Doubly so in Scotland because everyone knows which party will win the election before it is held.
The likelihood of the SNP losing is zero, so their Parliamentarians also have zero incentive to remove Sturgeon. It might now take the continued (and guaranteed) support of the sock puppets to keep her in office again, but Sturgeon will be back as First Minister. All these inquiries are an irrelevance.
I disagree and expect this will see her out of office in 2021
I would also suggest the Greens may want to keep their distance from Sturgeon
They couldn't even bring themselves to vote against Swinney, they ain't going to bring down the Nats and vote to put Douglas Ross into bat. The notion is laughable.
Here's a possibility (don't laugh).
SNP/Green lose pro-Indy majority.
The 3 Unionist Parties vote down minority SNP Govt.
Everyone votes down minority SCon Govt.
SLab/LibDem/Green minority Govt enters office with Anas as 1st Minister.
Tories abstain and SNP descend into civil war.
Slight problem: Tories abstaining would see SLab minority government voted down too.
Labour will not back a Tory minority government but the Tories might back a minority Labour (+Lib Dem) government. What is needed for a Unionist government, minority or otherwise, is for Labour to overtake the Tories. Its possible but difficult.
So Tories should vote tactically for Labour. In the way we've supported Ian Murray, as we've been doing here in Edinburgh South for a while.
It depends where they are. For the Scottish toon council I am in Angus South. Voting anyone other than Tory would be nuts. For Westminster I am in Dundee West. I may well vote Labour then.
The best hope for Unionism is that Labour starts to win back some of the acres and acres of ground lost to the SNP in the central belt, especially the west. Sarwar is a massive step up on Leonard but so is my daughter's cat and he has never been elected to anything, despite what he clearly thinks. Can Sarwar start to win back those Glasgow seats? A Tory in most of them should vote Labour for the Constituency and Tory on the list.
I was looking at a recent Scottish opinion poll (God, the fun we have in lockdown) and I noticed support for Rejoining the EU in Scotland is 47%. High, but massively down on the Scottish Remain vote in 2016. And who can blame the Scots for being more eurosceptic, after the shite we've seen from Brussels, and EU capitals, in recent months
I wonder if there is an opening here for SLAB. The SNP are committed to Rejoin. Perhaps SLAB, offering UK EEA or EFTA membership (but not Rejoin) might entice a few waverers who don't necessarily want Indy but DO want the Single Market and Freedom of Movement
To me this is the obvious way for Labour to evolve, UK-wide. EEA or EFTA. Clear blue water distancing themselves from the Tories. They can sell it as pro-business (and business will like it) and immigration is not going to be a major issue for a looooooooong time, because Covid
Labour should simply give up on the Red Wall, and go for soft Remainery Tories and Lib Dems in non-WWC England (and soft Nats in Scotland). Patriotic but pragmatic. We will get rid of the red tape.
If Labour tries to reopen the Brexit debate for 2024 they'll lose even worse than in 2019. I'd expect Boris to win a 120+ seat majority. Rejoin (and that's what it will be turned into by the Tory party) will be a real minority interest by then and Labour would be insane to let Boris get the leave band back together.
No, I think the best thing for SLAB to do is simply sidestep the EU debate and pitch on being the lefty unionist voice, not working with the Tories and not working with the SNP and promising not to make Douglas Ross FM if there is a Unionist majority.
Disagree. There are going to be major Brexit downsides, and unless Covid persists horribly (quite possible) they will become apparent as the tsunami of plague finally recedes. There will also be major upsides to Brexit, but they are some distance away. The pain will, in contrast, be immediate.
At that point rejoining the Single Market and/or CU might suddenly seem very appealing, to many. And could entice a lot of Tory/Lib Dem voters and others in southern England, Wales, Scotland. No, we're not back in the EU, but you get to work and live anywhere in Europe once again! and business can live free of bureaucracy.
A centrist Labour party offering this could win power, I reckon. In 2024. The longer they wait the less appealing this position will be, as the UK fundamentally diverges from Brussels, so there is no way back. But to do it Labour has to abandon the Red Wall and the traditional WWC. They have to accept their party has changed.
This is the only way Labour can hope to win a majority in 2024. They should seize it
The single market comes with free movement of people. That alone will allow Boris to get 45% of the vote again. Labour would be insane to do it and 2024 is a long time away, frankly no one really knows how Brexit will play out in that timeframe. To me the EU has won border pedantry over fish and agriculture, it's "win" over the City looks to be fading fast with listing rules changes and the Bank effectively saying it will simply ignore the lack of equivalence and continue to underwrite euro clearing.
You don't understand how many yearning Remainers there are, still, lurking in and around middle class England, and elsewhere. They have largely accepted the Brexit vote, they aren't campaigning to rejoin, but the one thing they ALL miss is Freedom of Movement.
EEA/EFTA/CU gives them that, without the hassle of a referendum. It would also be hugely popular with a lot of business people and the like. And young people who want to travel and work.
Sure, it would piss off the Red Wall voters still worried about migration, but I reckon they are lost to Labour anyway so Labour should give up the struggle.
This is the only way Labour can actually WIN in 2024, but it needs to be combined with a tediously centrist, non Corbynite economic policy - Blairism, basically.
They would sweep many constituencies in the south.
But it needs Labour to do a brutal reassessment of who they are and how they can win again. Not sure Starmer is the man for that.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
The knock on consequences of the collapse of Greensill for the Scottish government are genuinely frightening. Guarantees from the Scottish government sitting on hundreds of millions of bonds by an insolvent group which never made money but lived on grants, the vast majority of which money barely touched Scotland, let alone created employment here.
I'm afraid I don't understand that. Please could you explain what it means?
Right. Liberty, a group put together by Mr Gupta, bought up a whole series of steel assets in the UK and elsewhere. Nearly all of these were loss making but they were in areas that politicians were desperate to generate employment so grants and soft loans were a plenty. In Scotland the Scottish government guaranteed the income on loans supposedly for the development of a new green power station which was supposed to help the expansion of an aluminum recycling plant.
The problem is that that the deal that was done was just horrendous. Gupta issued bonds backed by Scottish guarantees and then sold them on the bond market. The money was not used for the power plant or indeed anything else in Scotland. Liberty were funded by Greensill who were another "soft loan" specialist. They are now in administration which means the debts of Liberty may well be called up. If they are then Liberty go bust. If they go bust the guarantees are called upon and nearly £600m of loans have to be made good by the Scottish government. This money would destroy their capital account meaning several fewer hospitals and schools.
Scotland got nothing out of this. Being generous about 100 jobs in the aluminum plant were protected. If the employees had been given £5m each it might have done more for the local economy. Incompetence doesn't come close to describing this.
Sanjeev Gupta was in my year at Trinity. He ran a business out of his his room, until the college told him that was in breach of regulations. He then moved into an apartment in town so he could study and work.
He didn't spend much time with us undergraduates who preferred drinking to working.
His business - particularly Liberty Steel - looks like a bit of a basket case, that requires buoyant steel prices to turn even a meagre profit. I suspect it will fold.
Its most profitable product is not steel. Its grant applications.
Having visited them all I probably go for St Vedast-alias-Foster due to the modest Epstein in the Courtyard and All Hallows on the Wall because the ceiling is like a perfect drawing room."
Like Topping I'd go for Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields. Possibly my favourite church in the world, not just London. But is it in the City, technically? I think not
So I'd go for either St Brides, Fleet St (Roman foundations in the cellar!), St Stephen Walbrook - Wrenaissance perfection - or St Bartholomew the Great - medieval and picturesque
It's been doing the rounds on various Slack channels all day.
Wow. That is damning. Who TF would want to work there?
It's still the single most desirable bit of CV experience for anyone in banking/investment. It's the equivalent of having a Harvard or Oxford degree so people put up with the shit for two years.
Their analysts might be working 105 hours per week, but they won't be working well.
I have regularly worked 100 plus hour weeks, fortunately I've had excellent employers and bosses who have rewarded both financially and insisted I take a break/holiday afterwards.
As one chap put it to me, if you're consistently working 80 plus hours you're either not planning/delegating properly and/or you're under resourced.
I did a "1 in 2" for 3 months, 130 hours per week, in General Medicine in 1988. After that an 80 hour week seemed pretty cushy...
I work about 1-2 hours a day. Have never had a proper job (apart from one morning - literally, one, and I was sacked by lunch). The most I work is about 10 hours a day for a week or two, then back to 1-2 hours a day.
BUT, in a very real sense, I am always working. It may look like I am staring vaguely out of the window eating a fine unpasteurised Brie, but I am actually thinking. Gestating. Imagining the next flint sex toy.
Like a cow chewing the cud. Making milk
To be fair, you seem to be mainly posting on here.
Yes, far too much. The one great disadvantage of my extremely light work schedule is revealed during lockdown. How do you fill the rest of the day?
As a man who has clearly put in his 10,000 hours – working with a wide range of partners and producing an indeterminate number of offspring as a result – you’d expect Boris Johnson to be an expert shag. Not the case according to friends of his private technology tutor, Jennifer Arcuri.
Her experience? Over in seconds and “like having sex with a boulder”.
Having visited them all I probably go for St Vedast-alias-Foster due to the modest Epstein in the Courtyard and All Hallows on the Wall because the ceiling is like a perfect drawing room."
Like Topping I'd go for Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields. Possibly my favourite church in the world, not just London. But is it in the City, technically? I think not
So I'd go for either St Brides, Fleet St (Roman foundations in the cellar!), St Stephen Walbrook - Wrenaissance perfection - or St Bartholomew the Great - medieval and picturesque
It's been doing the rounds on various Slack channels all day.
Wow. That is damning. Who TF would want to work there?
It's still the single most desirable bit of CV experience for anyone in banking/investment. It's the equivalent of having a Harvard or Oxford degree so people put up with the shit for two years.
Their analysts might be working 105 hours per week, but they won't be working well.
I have regularly worked 100 plus hour weeks, fortunately I've had excellent employers and bosses who have rewarded both financially and insisted I take a break/holiday afterwards.
As one chap put it to me, if you're consistently working 80 plus hours you're either not planning/delegating properly and/or you're under resourced.
I did a "1 in 2" for 3 months, 130 hours per week, in General Medicine in 1988. After that an 80 hour week seemed pretty cushy...
I work about 1-2 hours a day. Have never had a proper job (apart from one morning - literally, one, and I was sacked by lunch). The most I work is about 10 hours a day for a week or two, then back to 1-2 hours a day.
BUT, in a very real sense, I am always working. It may look like I am staring vaguely out of the window eating a fine unpasteurised Brie, but I am actually thinking. Gestating. Imagining the next flint sex toy.
Like a cow chewing the cud. Making milk
To be fair, you seem to be mainly posting on here.
Yes, far too much. The one great disadvantage of my extremely light work schedule is revealed during lockdown. How do you fill the rest of the day?
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
Having visited them all I probably go for St Vedast-alias-Foster due to the modest Epstein in the Courtyard and All Hallows on the Wall because the ceiling is like a perfect drawing room."
Like Topping I'd go for Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields. Possibly my favourite church in the world, not just London. But is it in the City, technically? I think not
So I'd go for either St Brides, Fleet St (Roman foundations in the cellar!), St Stephen Walbrook - Wrenaissance perfection - or St Bartholomew the Great - medieval and picturesque
It's been doing the rounds on various Slack channels all day.
Wow. That is damning. Who TF would want to work there?
It's still the single most desirable bit of CV experience for anyone in banking/investment. It's the equivalent of having a Harvard or Oxford degree so people put up with the shit for two years.
Their analysts might be working 105 hours per week, but they won't be working well.
I have regularly worked 100 plus hour weeks, fortunately I've had excellent employers and bosses who have rewarded both financially and insisted I take a break/holiday afterwards.
As one chap put it to me, if you're consistently working 80 plus hours you're either not planning/delegating properly and/or you're under resourced.
I did a "1 in 2" for 3 months, 130 hours per week, in General Medicine in 1988. After that an 80 hour week seemed pretty cushy...
I work about 1-2 hours a day. Have never had a proper job (apart from one morning - literally, one, and I was sacked by lunch). The most I work is about 10 hours a day for a week or two, then back to 1-2 hours a day.
BUT, in a very real sense, I am always working. It may look like I am staring vaguely out of the window eating a fine unpasteurised Brie, but I am actually thinking. Gestating. Imagining the next flint sex toy.
Like a cow chewing the cud. Making milk
To be fair, you seem to be mainly posting on here.
Yes, far too much. The one great disadvantage of my extremely light work schedule is revealed during lockdown. How do you fill the rest of the day?
I have relatively recently moved to North Yorkshire. Reading the local press I realised there is a plan to re-organise local government here. There will be a North Yorkshire Combined Authority with a Mayor. But then there are two plans for unitaries for the county which seems to largely be different proposals from the Conservatives who are the main party in the county.
The county council want North Yorkshire county council area to be one unitary with the City of York staying as the other unitary. A majority, although not all of the district/borough councils disagree and have proposed an West/East split. Not sure on the proposed names but the Western unitary would include Craven, Richmondshire, Hambleton and Harrogate BC. The Eastern Unitary, York, Scarborough, Selby and Ryedale.
Local elections to the district councils have, I believe, been suspended in some areas as a decision is made on which proposal to take forward. I believe the Local Government SoS makes the decision with consultations currently ongoing.
The same is happening in Cumbria. There are 4 proposals. One problem for the area I live in - Copeland - is that is on the edge of everywhere so tends to get overlooked when head offices are in Kendal or Carlisle etc. So am looking to see if there is an option which puts it a bit more in the middle of a council area and matches up to the patterns of how people live ad work.
A shame the elections have been postponed. I can see no good reason for this. It's not as if there aren't local issues to vote on - the coal mine, for one. The closure of the GSK facility in Ulverston is another.
The knock on consequences of the collapse of Greensill for the Scottish government are genuinely frightening. Guarantees from the Scottish government sitting on hundreds of millions of bonds by an insolvent group which never made money but lived on grants, the vast majority of which money barely touched Scotland, let alone created employment here.
I'm afraid I don't understand that. Please could you explain what it means?
Right. Liberty, a group put together by Mr Gupta, bought up a whole series of steel assets in the UK and elsewhere. Nearly all of these were loss making but they were in areas that politicians were desperate to generate employment so grants and soft loans were a plenty. In Scotland the Scottish government guaranteed the income on loans supposedly for the development of a new green power station which was supposed to help the expansion of an aluminum recycling plant.
The problem is that that the deal that was done was just horrendous. Gupta issued bonds backed by Scottish guarantees and then sold them on the bond market. The money was not used for the power plant or indeed anything else in Scotland. Liberty were funded by Greensill who were another "soft loan" specialist. They are now in administration which means the debts of Liberty may well be called up. If they are then Liberty go bust. If they go bust the guarantees are called upon and nearly £600m of loans have to be made good by the Scottish government. This money would destroy their capital account meaning several fewer hospitals and schools.
Scotland got nothing out of this. Being generous about 100 jobs in the aluminum plant were protected. If the employees had been given £5m each it might have done more for the local economy. Incompetence doesn't come close to describing this.
Sanjeev Gupta was in my year at Trinity. He ran a business out of his his room, until the college told him that was in breach of regulations. He then moved into an apartment in town so he could study and work.
He didn't spend much time with us undergraduates who preferred drinking to working.
His business - particularly Liberty Steel - looks like a bit of a basket case, that requires buoyant steel prices to turn even a meagre profit. I suspect it will fold.
Its most profitable product is not steel. Its grant applications.
Yes, and it is going to be an interesting scandal. Punting money to tycoons in order to keep the heavy industry plates spinning in marginal constituencies doesn't often end well.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
The US are threatening to sanction entities involved building the Nordstream2 pipeline between Russia & Germany
If they do it, Germany will be a tough spot because the US will finish that project off by hook or by crook & Germany is going to look like a complete piece of cheese.
The knock on consequences of the collapse of Greensill for the Scottish government are genuinely frightening. Guarantees from the Scottish government sitting on hundreds of millions of bonds by an insolvent group which never made money but lived on grants, the vast majority of which money barely touched Scotland, let alone created employment here.
I'm afraid I don't understand that. Please could you explain what it means?
Right. Liberty, a group put together by Mr Gupta, bought up a whole series of steel assets in the UK and elsewhere. Nearly all of these were loss making but they were in areas that politicians were desperate to generate employment so grants and soft loans were a plenty. In Scotland the Scottish government guaranteed the income on loans supposedly for the development of a new green power station which was supposed to help the expansion of an aluminum recycling plant.
The problem is that that the deal that was done was just horrendous. Gupta issued bonds backed by Scottish guarantees and then sold them on the bond market. The money was not used for the power plant or indeed anything else in Scotland. Liberty were funded by Greensill who were another "soft loan" specialist. They are now in administration which means the debts of Liberty may well be called up. If they are then Liberty go bust. If they go bust the guarantees are called upon and nearly £600m of loans have to be made good by the Scottish government. This money would destroy their capital account meaning several fewer hospitals and schools.
Scotland got nothing out of this. Being generous about 100 jobs in the aluminum plant were protected. If the employees had been given £5m each it might have done more for the local economy. Incompetence doesn't come close to describing this.
Sanjeev Gupta was in my year at Trinity. He ran a business out of his his room, until the college told him that was in breach of regulations. He then moved into an apartment in town so he could study and work.
He didn't spend much time with us undergraduates who preferred drinking to working.
His business - particularly Liberty Steel - looks like a bit of a basket case, that requires buoyant steel prices to turn even a meagre profit. I suspect it will fold.
Its most profitable product is not steel. Its grant applications.
Yes, and it is going to be an interesting scandal. Punting money to tycoons in order to keep the heavy industry plates spinning in marginal constituencies doesn't often end well.
I am not making excuses for rank incompetence but it is not easy. It is easy to say that steel is a strategically important industry. Labour are already claiming that Liberty should be nationalised in the event of a collapse. It is deeply frustrating that so much of our infrastructure and our windfarms is being built with foreign steel adding to our horrendous trade deficit. Areas which traditionally had a lot of heavy engineering/manufacturing tend to be depressed with damn few other options.
So what do we do? Let these plants go bust and risk the car industry as the next thing on the rank or dig in? Tricky.
What you absolutely do not do is what Scotland has managed to do which is stick your money in and fail to get nailed down guarantees that this money will be spent locally and achieve what the objective was supposed to be. But that is not the end of the problem.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
The tenor of the Tweet indicated to me that the EMA felt they could not offer a full-hearted endorsement of AZN because that would make the suspension activity from the various EU Governments, particularly the German Government, seem stupid. That's why I said that they should find a third, face saving way - like recommending changing the dosing levels, so that 'everyone' could be in the right. But I acknowledge that perhaps there wasn't time to do this.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
OK, I'll talk you through it, gently, one more time
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
The US are threatening to sanction entities involved building the Nordstream2 pipeline between Russia & Germany
If they do it, Germany will be a tough spot because the US will finish that project off by hook or by crook & Germany is going to look like a complete piece of cheese.
Gerhard Schröder won't be best pleased. What a shame.
The knock on consequences of the collapse of Greensill for the Scottish government are genuinely frightening. Guarantees from the Scottish government sitting on hundreds of millions of bonds by an insolvent group which never made money but lived on grants, the vast majority of which money barely touched Scotland, let alone created employment here.
I'm afraid I don't understand that. Please could you explain what it means?
Right. Liberty, a group put together by Mr Gupta, bought up a whole series of steel assets in the UK and elsewhere. Nearly all of these were loss making but they were in areas that politicians were desperate to generate employment so grants and soft loans were a plenty. In Scotland the Scottish government guaranteed the income on loans supposedly for the development of a new green power station which was supposed to help the expansion of an aluminum recycling plant.
The problem is that that the deal that was done was just horrendous. Gupta issued bonds backed by Scottish guarantees and then sold them on the bond market. The money was not used for the power plant or indeed anything else in Scotland. Liberty were funded by Greensill who were another "soft loan" specialist. They are now in administration which means the debts of Liberty may well be called up. If they are then Liberty go bust. If they go bust the guarantees are called upon and nearly £600m of loans have to be made good by the Scottish government. This money would destroy their capital account meaning several fewer hospitals and schools.
Scotland got nothing out of this. Being generous about 100 jobs in the aluminum plant were protected. If the employees had been given £5m each it might have done more for the local economy. Incompetence doesn't come close to describing this.
Sanjeev Gupta was in my year at Trinity. He ran a business out of his his room, until the college told him that was in breach of regulations. He then moved into an apartment in town so he could study and work.
He didn't spend much time with us undergraduates who preferred drinking to working.
His business - particularly Liberty Steel - looks like a bit of a basket case, that requires buoyant steel prices to turn even a meagre profit. I suspect it will fold.
Its most profitable product is not steel. Its grant applications.
Yes, and it is going to be an interesting scandal. Punting money to tycoons in order to keep the heavy industry plates spinning in marginal constituencies doesn't often end well.
I am not making excuses for rank incompetence but it is not easy. It is easy to say that steel is a strategically important industry. Labour are already claiming that Liberty should be nationalised in the event of a collapse. It is deeply frustrating that so much of our infrastructure and our windfarms is being built with foreign steel adding to our horrendous trade deficit. Areas which traditionally had a lot of heavy engineering/manufacturing tend to be depressed with damn few other options.
So what do we do? Let these plants go bust and risk the car industry as the next thing on the rank or dig in? Tricky.
What you absolutely do not do is what Scotland has managed to do which is stick your money in and fail to get nailed down guarantees that this money will be spent locally and achieve what the objective was supposed to be. But that is not the end of the problem.
I was thinking more about south of the border. We may start to see the collision between buccannering free markets and porkbarrelling of marginal constituencies played out in the Tory party.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
The tenor of the Tweet indicated to me that the EMA felt they could not offer a full-hearted endorsement of AZN because that would make the suspension activity from the various EU Governments, particularly the German Government, seem stupid. That's why I said that they should find a third, face saving way - like recommending changing the dosing levels, so that 'everyone' could be in the right. But I acknowledge that perhaps there wasn't time to do this.
Yes, I got the exact same feeling. They did this foolish half hearted tweet to save the blushes of European governments who made a desperate error. But, instead, they compounded the error
Why on earth would the Tories possibly want to stand aside for another party to win the seat out of fear of not winning a by-election whilst in government, an exceedingly rare event?
2011. Does that pass the statute of limitations test? You know, like the one where posters defend Johnson because the Guppy conspiracy was thirty years ago.
The US are threatening to sanction entities involved building the Nordstream2 pipeline between Russia & Germany
If they do it, Germany will be a tough spot because the US will finish that project off by hook or by crook & Germany is going to look like a complete piece of cheese.
I thought the project was so far advanced it was going to be finished now? Seems unlikely they'll actually get it finished off.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
OK, I'll talk you through it, gently, one more time
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
Here endeth your lesson.
No, you have to tell the truth, that this needs further investigation as a possible very rare side effect, and that the benefits outweigh the tiny hazards.
Failing to address the issue doesn't provide reassurance, and it is always the cover up that creates the problem.
Why on earth would the Tories possibly want to stand aside for another party to win the seat out of fear of not winning a by-election whilst in government, an exceedingly rare event?
They won't but as I said earlier this week Tice is going to be lucky to keep his deposit
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
OK, I'll talk you through it, gently, one more time
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
Here endeth your lesson.
No, you have to tell the truth, that this needs further investigation as a possible very rare side effect, and that the benefits outweigh the tiny hazards.
Failing to address the issue doesn't provide reassurance, and it is always the cover up that creates the problem.
The US are threatening to sanction entities involved building the Nordstream2 pipeline between Russia & Germany
If they do it, Germany will be a tough spot because the US will finish that project off by hook or by crook & Germany is going to look like a complete piece of cheese.
I thought the project was so far advanced it was going to be finished now? Seems unlikely they'll actually get it finished off.
There are already sanctions that slowed it but you are correct its very well advanced. The US statement is that companies should stop working on it 'now'. The US could ultimately put that project on a very long hiatus if they really wanted.
Why on earth would the Tories possibly want to stand aside for another party to win the seat out of fear of not winning a by-election whilst in government, an exceedingly rare event?
Obviously they won't, but will Tice stand for REFUK and split the vote again?
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
2011. Does that pass the statute of limitations test? You know, like the one where posters defend Johnson because the Guppy conspiracy was thirty years ago.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
The tenor of the Tweet indicated to me that the EMA felt they could not offer a full-hearted endorsement of AZN because that would make the suspension activity from the various EU Governments, particularly the German Government, seem stupid. That's why I said that they should find a third, face saving way - like recommending changing the dosing levels, so that 'everyone' could be in the right. But I acknowledge that perhaps there wasn't time to do this.
Yes, I got the exact same feeling. They did this foolish half hearted tweet to save the blushes of European governments who made a desperate error. But, instead, they compounded the error
Are there minutes of these discussions?
It would be interesting to compare the discussion in UK MHRI and the EU EMA over this issue.
Why on earth would the Tories possibly want to stand aside for another party to win the seat out of fear of not winning a by-election whilst in government, an exceedingly rare event?
Obviously they won't, but will Tice stand for REFUK and split the vote again?
There's very little downside to doing so. We won't know if they are going to be a force in the locals (even if only in the siphoning off Tory votes sense) and plenty of people won't have heard of them or realise that they are Farage's new vehicle (albeit he is not the leader), and a Westminster by-election will get them some amount of free attention.
Worst case scenario he has a piddling showing and cannot retain the BXP vote, but from a starting point of nothign what would that matter? Best case scenario they win the seat, or more probably cost the Tories the seat (or are preceived to cost them it).
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
OK, I'll talk you through it, gently, one more time
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
Here endeth your lesson.
No, you have to tell the truth, that this needs further investigation as a possible very rare side effect, and that the benefits outweigh the tiny hazards.
Failing to address the issue doesn't provide reassurance, and it is always the cover up that creates the problem.
+1. For 20 or so years, I have been fighting this battle with PR types who think messaging on public security issues, such as food and drug safety or terrorism, is just another form of PR. It simply is not.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
The tenor of the Tweet indicated to me that the EMA felt they could not offer a full-hearted endorsement of AZN because that would make the suspension activity from the various EU Governments, particularly the German Government, seem stupid. That's why I said that they should find a third, face saving way - like recommending changing the dosing levels, so that 'everyone' could be in the right. But I acknowledge that perhaps there wasn't time to do this.
Yes, I got the exact same feeling. They did this foolish half hearted tweet to save the blushes of European governments who made a desperate error. But, instead, they compounded the error
Are there minutes of these discussions?
It would be interesting to compare the discussion in UK MHRI and the EU EMA over this issue.
Don't rely on minutes if you want to analyse discussions. Every word in a minute could be accurate and not really give much of an impression of the flow of things.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
This is why many of us trust Dr Foxy ad believe what he tells us.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
OK, I'll talk you through it, gently, one more time
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
Here endeth your lesson.
No, you have to tell the truth, that this needs further investigation as a possible very rare side effect, and that the benefits outweigh the tiny hazards.
Failing to address the issue doesn't provide reassurance, and it is always the cover up that creates the problem.
+1. For 20 or so years, I have been fighting this battle with PR types who think messaging on public security issues, such as food and drug safety or terrorism, is just another form of PR. It simply is not.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
Counties can be a pain, administratively, as practical realities do not align well to county boundaries, but though not many people will be passionately proclaiming their status as a moonraker, I doubt anyone wants to change them. And woe betide the Boundary Commission when the numbers forced them to propose some cross boundary parliamentary seats.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
This is why many of us trust Dr Foxy ad believe what he tells us.
Unlike Prince and Princess Nut Nuts.
I feel like those nicknames have caught on about was well as Starmer as Gordon Brittas.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
Don't, ever, get a job in PR. You'd be terrible
Public Health communications is not PR. PR can be a one-off. Public health communications is about enduring trust. Telling the brutal truth is a part of that process, particularly when public anxiety is at its highest. This is, in part, why Trump's downplaying of the pandemic at the outset was so damaging.
I'm with Foxy on this one. You have to give the bad news straight, but then provide the reassurance in the form of what you are doing about it, and what Joe Public can do themselves to help mitigate their personal risk and the risks to their loved ones.
Utter bollocks, PR is PR. When you are reassuring the world about the safety and efficacy of a vaccine, you don't say, in the same tweet, the RISKS of this vaccine are STILL outweighed by the benefits (reaction: RISKS? WHAT RISKS? THERE ARE RISKS???), nor, in the same breath, do you say: but we do know you can get BLOOD CLOTS.
This is why doctors and scientists should never do PR. And, generally, they don't. Wheel them in to make a prepared reassuring statement, then get them back to their stupid labs.
Total and utter bollocks. You have to admit the risks are real where they are. I don't know the particulars in this case, but you never deny real risks. So glad you are not in charge of public messaging for health issues.
You're a geek. You don't understand. It's OK
LOL I have been a spokesman for an international organization that was regularly at the centre of international crises and was its voice and face on prime time TV, and I have been a paid talking head on the BBC, ABC, Rai Uno and Fox News. But then, what would I know about the media, messaging and PR.
Well, if you think that was an appropriate tweet by the EMA, you know nothing
I was not reacting to the EMA tweet, but to your post.
OK, I'll talk you through it, gently, one more time
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
Here endeth your lesson.
No, you have to tell the truth, that this needs further investigation as a possible very rare side effect, and that the benefits outweigh the tiny hazards.
Failing to address the issue doesn't provide reassurance, and it is always the cover up that creates the problem.
massively outweigh the risks.
Indeed. The tweet itself was dishonest, not the truth telling exercise that these crapulous spectrumy twits Tim and Foxy piously assert. The benefits of taking AZ MASSIVELY outweigh the tiny risks. So MASSIVELY it is not worth mentioning the risks. Mention them in another tweet. Six days later. If you REALLY must
Thank God we are not governed by geekaloid, boggle-eyed,, undersexed scientists who would have us cowering in our caves unless we get hit by a comet.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
This is why many of us trust Dr Foxy ad believe what he tells us.
Unlike Prince and Princess Nut Nuts.
I feel like those nicknames have caught on about was well as Starmer as Gordon Brittas.
I'm still rather fond of Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer. It still makes me chuckle, yet I don't know why. Perhaps the faint faint echo of Pulp Fiction. It also transgresses the rule of good nicknames: that they should be shorter and pithier than the actual name. Also he is the least "royale" personality on earth.
A 1 in 2 is an archaic medical rota. On top of the usual working week, you are on call 1 in 2 nights, with usual work the next day, so 32 hours in 48.
Mostly I worked 1 in 3, and one of my House Jobs was a 1 in 4, and considered soft.
Cheers. Sounds appealing from my comfortable university career. I have been moaning* today about not getting* lunch and a long day (8.15 to 6) that doesn’t really seem to cut it now...
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the benefits of the #COVID19Vaccine AstraZeneca still outweigh its risks despite possible link to rare blood clots associated with low levels of blood platelets.
Better, but still true:
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the proven benefits of #COVID19 Vaccine AstraZeneca far outweigh any possible link to blood clots. Indeed data shows vaccinated patients are less likely to suffer clotting.
It isn't about dissembling, it's about highlighting those facts that you see as the most pertinent in a short Tweet.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
"still outweighs" - like there is an ongoing live debate and hmm, we shall see. Then the word "risks". So there ARE risks. And why even mention "blood clots". Those are the two words that scream out. This jab gives you BLOOD CLOTS
Fuckin eejits. Just say "We have decided it is a safe and effective vaccine". Tuck all the other stuff away, which really is trivial in comparison, on some obscure website
Though our own press conference did cover the same ground, with 5 cases of of CVST and DIC in 11 million vaccines. It may well prove to be a very rare side effect, and is certainly needing further surveillance. Whether there are any other risk factors in the cases remains to be seen. Best carry on for now but be vigilant.
Sure, just don't put it in your one big official tweet, that has now been retweeted several thousand times. Madness. Can they not see how it looks? Are they just dim? This is basic PR
By all means inform the public of some very rare, possible, unproven, but scary-sounding risks in a dense Pdf in your hard-to-find website. Not on bloody Twitter.
I do wonder if there is still a faint agenda to smear AZ, in favour of the others, who, of course, make a profit
Their tweet is highly congruent with Whitty in the press conference:
"Professor Chris Whitty said "all of medicine is about the potential risks of a treatment" and says the key question is "are the benefits big enough to justify that".
With the vaccine, there is an "incredibly small potential risk" against "the really very substantial protections these vaccines give".
In order to reassure, you have to stick to the truth.
This is why many of us trust Dr Foxy ad believe what he tells us.
Unlike Prince and Princess Nut Nuts.
I feel like those nicknames have caught on about was well as Starmer as Gordon Brittas.
I'm still rather fond of Sir Kir "Royale" Starmer. It still makes me chuckle, yet I don't know why. Perhaps the faint faint echo of Pulp Fiction. It also transgresses the rule of good nicknames: that they should be shorter and pithier than the actual name. Also he is the least "royale" personality on earth.
Of course Sir Keir is Farsi for foreskin. Or so I am told.
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the benefits of the #COVID19Vaccine AstraZeneca still outweigh its risks despite possible link to rare blood clots associated with low levels of blood platelets.
Better, but still true:
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the proven benefits of #COVID19 Vaccine AstraZeneca far outweigh any possible link to blood clots. Indeed data shows vaccinated patients are less likely to suffer clotting.
It isn't about dissembling, it's about highlighting those facts that you see as the most pertinent in a short Tweet.
You have a future in PR and social media. So much better. What was the EMA thinking, if it wasn't "save the blushes of Mutti Merkel"?
The Mexicans placed that request plenty of days ago and it makes good health sense for the US to do so. There is no gain shipping them to Ireland
For us on the other hand, there is a benefit, and I think everyone would be on board (I think Sinn Fein are in favour, and if they are, I see no reason why anyone else would have an objection). Obviously our own campaign needs to be running full steam ahead to justify it.
Better than Brian Rose's 'London Real Party'. He doesn't even have a snazzy logo like the Freedom Alliance
I assume "Let London Live" is not BBC2's new daytime property vehicle which explores the capital's rental market without any recourse to pre-recorded material.
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the benefits of the #COVID19Vaccine AstraZeneca still outweigh its risks despite possible link to rare blood clots associated with low levels of blood platelets.
Better, but still true:
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the proven benefits of #COVID19 Vaccine AstraZeneca far outweigh any possible link to blood clots. Indeed data shows vaccinated patients are less likely to suffer clotting.
It isn't about dissembling, it's about highlighting those facts that you see as the most pertinent in a short Tweet.
You have a future in PR and social media. So much better. What was the EMA thinking, if it wasn't "save the blushes of Mutti Merkel"?
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
But that's exactly my point. It's not that some counties cause strong attachments, it's that some people have a much greater sense of 'belonging' to a locality or county than others.
I'd hazard a guess that the UK splits about 52%/48% in favour of 'belongers'.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
Honestly, more and more I keep wondering where this reputation for competency that Germany has got comes from.
It's the trains. I was always amazed that despite trains travelling across the continent they were almost never late. I was once waiting for a delayed(!) train that came between 1 and 2 minutes late and people were looking at watches and staring in disbelief after about 30 seconds it was the most German thing I saw whilst living there.
The Mexicans placed that request plenty of days ago and it makes good health sense for the US to do so. There is no gain shipping them to Ireland
For us on the other hand, there is a benefit, and I think everyone would be on board (I think Sinn Fein are in favour, and if they are, I see no reason why anyone else would have an objection). Obviously our own campaign needs to be running full steam ahead to justify it.
Its likely the UK would pass on excess to Ireland but I suspect by that point the supply chain may not need such a thing to be required.
Better than Brian Rose's 'London Real Party'. He doesn't even have a snazzy logo like the Freedom Alliance
I assume "Let London Live" is not BBC2's new daytime property vehicle which explores the capital's rental market without any recourse to pre-recorded material.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
Do not disagree. As I say this only applies in rural counties of Britain, when there are big cities the allegiance will be to the city. But boy, it can be fierce. Geordies and Glaswegians!
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Better than Brian Rose's 'London Real Party'. He doesn't even have a snazzy logo like the Freedom Alliance
I assume "Let London Live" is not BBC2's new daytime property vehicle which explores the capital's rental market without any recourse to pre-recorded material.
The Freedom Alliance logo looks like it should belong to an American White Supremecist group.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
Do not disagree. As I say this only applies in rural counties of Britain, when there are big cities the allegiance will be to the city. But boy, it can be fierce. Geordies and Glaswegians!
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Seen it first hand during lockdown. Our village shop is a spar attached to a petrol station on the A road. The locals are keen to have it as safe as possible as we have no choice but to use it. The tossers* filling up as they drive past pay no heed to the capacity limits, social distancing and often no masks. They don't care cos they don't have to. * Not ALL of them obvs.
Well that was The Red Shoes - I can see why it's considered such a classic. The ending I was not expecting and felt a little over-dramatic, but this was melodrama I suppose. Some great visual effects in the performance scenes - what looked like proto-greenscreen, which I suppose must have been done by hand frame by frame.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
Do not disagree. As I say this only applies in rural counties of Britain, when there are big cities the allegiance will be to the city. But boy, it can be fierce. Geordies and Glaswegians!
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Seen it first hand during lockdown. Our village shop is a spar attached to a petrol station on the A road. The locals are keen to have it as safe as possible as we have no choice but to use it. The tossers* filling up as they drive past pay no heed to the capacity limits, social distancing and often no masks. They don't care cos they don't have to. * Not ALL of them obvs.
The best route to this nirvana - everyone caring about where they live - is maximum home ownership mixed with minimal migration churn (without harming the economy, we DO need skilled immigrants, and they bring much needed new ideas).
These are generally seen as conservative aims. I am not sure why. I wish the Left would retake them, so we had a decent opposition.
And with that ecumenical comment, goodnight PB, goodnight
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
Don't think Yorkshire has ever been a single administrative area. But it certainly has a regional identity.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
Do not disagree. As I say this only applies in rural counties of Britain, when there are big cities the allegiance will be to the city. But boy, it can be fierce. Geordies and Glaswegians!
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Yes, agree. Though it's remarkable how quickly outside the big cities the allegiance returns to the county.
The English (I'm riffing here) look outward to their countryside, not inward to their cities. When I grew up in 1980s suburban Stockport I looked outward to Cheshire, not inward to Manchester. Sporting fixtures were with teams in Macclesfield or Northwich or - surprisingly often - the Wirral. Leisure was Lyme Park and Macclesfield Forest and Alderley Edge. Clubs and associations had 'Cheshire' in their name. I had some contact with Manchester, but surprisingly little - and none at all with Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury. The city region might make economic sense. It might make administrative sense. But it doesn't command the loyalty and affection in the same way.
That said, I just want counties to exist and for people to know where I mean by them. I'm agnostic about whethet they have to match the administrative geography - I can see arguments on both sides - and I'm not even saying that I care particularly about where the border is drawn - my affections don't stop at the Cheshire-Derbyshire border. But I do want these boundaries to have some permenance.
Got to be Priti. What a domme! Not only could she firmly tell you you've been a bad boy and need to be severely punished... But she has the full resources of HMG to actually do it. Including, if needs be, new laws to ensure compliance and total obedience.
On the subject of counties 'Engel' s England', by Matthew Engel, is excellent. Pen portraits of each of the 39 counties, entertainingly capturing the character of each. Also on the subject of counties, I am - slightly by accident - working my way through the county tops - the highest point in each historic county of England and Wales (no reason Scotland couldn't be added to the list, but let's not run before we can walk). Favourite so far is Moel Famau, Flintshire.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
Do not disagree. As I say this only applies in rural counties of Britain, when there are big cities the allegiance will be to the city. But boy, it can be fierce. Geordies and Glaswegians!
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Yes, agree. Though it's remarkable how quickly outside the big cities the allegiance returns to the county.
The English (I'm riffing here) look outward to their countryside, not inward to their cities. When I grew up in 1980s suburban Stockport I looked outward to Cheshire, not inward to Manchester. Sporting fixtures were with teams in Macclesfield or Northwich or - surprisingly often - the Wirral. Leisure was Lyme Park and Macclesfield Forest and Alderley Edge. Clubs and associations had 'Cheshire' in their name. I had some contact with Manchester, but surprisingly little - and none at all with Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury. The city region might make economic sense. It might make administrative sense. But it doesn't command the loyalty and affection in the same way.
That said, I just want counties to exist and for people to know where I mean by them. I'm agnostic about whethet they have to match the administrative geography - I can see arguments on both sides - and I'm not even saying that I care particularly about where the border is drawn - my affections don't stop at the Cheshire-Derbyshire border. But I do want these boundaries to have some permenance.
Yes. Cheshire has some stickiness in South Manchester. Not sure why.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
Do not disagree. As I say this only applies in rural counties of Britain, when there are big cities the allegiance will be to the city. But boy, it can be fierce. Geordies and Glaswegians!
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Yes, agree. Though it's remarkable how quickly outside the big cities the allegiance returns to the county.
The English (I'm riffing here) look outward to their countryside, not inward to their cities. When I grew up in 1980s suburban Stockport I looked outward to Cheshire, not inward to Manchester. Sporting fixtures were with teams in Macclesfield or Northwich or - surprisingly often - the Wirral. Leisure was Lyme Park and Macclesfield Forest and Alderley Edge. Clubs and associations had 'Cheshire' in their name. I had some contact with Manchester, but surprisingly little - and none at all with Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury. The city region might make economic sense. It might make administrative sense. But it doesn't command the loyalty and affection in the same way.
That said, I just want counties to exist and for people to know where I mean by them. I'm agnostic about whethet they have to match the administrative geography - I can see arguments on both sides - and I'm not even saying that I care particularly about where the border is drawn - my affections don't stop at the Cheshire-Derbyshire border. But I do want these boundaries to have some permenance.
Yes. Cheshire has some stickiness in South Manchester. Not sure why.
Well, for the reasons in para 2 above. And because 'Greater Manchester' much though I love the places therein - is a terrible name for a county. And because people like permenance.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
But QED. You moved around a lot. You'd be amazed how many people DON'T move around a lot, and develop a genuine, and quite fierce attachment to where they live, as a county (or landscape - but often counties follow landscape, via riverine borders, forests, hills)
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Lancashire is very popular in Wigan. Not Greater Manchester. Why? Because it obviously isn't. Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though. Apart from the cricket team.
Do not disagree. As I say this only applies in rural counties of Britain, when there are big cities the allegiance will be to the city. But boy, it can be fierce. Geordies and Glaswegians!
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Yes, agree. Though it's remarkable how quickly outside the big cities the allegiance returns to the county.
The English (I'm riffing here) look outward to their countryside, not inward to their cities. When I grew up in 1980s suburban Stockport I looked outward to Cheshire, not inward to Manchester. Sporting fixtures were with teams in Macclesfield or Northwich or - surprisingly often - the Wirral. Leisure was Lyme Park and Macclesfield Forest and Alderley Edge. Clubs and associations had 'Cheshire' in their name. I had some contact with Manchester, but surprisingly little - and none at all with Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury. The city region might make economic sense. It might make administrative sense. But it doesn't command the loyalty and affection in the same way.
That said, I just want counties to exist and for people to know where I mean by them. I'm agnostic about whethet they have to match the administrative geography - I can see arguments on both sides - and I'm not even saying that I care particularly about where the border is drawn - my affections don't stop at the Cheshire-Derbyshire border. But I do want these boundaries to have some permenance.
Yes. Cheshire has some stickiness in South Manchester. Not sure why.
Well, for the reasons in para 2 above. And because 'Greater Manchester' much though I love the places therein - is a terrible name for a county. And because people like permenance.
On the subject of counties 'Engel' s England', by Matthew Engel, is excellent. Pen portraits of each of the 39 counties, entertainingly capturing the character of each. Also on the subject of counties, I am - slightly by accident - working my way through the county tops - the highest point in each historic county of England and Wales (no reason Scotland couldn't be added to the list, but let's not run before we can walk). Favourite so far is Moel Famau, Flintshire.
Careful. That could lead to similar (but longer) lists, some of which may become slightly obsessional.
I'd have thought Moel Famau would have too many Liverpudlians on it - it was a common day trip destination for many. The tower is quite a good photographic feature though.
Coniston Old Man is my favourite, if only because Cumbria is an abomination and reclaiming it for Lancashire should be a priority.
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
It is really excellent then that there cities made where folk like you can huddle together, in close proximity to all that noise, smell, pollution, disease, violence, theft...
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
It is really excellent then that there cities made where folk like you can huddle together, in close proximity to all that noise, smell, pollution, disease, violence, theft...
In the interests of balance, you should probably mention that there are clear advantages to city life.
I'm not attached to the districts, but I am to the counties.
I'd only support it if, say, Hampshire County Council became the unitary.
Problem is it is fair that some counties, in themselves, probably are too big for single unitaries, but then you get into weird divisions of untiaries. Wiltshire and Swindon(Wiltshire) makes pretty decent sense, but others somewhat less so.
I'm attachhed to the counties too. But I don't necessarily see why counties should have to equal locak government units. What I really want is a sub-unit of the country that is consistent over time so that I can ask a question like 'list all the clubs who have ever been in the football leage whose home ground was in Cheshire' without having to go on a lengthy explanation of what I mean by Cheshire. This is not as trivial as it sounds.
The original plan back before 1974 was to completely scrap the administrative counties for local government, and have a single system of unitary authorities across England which would not map very closely at all to the old counties. The traditional counties would have been retained for geographical and ceremonial purposes but would have had no adminstrative rôle at all. That ended up being dropped as too radical, so we ended up with the fudged system of in many cases greatly altered counties that no-one has been happy with.
Ted Heath was never forgiven., in Herefordshire, for uniting Herefordshire and Worcestershire, under Worcester. Two ancient, proud but significantly different counties: Worcester much more urban, touching Brum, a bit boring but quite pretty, suburban - whereas Herefordshire was (and is) profoundly rural, poorer, very beautiful, bordering Wales
Stupidity in spades. Heath was such a tin-eared DICK
Emotional attachments to Counties have been on the decline since we stopped conscripting young men to county-based regiments to fight and die alongside each other in wars.
Quite wrong, and depends where you are.
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
It's not about which county, it's about which people.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
Devon needs to exist, if only as a buffer to ensure Somerset and Cornwall never meet. A buffer between matter and anti-matter. Don't matter....
I have lived in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, County Durham, Clwyd, West Midlands, London, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Devon. I have no expectation of adding a tenth.
Having visited them all I probably go for St Vedast-alias-Foster due to the modest Epstein in the Courtyard and All Hallows on the Wall because the ceiling is like a perfect drawing room."
Like Topping I'd go for Hawksmoor's Christ Church, Spitalfields. Possibly my favourite church in the world, not just London. But is it in the City, technically? I think not
So I'd go for either St Brides, Fleet St (Roman foundations in the cellar!), St Stephen Walbrook - Wrenaissance perfection - or St Bartholomew the Great - medieval and picturesque
It's been doing the rounds on various Slack channels all day.
Wow. That is damning. Who TF would want to work there?
It's still the single most desirable bit of CV experience for anyone in banking/investment. It's the equivalent of having a Harvard or Oxford degree so people put up with the shit for two years.
Their analysts might be working 105 hours per week, but they won't be working well.
I have regularly worked 100 plus hour weeks, fortunately I've had excellent employers and bosses who have rewarded both financially and insisted I take a break/holiday afterwards.
As one chap put it to me, if you're consistently working 80 plus hours you're either not planning/delegating properly and/or you're under resourced.
I did a "1 in 2" for 3 months, 130 hours per week, in General Medicine in 1988. After that an 80 hour week seemed pretty cushy...
I work about 1-2 hours a day. Have never had a proper job (apart from one morning - literally, one, and I was sacked by lunch). The most I work is about 10 hours a day for a week or two, then back to 1-2 hours a day.
BUT, in a very real sense, I am always working. It may look like I am staring vaguely out of the window eating a fine unpasteurised Brie, but I am actually thinking. Gestating. Imagining the next flint sex toy.
Like a cow chewing the cud. Making milk
So the only time you’re not working is when you’re knapping?
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
It is really excellent then that there cities made where folk like you can huddle together, in close proximity to all that noise, smell, pollution, disease, violence, theft...
In the interests of balance, you should probably mention that there are clear advantages to city life.
Not many, when you get past about 35 - in my experience.
The arts, yes. But that loss has been significantly mitigated by having live streaming of RSC and National Theatre (and opera and ballet from further afield). The same is also happening with many of the big exhibitions. I can get 90% of the experience at about 5% of the cost of travelling to and staying overnight for a show.
Architecture? I can go every couple of years and see what has changed.
Retail? My favourite retail experiences have been rummaging around small town antiques places, finding an occasional gem. Oh, and a Valentino coat I bought in Grimsby over forty years ago that still gets admiring comments (the last from Art Malik). For everything else non-food there is Amazon and e-bay. Selfridges, Harrods? Top-end tat.
The parks? The view from my front window probably covers an area of about fifty Hyde Parks.
Fine dining? I can eat seafood from Brixham, hours before it arrives in London. Ditto lamb from my village (praised for its quality at the time of the Domesday Book) and venison and game. We have an artisan cheese shop that would happily take on Paxton and Whitfield.
I can go on ferries and steam trains and watch dolphins and walk to lighthouses and chase the dog around beaches - all on my doorstep.
And I bought a truly gorgeous slice of Devon for the price of a two bed flat in a not very salubrious London postcode. With the dawn chorus. And before that, silence. And on a clear night, a billion stars. With no background light.
It really is disgusting that under some rather dubious circumstances, China inflicts the Bastard Bug on the planet. And then goes into battle to demolish the vaccines that will save the planet from their Bastard Bug. Because they want a sales pitch for their own vaccines against their Bastard Bug.
The first sentence of the German health ministry's message to reassure people about AstraZeneca says that the EMA will "publish a warning about it" but recommend to continue its use. They argue that stopping and starting vaccinations shows people that they should trust it.
Honestly, more and more I keep wondering where this reputation for competency that Germany has got comes from.
It's the trains. I was always amazed that despite trains travelling across the continent they were almost never late. I was once waiting for a delayed(!) train that came between 1 and 2 minutes late and people were looking at watches and staring in disbelief after about 30 seconds it was the most German thing I saw whilst living there.
Take a look at the recent reliability stats for DB; it’s a myth nowadays that they always run on time. I had a significant delay on an ICE in 2019 and the looks of the travellers during the announcement were of the same resigned ‘not againness’ that you’d find inside any tube carriage.
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
It certainly came into its own during the Plague, especially for my shielding husband (who, if this had all kicked off in 2010 rather than 2020, would've been marooned in Haringey, quite possibly with fatal consequences.)
London is - or, at any rate, was - a nice place to visit occasionally to do stuff. Why you'd actually want to live there (and pay an enormous premium for the privilege, at that,) is quite beyond me.
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
It certainly came into its own during the Plague, especially for my shielding husband (who, if this had all kicked off in 2010 rather than 2020, would've been marooned in Haringey, quite possibly with fatal consequences.)
London is - or, at any rate, was - a nice place to visit occasionally to do stuff. Why you'd actually want to live there (and pay an enormous premium for the privilege, at that,) is quite beyond me.
As an aside, I loathe both the countryside and small towns.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
It certainly came into its own during the Plague, especially for my shielding husband (who, if this had all kicked off in 2010 rather than 2020, would've been marooned in Haringey, quite possibly with fatal consequences.)
London is - or, at any rate, was - a nice place to visit occasionally to do stuff. Why you'd actually want to live there (and pay an enormous premium for the privilege, at that,) is quite beyond me.
For many, work ties them to be in or near a city, and so people cling to a self-justification and can reel off the advantages of being near theatres and galleries and the rest, skipping over the minor detail that they hardly ever go there. I loved my time in London, but as you say have got just as much out if it going back as an occasional visitor, and would never want to go back and live there even if it were an economically neutral decision, which it most definitely isn’t.
Now that WFH has (or offers a chance that it might) freed many people from their geographical captivity, it is remarkable how for many of the middle aged the first thing they have done is flee the capital.
I was watching Youtube yesterday when an ad came on I watched, not because it was good but because it was political and pretty awful so I thought it might be of interest to some here.
Because of the focus (American-style attack ad) on Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan I correctly guessed it was Brian Rose for mayor of London. Quite funny watching two minutes of him slagging them off for the COVID-19 response and relentlessly negativity then to hear him say he wouldn't use fear as a weapon.
I suspect it'll fall flat, but was slightly surprised to see such an ad.
Meanwhile, senior health service figures told the Guardian that staff delivering the vaccines were “demoralised” and “in despair”, with ministers “constantly moving the goalposts” by briefing that immunisation targets would be brought forward, while underplaying the risk of supply disruptions.
There was also “huge frustration” among family doctors running GP-led vaccination sites and bosses of hospitals managing mass vaccination centres that ministers were wrongly trying to claim credit for the success of the programme.
But personnel who are centrally involved in organising the vaccination drive are annoyed about media stories promising that people of a particular age will have their first dose ahead of previous expectations and that ministers have not been open with them or the public about the risk of interruptions to vaccine supply, such as the one that emerged this week.
Previously hidden tensions between the NHS and the government over the speed of the deployment and who deserves recognition have emerged in the wake of the dose shortage. The month-long slowdown has dashed government hopes of hitting the next milestone – immunising all the over-50s – well before the mid-April deadline ministers set themselves publicly.
One senior NHS leader said: “There is frustration that the politicians are very focused on political boasting about the success of the vaccine rollout and who’s going to get jabbed when, without taking into account the operational complexity of what that means. The risk is that these political boasting messages will create undue expectation over who can get their jab when, which risks overwhelming NHS staff who are already going as fast as they can. Staff are annoyed that the government seems obsessed with how things will play politically and in the media, but has no sense of the public health impact of such statements.”
Another senior NHS official said: “Frontline staff want ministers to stop over-promising and be more measured and more realistic, and just stick to the original plan of which groups would be vaccinated by when – all adults by the end of July, which would still be some achievement.
“Staff doing the vaccinations are demoralised and in despair about all this. They feel like they’re being set up to fail. They resent people like Matt Hancock claiming credit for the rollout when it’s the NHS that’s responsible for its success. The main barrier to speeding up the rollout is vaccine supply, which is completely outside the control of GPs and the NHS.
Interesting item on the local news this morning: Norfolk County Council is taking over responsibility for contact tracing from NHS Test and Trace in its area. I went rummaging and found further details here:
This appears to be part of a pilot scheme - I assume, preparatory to abolishing the entire national contact tracing system in England and parcelling it off to local authorities (which, of course, is what many people suggested should've been done from the outset.) Though that said, exactly how long we're going to persist in chasing round after Covid cases and getting them to isolate, once the vaccination program finally gets around to doing everyone (however many years that takes,) Lord alone knows.
Comments
EEA/EFTA/CU gives them that, without the hassle of a referendum. It would also be hugely popular with a lot of business people and the like. And young people who want to travel and work.
Sure, it would piss off the Red Wall voters still worried about migration, but I reckon they are lost to Labour anyway so Labour should give up the struggle.
This is the only way Labour can actually WIN in 2024, but it needs to be combined with a tediously centrist, non Corbynite economic policy - Blairism, basically.
They would sweep many constituencies in the south.
But it needs Labour to do a brutal reassessment of who they are and how they can win again. Not sure Starmer is the man for that.
It would be Winchester as the county capital. But, if it had to be Southampton, I wouldn't necessarily mind for whole of Hampshire.
I'd want competitive and representative wards, though.
I have (had) little time for the Roy Perry empire, and he's a soaking Wet.
NO surprises with the outcome
NO surprise with her response
NO credibility left for her as First Minister
SNP now need to decide whether it can be regarded as a 'grown up' party or a one issue group of agitators.
A shame the elections have been postponed. I can see no good reason for this. It's not as if there aren't local issues to vote on - the coal mine, for one. The closure of the GSK facility in Ulverston is another.
https://twitter.com/TVNaga01/status/1372631015164948482?s=20
https://twitter.com/PaulWilliamsLAB/status/46719898705072129
If they do it, Germany will be a tough spot because the US will finish that project off by hook or by crook & Germany is going to look like a complete piece of cheese.
https://twitter.com/TiceRichard/status/1372615370738130949?s=19
So what do we do? Let these plants go bust and risk the car industry as the next thing on the rank or dig in? Tricky.
What you absolutely do not do is what Scotland has managed to do which is stick your money in and fail to get nailed down guarantees that this money will be spent locally and achieve what the objective was supposed to be. But that is not the end of the problem.
https://twitter.com/EMA_News/status/1372588755085840388?s=20
We are managing global public opinion - which is faced by a pandemic which is killing millions. We also know that vaccine skepticism is a huge problem, across the world, but especially in Europe, where the virus is rampant, right now.
We ALSO know that we have a cheap, excellent, easily used vaccine, made not for profit, which is safe and effective, and will save thousands of lives and millions of hospitalisations. This vaccine has been the subject of almost-farcical smearing (by senior and stupid European politicians - eg president of France E Macron saying it is "quasi ineffective in the old").
Our job is to reassure the people that this vaccine is SAFE and EFFECTIVE (which all the data says it IS), but without lying, because lying would be bad.
The only question mark over this vaccine is about 30 cases of a not-that-fatal thrombosis out of SEVENTEEN MILLION INJECTIONS
The equation is clear. You tell the anxious, waiting people that this vaccine is safe, and effective. That's all. You don't lie. You just give the bald truth.
For those that are deeply anxious you provide a link where, if they want, they can read about the minuscule risks of thrombosis, 30 out of 17 million. Few will bother. The vast majority will be reassured.
What you don't do is say there are RISKS of BLOODCLOTS in your single most important tweet, thus alarming half the planet and fuelling all the antivaxxers in existence. Utterly stupid.
Here endeth your lesson.
2011. Does that pass the statute of limitations test? You know, like the one where posters defend Johnson because the Guppy conspiracy was thirty years ago.
Failing to address the issue doesn't provide reassurance, and it is always the cover up that creates the problem.
https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1372567629848788994
I thought not...
https://twitter.com/sandieshoes/status/1372673864245907458?s=20
https://twitter.com/FergalBowers/status/1372412589720928256?s=20
And it isn't pulling AZN either.
It would be interesting to compare the discussion in UK MHRI and the EU EMA over this issue.
Worst case scenario he has a piddling showing and cannot retain the BXP vote, but from a starting point of nothign what would that matter? Best case scenario they win the seat, or more probably cost the Tories the seat (or are preceived to cost them it).
Middlesex? sure. No one cares, it has disappeared. But Cornwall. Herefordshire, Lancs, Yorks, Cumbria, Northumberland, the Scottish border counties, Pembrokeshire, definitely. A real allegiance. Possibly also Sussex, Dorset, Kent, even Essex. Also Norfolk and Suffolk. And Lincs. People feel it. THIS IS MY COUNTY
Highland Scots feel VERY different from Glasgow and Edinburgh. Likewise Hebrideans, Orcadians, Shetlanders
Unlike Prince and Princess Nut Nuts.
Thank God we are not governed by geekaloid, boggle-eyed,, undersexed scientists who would have us cowering in our caves unless we get hit by a comet.
http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/English/Registrations/PP12768
It's Leader?
Piers Corbyn
Better than Brian Rose's 'London Real Party'. He doesn't even have a snazzy logo like the Freedom Alliance
Unless @turbotubbs is entirely deranged.
By that I mean some people have a strong sense of attachment to their locality; others, not so much.
I have lived in Sussex, Bucks, Oxfordshire, Yorkshire and Dorset, each for periods of between 5 and 20 years. I liked living in all of them, but I can't say I feel strongly enough to protest if any of them were abolished as administrative areas. It's not as if the Weald, the Dales, or the Jurassic coast would disappear if the counties went.
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the benefits of the #COVID19Vaccine AstraZeneca still outweigh its risks despite possible link to rare blood clots associated with low levels of blood platelets.
Better, but still true:
EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) concludes that the proven benefits of #COVID19 Vaccine AstraZeneca far outweigh any possible link to blood clots. Indeed data shows vaccinated patients are less likely to suffer clotting.
It isn't about dissembling, it's about highlighting those facts that you see as the most pertinent in a short Tweet.
Herefordshire is a fine example. They do really feel Herefordian. Proud of their beautiful countryside, proud of their tiny cathedral city, proud of their lovely black and white villages, beef, cider, and so on.
It's not the richest place, it is often overlooked, but that does not erase their feelings.
I am sure this "county" feeling is common in the more rural counties of Britain, it is probably less common in urban areas, but that's because - there - people develop an allegiance to a city. Geordies, Scousers, Londoners, Glaswegians. Mess with this at your peril.
Or so I am told.
I'd hazard a guess that the UK splits about 52%/48% in favour of 'belongers'.
Mancs and Scousers didn't give a toss about it though.
Apart from the cricket team.
I thoroughly approve. As the great Roger Scruton (RIP) often pointed out, if people feel a regional local loyalty, to a town, a county, a city, then they care what happens to it. The same as owning a house in a part of town. You feel invested in the neighborhood, you want to make it better, you want to see clean streets and happy kids. You care.
This is so obvious it is amazing it needs repeating. It is the essence of enlightened conservatism. Totally transient populations milled through capitalism (or Marxism) don't give a fuck about where they live, so they will litter, and spit, and spray graffiti and often be bad citizens, knowing they are soon moving on.
Give people roots and a sense of belonging, a place where their kids will grow, and they care. And the litter gets picked up. Or not thrown at all. It is that simple.
Our village shop is a spar attached to a petrol station on the A road.
The locals are keen to have it as safe as possible as we have no choice but to use it.
The tossers* filling up as they drive past pay no heed to the capacity limits, social distancing and often no masks.
They don't care cos they don't have to.
* Not ALL of them obvs.
These are generally seen as conservative aims. I am not sure why. I wish the Left would retake them, so we had a decent opposition.
And with that ecumenical comment, goodnight PB, goodnight
The English (I'm riffing here) look outward to their countryside, not inward to their cities. When I grew up in 1980s suburban Stockport I looked outward to Cheshire, not inward to Manchester. Sporting fixtures were with teams in Macclesfield or Northwich or - surprisingly often - the Wirral. Leisure was Lyme Park and Macclesfield Forest and Alderley Edge. Clubs and associations had 'Cheshire' in their name. I had some contact with Manchester, but surprisingly little - and none at all with Bolton, Oldham, Rochdale, Bury. The city region might make economic sense. It might make administrative sense. But it doesn't command the loyalty and affection in the same way.
That said, I just want counties to exist and for people to know where I mean by them. I'm agnostic about whethet they have to match the administrative geography - I can see arguments on both sides - and I'm not even saying that I care particularly about where the border is drawn - my affections don't stop at the Cheshire-Derbyshire border. But I do want these boundaries to have some permenance.
Not only could she firmly tell you you've been a bad boy and need to be severely punished...
But she has the full resources of HMG to actually do it.
Including, if needs be, new laws to ensure compliance and total obedience.
Also on the subject of counties, I am - slightly by accident - working my way through the county tops - the highest point in each historic county of England and Wales (no reason Scotland couldn't be added to the list, but let's not run before we can walk). Favourite so far is Moel Famau, Flintshire.
Not sure why.
I really can't see why anyone would want to live in a place with less than about half a million people.
I'd have thought Moel Famau would have too many Liverpudlians on it - it was a common day trip destination for many. The tower is quite a good photographic feature though.
Coniston Old Man is my favourite, if only because Cumbria is an abomination and reclaiming it for Lancashire should be a priority.
I have lived in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, County Durham, Clwyd, West Midlands, London, Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Devon. I have no expectation of adding a tenth.
The arts, yes. But that loss has been significantly mitigated by having live streaming of RSC and National Theatre (and opera and ballet from further afield). The same is also happening with many of the big exhibitions. I can get 90% of the experience at about 5% of the cost of travelling to and staying overnight for a show.
Architecture? I can go every couple of years and see what has changed.
Retail? My favourite retail experiences have been rummaging around small town antiques places, finding an occasional gem. Oh, and a Valentino coat I bought in Grimsby over forty years ago that still gets admiring comments (the last from Art Malik). For everything else non-food there is Amazon and e-bay. Selfridges, Harrods? Top-end tat.
The parks? The view from my front window probably covers an area of about fifty Hyde Parks.
Fine dining? I can eat seafood from Brixham, hours before it arrives in London. Ditto lamb from my village (praised for its quality at the time of the Domesday Book) and venison and game. We have an artisan cheese shop that would happily take on Paxton and Whitfield.
I can go on ferries and steam trains and watch dolphins and walk to lighthouses and chase the dog around beaches - all on my doorstep.
And I bought a truly gorgeous slice of Devon for the price of a two bed flat in a not very salubrious London postcode. With the dawn chorus. And before that, silence. And on a clear night, a billion stars. With no background light.
Yep, I really don't miss city living.
Grotesque.
London is - or, at any rate, was - a nice place to visit occasionally to do stuff. Why you'd actually want to live there (and pay an enormous premium for the privilege, at that,) is quite beyond me.
Now that WFH has (or offers a chance that it might) freed many people from their geographical captivity, it is remarkable how for many of the middle aged the first thing they have done is flee the capital.
I was watching Youtube yesterday when an ad came on I watched, not because it was good but because it was political and pretty awful so I thought it might be of interest to some here.
Because of the focus (American-style attack ad) on Boris Johnson and Sadiq Khan I correctly guessed it was Brian Rose for mayor of London. Quite funny watching two minutes of him slagging them off for the COVID-19 response and relentlessly negativity then to hear him say he wouldn't use fear as a weapon.
I suspect it'll fall flat, but was slightly surprised to see such an ad.
There was also “huge frustration” among family doctors running GP-led vaccination sites and bosses of hospitals managing mass vaccination centres that ministers were wrongly trying to claim credit for the success of the programme.
But personnel who are centrally involved in organising the vaccination drive are annoyed about media stories promising that people of a particular age will have their first dose ahead of previous expectations and that ministers have not been open with them or the public about the risk of interruptions to vaccine supply, such as the one that emerged this week.
Previously hidden tensions between the NHS and the government over the speed of the deployment and who deserves recognition have emerged in the wake of the dose shortage. The month-long slowdown has dashed government hopes of hitting the next milestone – immunising all the over-50s – well before the mid-April deadline ministers set themselves publicly.
One senior NHS leader said: “There is frustration that the politicians are very focused on political boasting about the success of the vaccine rollout and who’s going to get jabbed when, without taking into account the operational complexity of what that means. The risk is that these political boasting messages will create undue expectation over who can get their jab when, which risks overwhelming NHS staff who are already going as fast as they can. Staff are annoyed that the government seems obsessed with how things will play politically and in the media, but has no sense of the public health impact of such statements.”
Another senior NHS official said: “Frontline staff want ministers to stop over-promising and be more measured and more realistic, and just stick to the original plan of which groups would be vaccinated by when – all adults by the end of July, which would still be some achievement.
“Staff doing the vaccinations are demoralised and in despair about all this. They feel like they’re being set up to fail. They resent people like Matt Hancock claiming credit for the rollout when it’s the NHS that’s responsible for its success. The main barrier to speeding up the rollout is vaccine supply, which is completely outside the control of GPs and the NHS.
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/norfolk-council-takes-over-covid-contact-tracing-7834582
This appears to be part of a pilot scheme - I assume, preparatory to abolishing the entire national contact tracing system in England and parcelling it off to local authorities (which, of course, is what many people suggested should've been done from the outset.) Though that said, exactly how long we're going to persist in chasing round after Covid cases and getting them to isolate, once the vaccination program finally gets around to doing everyone (however many years that takes,) Lord alone knows.