbyn was the right choice.“
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/aug/27/labour-is-the-party-of-remain-says-keir-starmer-brexit
Gordon Beattie, chairman of Beattie Communications, published a LinkedIn post saying his firm would not hire "blacks, gays or Catholics".
He added that he only hired "talented people" and did not care about colour, sexual orientation or religion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-56273997
>>>>>>>
Yes, such a pity it's not true. But I'll continue to believe that Prince Rupert's horse watered at Magdalen, on only slightly less slender evidence.
Right?
Only issue is that to buy all the expansions now would cost well over £100 so they've launched a subscription service that gives new players all expansions immediately for £4 a month. There's no need for me to subscribe since I already own it all, but its an alternative instead of paying upfront for everything at once to get access to the entire back catalogue.
I've not bought CKIII yet. I'm waiting a year or so, I always find Paradox games get patched very heavily after first release which isn't a criticism, the base game is typically good but they keep their game alive by evolving and updating it in response to fan feedback.
The excess deaths to covid deaths ratio might be a indicator of this:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-tracker
It depends. On the specific virus, on the conditions of burial and longer term environment in the grave.
It is known that some viruses have the ability to effectively put themselves into suspended animation. They are a simple crystalline system and can, under the right conditions become an inert substance which can sustain almost indefinitely. There was a fear when scientists went looking for samples of the Spanish Flu in graves up in Spitzbergen a few years ago that the virus could still be active due to the permafrost conditions in which the bodies were deposited. They failed to find any evidence of the virus.
But I believe it is generally accepted that cold and flu viruses do not survive long outside a living human host except in the most specific of circumstances - such as perhaps outer space.
As archaeologists we are far more worried about bacterial pathogens such as bubonic plague or Anthrax, both of which are known to be able to survive for a considerable period of time in the right ground conditions. In France they talk about "champs maudits" or cursed fields where the carcasses of sheep that died with anthrax are buried and the bacterium survives for decades to later reinfect other livestock in the right conditions.
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1367254394421575680?s=20
At that time, the Eurozone (*cough* Germany...) was trying to "encourage" Ireland to accept a common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone. Ireland was very resistant. Our support for them enabled them to stand up to Berlin more than might otherwise have been the case.
So, you're playing massive catchup for the entire game, which forces one of about three play styles.
(Also, Germany is ridiculously overpowered due to the Hansa and the ability to build one more district than the population cap. It means you can go broad and shallow very quickly and win surprisingly early in the game.)
A common minimum corporate tax rate across the Eurozone would have led to us being the outsider with the competitive rate surely?
Master. Commander. Scholar. Lover. Gentleman.
In the specific Civ 6 case, yes, I think we're getting some genuinely new gameplay, not just some new permutation of the spreadsheets.
Tories should just play Starmer calling for a ‘people’s vote’ on a loop at the next GE
https://twitter.com/DJSnM/status/1367256222861197314
If Max Clifford is so good at PR how come everybody thinks he's a c**t?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37iHSwA1SwE
The irony is now we're outside Europe a common EU CT rate might be in our interest. We could undercut it and job done.
https://twitter.com/AgentP22/status/1367255980527005701
A late, late winner!
Unfortunately it seems that some countries underestimated their prevalence for political/economic reasons or because they had nowhere near our amount of testing.
The government should definitely learn from that and be very cautious opening up again.
I'm probably the wrong person to ask, mind, because I won't be going on travels in any case.
It's also something that DJT got absolutely right.
There was a More or Less on this topic:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p094vd4x
Plus lots of people are not necessarily good at dealing with employees - whether they are employed at work or in the home. How many bad or indifferent managers have many of us on here experienced? Bad managers are - regrettably - much more common than good ones and I don't suppose actors or ex-military men are any exception to that. Hmm ..... you are making a big assumption that there is no possibility of there being any truth to the allegations. Simply because Meghan is bi-racial does not mean that she is automatically a saint. Or vice versa of course.
The Sussexes want to give a no holds barred interview. Fine. But then others affected are much more likely to feel free to want to have their say too, especially if they feel that their normal discretion is being abused. Once you put stuff out into the public domain you cannot guarantee that you get the only or the last word.
Stupid to involve the press at all IMO, especially if you claim you want a private life without press intrusion.
But I must admit that there's a small element of truth in what @stodge says: it does look like a bit of a concerted "trash Meghan" PR campaign.
They would all be best advised to say nothing and get on with their now separate lives. The more they talk the greater the likelihood that more (but only a partial story) will come out which will be to no-one's credit.
EU says UK grace period extension breaches international law
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-56262527
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9323253/Obesity-linked-hundreds-thousands-Covid-19-deaths-says-report.html
Very long tail again...just the two batsman.
Dominic Sibley
Zak Crawley
Jonny Bairstow
Joe Root(c)Ben StokesOllie Pope
Dan Lawrence
Ben Foakes(wk)
Dom Bess
Jack Leach
James Anderson
NHS is getting good at Public Health interventions. I think I have mentioned before that rolling back Diabetes Type II is becoming more common over the last several years. Even keeping people more healthy for a few years has a major benefit in terms of expensive complications.
The smoking stuff also seems good.
The body positivity stuff is ... as you say ... largely bollocks, like much of all the identity politics stuff.
To build a whole life around a victim narrative is demeaning yourself imo.
I am not saying going all Marjorie Dawes, but just buying into this post-truth bollocks, because it might offend some people, is not the right way to go about things.
Dinefwr refers to the Borough of Dinefwr, not the castle.