"Call for prisoners to pick up roadside litter rejected by minister
Published 01 July 2018
A councillor's suggestion that prisoners should clear roadside litter has been met with an "absolutely nonsensical" response by Michael Gove’s office. Cllr Ashley Clark (Con) wrote a letter to the government minister hoping he would agree that convicts should don high-vis jackets and clear waste across the sides of the A2 and Thanet Way.
But the response sent on behalf of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been blasted as "a joke". The letter, written by ministerial contact Sherife Tekdal, states that if convicts are used to collect rubbish then an unfair stigma that all volunteer litter-pickers are criminals will be created. It reads: “It is often recommended that those found guilty of littering should be required to participate in litter‑picking, and we recognise the obvious attraction of making the punishment fit the crime.
“We also want to encourage voluntary and community-led litter-picking activity and do not wish to discourage volunteers by implying that litter-picking is a punishment in itself. “The use of litter-picking as a sanction in itself must be handled with care, to avoid creating a perception that anyone seen litter-picking must be an offender serving a community sentence, which could deter law-abiding citizens from volunteering to take part in these activities.
“Community payback, previously community service, is therefore best used in circumstances in which volunteers are unlikely to be operating, including tackling issues on private land, or to address persistent or large-scale problems.” Disappointed Cllr Clark says the response is "pathetic drivel"."
It's amazing how completely fucked so many of the roads are. It's more like driving in Russia these days. When I had my R35 I completely destroyed a 10jx20 TE37 with an P Zero on it in a pothole. Total cost: £1,000!
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
It's mainly the fault of the litterers of course, but why can't the authorities provide extra bins when they must know huge crowds are likely? I was walking round a large park recently which had one litter bin for thousands of visitors and it was overflowing in all directions with paper coffee cups.
Sorry Andy, its not mainly the fault, it is TOTALLY the fault of the litterers. We blanch in the country at large penalties for litter (I recall at some point there was an attempt to link to the fine to income which prompted outrage). Go to Singapore and try to find litter.
Yes, it’s time for much stiffer penalties. Which are imposed. You’d solve the problem in a year or two
On a guided tour of Singapore some years ago one of our party dropped a sweet wrapper. "Pick it up" the guide said, sternly. No please. A command.
I’ve long been of the opinion that 90% of people would happily live in Singapore and accept all the strict laws and surveillance - in return for clean streets, safe streets, zero crime, great healthcare, no graffiti, and so on.
This is what Labour should do. Get authoritarian and Singaporey. Forget the idiotic identity politics which is killing them
I'm pretty libertarian in general. But I really lose my shit when it comes to graffiti and litter. Anyone proposing the introduction of the death penalty for graffiti would see barely a half-hearted murmur of protest raised from me.
I’ve even got a slogan for Labour
Broken Windows Britain
Based on the Bratton policing policy in NYC: you start with zero tolerance for the small stuff (broken windows, graffiti, litter) then society fixes itself.
It works. It worked in NYC. It went from a druggy toilet to a gleaming city, once again. Crime rates plunged.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Unfortunately in Germany a doctor has to be involved in every vaccination, so it would need a change in the law to allow pharmacies to offer jabs.
Seriously? I had a three year course of cancer treatment delivered entirely by NHS nurses. No wonder vaccinations are taking so long in Germany.
Having said that, most other big European countries seem to be moving at the same speed, so it can’t be the only reason unless doctors are required in the same way in those countries as well.
At the moment, supply is the bottleneck. Even the Great AZ Pause has mostly been caught up. Most of the stories about millions of doses lying around are pretty bad faith- you do the calculation immediately after a huge delivery and bingo!
(https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/ is a pretty good source for the French data; as you noted, the pace is now pretty much of a muchness for most big European countries.)
What remains to be seen is how they cope over the next month or two, as the taps open more fully.
There are doses lying around in Germany, but it's because of the policy of reserving second doses.
13.5 million doses administered out of 15.9 million delivered. True, some will be recent deliveries still on their way to vaccination centres etc. But others are reserved second doses, which is in turn partly because of German inflexibility about the timing of the second dose, and wanting to guarantee people's upcoming second dose appointments.
What will they do about younger women who’ve had one dose of AZ who now reject the 2nd, because of the 1/100,000 chance of a blood clot?
That's still not conclusive either. The background rate for women of childbearing age is about the same as what has been observed post vaccination in Germany. As it stands I'd want MHRA or WHO confirmation of this issue before accepting it.
Indeed. And even if it is conclusive your chances of catching Covid and suffering badly, or even dying, are higher by orders of magnitude. And every infected person can pass it on, or engender a horrible mutation, etc
Their risk-aversion is not logical. I always thought Germans were logical
To answer the earlier question: people who have had a first dose of AZ can get a second dose. Younger people can also still get a first dose of AZ, though it's not recommended.
Germans are not especially more or less logical than anyone else. But I would point out that when you have many millions of over 60s still waiting for a first vaccination, and you have very limited quantities of AZ, it's not really "illogical" to limit AZ to over-60s when you see a serious, if rare, side-effect in younger people. If anything, it's too "logical".
That is logical, but logic has long since departed most PB posters as soon as "Germany" is mentioned.
But by suspending use for under 60s (or whatever) and thus changing your AZ policy for, what, the fifth time? - you’ve successfully scared the shit out of everyone, AGAIN. And Germany already has a vaccine hesitancy problem.
No, this is not logical
It's not really that simple though is it? The alternative, of doing nothing when you have evidence of a problem in younger people, and you don't need to use AZ on younger people because you have so few doses, is also not going to reassure. And you can't really tell regulators to make decisions based entirely on what will worry people the least, unless you want hesitant people to totally lose all faith in the regulators.
So far Germany has demanded AZ, then recommended it only for the old, then claimed it is only 8% effective for the old, then suspended its use entirely, then reinstated it, then restricted it to the young, then suspended it for the young, and restricted it to the old
As usual, you are not remotely accurate. German regulators first recommended it for people up to 65, then for everyone, then suspended it for 3 days, then recommended it for people over 60. The initial limit to people up to 65, and the suspension, were mistakes, as I said at the time. I'm not sure about the latest move, but it is not "illogical".
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
When you move to such places, listen to the drums in the evening. This will tell you how angry the Ju-Ju men are.
If they go silent - well, it was nice knowing you. Revolvers on the terrace....
This is becoming a prominent issue. It may seem trivial but it distresses many people, and a party that promised to sort it would prosper. Labour, if they were clever, could build a platform out of this.
Fix Britain. Clean Our Country. Make Our Cities Beautiful
Another even tinier issue that bugs me. Phone boxes. They are now repulsive and no one uses them. Get rid.
String together a load of these little campaigns and suddenly Labour has a compelling narrative. Clean Our Country
Not a bad idea.
A commitment to filling in the potholes, and sending dog-owners who don't clean up to Wormwood Scrubs for a spell, should guarantee a super-majority.
Pot holes! Maddening. Some in London are car-breakers, literally
There must be a dozen relatively minor issues like this that nonetheless drive many people quietly crazy. Daily irritants.
Labour is fruitlessly searching for big killer policies, maybe they should focus on the smaller stuff, but as part of a grander narrative
You can imagine persuasive TV ads. The camera pans over scenes of horrible litter. Voiceover: ‘After 14 years of Tory government, this is what Britain looks like. Don’t you yearn for a clean country, clean politics?’
Well, certainly, pavement politics is the way the Liberals built up their profile locally, and provided a base eventually to challenge in some seats.
Don't really see Sir Keir using that as a lever for ejecting Boris from No 10 though TBH. They will need other issues.
Though going back to Blair '97... the five pledges were pretty minor. But the sense that the public realm had got as shabby as the government's behaviour was palpable, coupled to the sense that Labour would fix it. People often mock Pavement Politics, but it works. (Hence the slush money for marginals levelling up funds.)
The harsh reality is that there is so much wrong with our society that people are simultaneously angry about and contributing towards. The 5 pledges worked precisely because they were small, important and achievable.
The Tories can see the things wrong, can see that they are both responsible for a lot of them and indifferent to them, and can see a way to flip this to their advantage. The absurd levels of flag-waving patriotism being demanded are a smokescreen - make people proud to be English British so that to point to all the things wrong makes them somehow unpatriotic.
We've got 150k dead from Covid and could have done so much better -> So you back the Frogs then Too many kids go hungry at school -> stop making excuses for forriners on the scrounge Idiots throw McDonalds wrappers next to the bin cos they are ignorant -> working people never get a break cos the money goes on benefits and there's all these antifa terrorists threatening our statues
It's amazing how completely fucked so many of the roads are. It's more like driving in Russia these days. When I had my R35 I completely destroyed a 10jx20 TE37 with an P Zero on it in a pothole. Total cost: £1,000!
I can't tell whether that second sentence is a parody or not...
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Honestly, if Starmer can detoxify the Labour brand post-Corbyn, start bringing some new blood through into the Shadow Cabinet, lose the next election but with a somewhat reduced Tory majority (say anything under 50) and set his party up for a win in 2029, he'll have (retrospectively) done a good job. Labour are in such a mess right now that he has to be judged against what's possible, and that just means he needs to be Michael Howard rather than William Hague, because his chances of being David Cameron are pretty low.
This is becoming a prominent issue. It may seem trivial but it distresses many people, and a party that promised to sort it would prosper. Labour, if they were clever, could build a platform out of this.
Fix Britain. Clean Our Country. Make Our Cities Beautiful
Another even tinier issue that bugs me. Phone boxes. They are now repulsive and no one uses them. Get rid.
String together a load of these little campaigns and suddenly Labour has a compelling narrative. Clean Our Country
Not a bad idea.
A commitment to filling in the potholes, and sending dog-owners who don't clean up to Wormwood Scrubs for a spell, should guarantee a super-majority.
Pot holes! Maddening. Some in London are car-breakers, literally
There must be a dozen relatively minor issues like this that nonetheless drive many people quietly crazy. Daily irritants.
Labour is fruitlessly searching for big killer policies, maybe they should focus on the smaller stuff, but as part of a grander narrative
You can imagine persuasive TV ads. The camera pans over scenes of horrible litter. Voiceover: ‘After 14 years of Tory government, this is what Britain looks like. Don’t you yearn for a clean country, clean politics?’
Well, certainly, pavement politics is the way the Liberals built up their profile locally, and provided a base eventually to challenge in some seats.
Don't really see Sir Keir using that as a lever for ejecting Boris from No 10 though TBH. They will need other issues.
Though going back to Blair '97... the five pledges were pretty minor. But the sense that the public realm had got as shabby as the government's behaviour was palpable, coupled to the sense that Labour would fix it. People often mock Pavement Politics, but it works. (Hence the slush money for marginals levelling up funds.)
Yes exactly. People don’t trust grand promises at elections. Hence the Corbyn disaster in 2019. No, you’re not going to end poverty. Not overnight. No, you’re not going to give £500 billion to nurses. No, we don’t believe you will give everyone a new iPad
Just clean the damn streets and fix all the potholes. You can do that. I want that
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Unfortunately in Germany a doctor has to be involved in every vaccination, so it would need a change in the law to allow pharmacies to offer jabs.
Seriously? I had a three year course of cancer treatment delivered entirely by NHS nurses. No wonder vaccinations are taking so long in Germany.
Having said that, most other big European countries seem to be moving at the same speed, so it can’t be the only reason unless doctors are required in the same way in those countries as well.
At the moment, supply is the bottleneck. Even the Great AZ Pause has mostly been caught up. Most of the stories about millions of doses lying around are pretty bad faith- you do the calculation immediately after a huge delivery and bingo!
(https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/ is a pretty good source for the French data; as you noted, the pace is now pretty much of a muchness for most big European countries.)
What remains to be seen is how they cope over the next month or two, as the taps open more fully.
There are doses lying around in Germany, but it's because of the policy of reserving second doses.
13.5 million doses administered out of 15.9 million delivered. True, some will be recent deliveries still on their way to vaccination centres etc. But others are reserved second doses, which is in turn partly because of German inflexibility about the timing of the second dose, and wanting to guarantee people's upcoming second dose appointments.
What will they do about younger women who’ve had one dose of AZ who now reject the 2nd, because of the 1/100,000 chance of a blood clot?
That's still not conclusive either. The background rate for women of childbearing age is about the same as what has been observed post vaccination in Germany. As it stands I'd want MHRA or WHO confirmation of this issue before accepting it.
Indeed. And even if it is conclusive your chances of catching Covid and suffering badly, or even dying, are higher by orders of magnitude. And every infected person can pass it on, or engender a horrible mutation, etc
Their risk-aversion is not logical. I always thought Germans were logical
To answer the earlier question: people who have had a first dose of AZ can get a second dose. Younger people can also still get a first dose of AZ, though it's not recommended.
Germans are not especially more or less logical than anyone else. But I would point out that when you have many millions of over 60s still waiting for a first vaccination, and you have very limited quantities of AZ, it's not really "illogical" to limit AZ to over-60s when you see a serious, if rare, side-effect in younger people. If anything, it's too "logical".
That is logical, but logic has long since departed most PB posters as soon as "Germany" is mentioned.
But by suspending use for under 60s (or whatever) and thus changing your AZ policy for, what, the fifth time? - you’ve successfully scared the shit out of everyone, AGAIN. And Germany already has a vaccine hesitancy problem.
No, this is not logical
It's not really that simple though is it? The alternative, of doing nothing when you have evidence of a problem in younger people, and you don't need to use AZ on younger people because you have so few doses, is also not going to reassure. And you can't really tell regulators to make decisions based entirely on what will worry people the least, unless you want hesitant people to totally lose all faith in the regulators.
So far Germany has demanded AZ, then recommended it only for the old, then claimed it is only 8% effective for the old, then suspended its use entirely, then reinstated it, then restricted it to the young, then suspended it for the young, and restricted it to the old
As usual, you are not remotely accurate. German regulators first recommended it for people up to 65, then for everyone, then suspended it for 3 days, then recommended it for people over 60. The initial limit to people up to 65, and the suspension, were mistakes, as I said at the time. I'm not sure about the latest move, but it is not "illogical".
I can laugh at most things. Doing the hokey-cokey with vaccines..... WTF? WTAF?
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
It's mainly the fault of the litterers of course, but why can't the authorities provide extra bins when they must know huge crowds are likely? I was walking round a large park recently which had one litter bin for thousands of visitors and it was overflowing in all directions with paper coffee cups.
Sorry Andy, its not mainly the fault, it is TOTALLY the fault of the litterers. We blanch in the country at large penalties for litter (I recall at some point there was an attempt to link to the fine to income which prompted outrage). Go to Singapore and try to find litter.
Yes, it’s time for much stiffer penalties. Which are imposed. You’d solve the problem in a year or two
On a guided tour of Singapore some years ago one of our party dropped a sweet wrapper. "Pick it up" the guide said, sternly. No please. A command.
I’ve long been of the opinion that 90% of people would happily live in Singapore and accept all the strict laws and surveillance - in return for clean streets, safe streets, zero crime, great healthcare, no graffiti, and so on.
This is what Labour should do. Get authoritarian and Singaporey. Forget the idiotic identity politics which is killing them
I'm pretty libertarian in general. But I really lose my shit when it comes to graffiti and litter. Anyone proposing the introduction of the death penalty for graffiti would see barely a half-hearted murmur of protest raised from me.
I’ve even got a slogan for Labour
Broken Windows Britain
Based on the Bratton policing policy in NYC: you start with zero tolerance for the small stuff (broken windows, graffiti, litter) then society fixes itself.
It works. It worked in NYC. It went from a druggy toilet to a gleaming city, once again. Crime rates plunged.
Do the same to the UK
Then you will run into a few small cultural problems in the progressive bits of the Labour party....
Did you know that the new cashier-less Amazon stores are pejorative? And why?
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Because for some people - especially self-described centrists - Boris causes a logic error in their brain that makes rational evaluation of his electoral appeal impossible. He could win again in 2024 and 2029, and they'd still underestimate him. 'Oh, he just got lucky again', 'The media conspired against our immensely boring candidate', 'That 10-point bounce just came out of nowhere'...
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
It's mainly the fault of the litterers of course, but why can't the authorities provide extra bins when they must know huge crowds are likely? I was walking round a large park recently which had one litter bin for thousands of visitors and it was overflowing in all directions with paper coffee cups.
Sorry Andy, its not mainly the fault, it is TOTALLY the fault of the litterers. We blanch in the country at large penalties for litter (I recall at some point there was an attempt to link to the fine to income which prompted outrage). Go to Singapore and try to find litter.
Yes, it’s time for much stiffer penalties. Which are imposed. You’d solve the problem in a year or two
On a guided tour of Singapore some years ago one of our party dropped a sweet wrapper. "Pick it up" the guide said, sternly. No please. A command.
I’ve long been of the opinion that 90% of people would happily live in Singapore and accept all the strict laws and surveillance - in return for clean streets, safe streets, zero crime, great healthcare, no graffiti, and so on.
This is what Labour should do. Get authoritarian and Singaporey. Forget the idiotic identity politics which is killing them
I'm pretty libertarian in general. But I really lose my shit when it comes to graffiti and litter. Anyone proposing the introduction of the death penalty for graffiti would see barely a half-hearted murmur of protest raised from me.
I’ve even got a slogan for Labour
Broken Windows Britain
Based on the Bratton policing policy in NYC: you start with zero tolerance for the small stuff (broken windows, graffiti, litter) then society fixes itself.
It works. It worked in NYC. It went from a druggy toilet to a gleaming city, once again. Crime rates plunged.
Do the same to the UK
Then you will run into a few small cultural problems in the progressive bits of the Labour party....
Did you know that the new cashier-less Amazon stores are pejorative? And why?
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
This is becoming a prominent issue. It may seem trivial but it distresses many people, and a party that promised to sort it would prosper. Labour, if they were clever, could build a platform out of this.
Fix Britain. Clean Our Country. Make Our Cities Beautiful
Another even tinier issue that bugs me. Phone boxes. They are now repulsive and no one uses them. Get rid.
String together a load of these little campaigns and suddenly Labour has a compelling narrative. Clean Our Country
Not a bad idea.
A commitment to filling in the potholes, and sending dog-owners who don't clean up to Wormwood Scrubs for a spell, should guarantee a super-majority.
Pot holes! Maddening. Some in London are car-breakers, literally
There must be a dozen relatively minor issues like this that nonetheless drive many people quietly crazy. Daily irritants.
Labour is fruitlessly searching for big killer policies, maybe they should focus on the smaller stuff, but as part of a grander narrative
You can imagine persuasive TV ads. The camera pans over scenes of horrible litter. Voiceover: ‘After 14 years of Tory government, this is what Britain looks like. Don’t you yearn for a clean country, clean politics?’
Well, certainly, pavement politics is the way the Liberals built up their profile locally, and provided a base eventually to challenge in some seats.
Don't really see Sir Keir using that as a lever for ejecting Boris from No 10 though TBH. They will need other issues.
Though going back to Blair '97... the five pledges were pretty minor. But the sense that the public realm had got as shabby as the government's behaviour was palpable, coupled to the sense that Labour would fix it. People often mock Pavement Politics, but it works. (Hence the slush money for marginals levelling up funds.)
The harsh reality is that there is so much wrong with our society that people are simultaneously angry about and contributing towards. The 5 pledges worked precisely because they were small, important and achievable.
The Tories can see the things wrong, can see that they are both responsible for a lot of them and indifferent to them, and can see a way to flip this to their advantage. The absurd levels of flag-waving patriotism being demanded are a smokescreen - make people proud to be English British so that to point to all the things wrong makes them somehow unpatriotic.
We've got 150k dead from Covid and could have done so much better -> So you back the Frogs then Too many kids go hungry at school -> stop making excuses for forriners on the scrounge Idiots throw McDonalds wrappers next to the bin cos they are ignorant -> working people never get a break cos the money goes on benefits and there's all these antifa terrorists threatening our statues
etc
Which takes us back to the unpleasant reality of the situation.
The current government is a terrible government; they are making an appalling hash of running the country well.
But they're blooming good at politics.
The nearest precedent I can think of is Silvio Berlusconi, and look how hard it has been to flush him away even though Italy hardly thrived under his rule.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
That rate will double the UK's population by the year 3000, assuming no other population changes in that time.
Honestly, I thought it would look worse than that. Anyway, my point is that extrapolation is stupid.
they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
When you move to such places, listen to the drums in the evening. This will tell you how angry the Ju-Ju men are.
If they go silent - well, it was nice knowing you. Revolvers on the terrace....
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
It's mainly the fault of the litterers of course, but why can't the authorities provide extra bins when they must know huge crowds are likely? I was walking round a large park recently which had one litter bin for thousands of visitors and it was overflowing in all directions with paper coffee cups.
Sorry Andy, its not mainly the fault, it is TOTALLY the fault of the litterers. We blanch in the country at large penalties for litter (I recall at some point there was an attempt to link to the fine to income which prompted outrage). Go to Singapore and try to find litter.
Yes, it’s time for much stiffer penalties. Which are imposed. You’d solve the problem in a year or two
On a guided tour of Singapore some years ago one of our party dropped a sweet wrapper. "Pick it up" the guide said, sternly. No please. A command.
I’ve long been of the opinion that 90% of people would happily live in Singapore and accept all the strict laws and surveillance - in return for clean streets, safe streets, zero crime, great healthcare, no graffiti, and so on.
This is what Labour should do. Get authoritarian and Singaporey. Forget the idiotic identity politics which is killing them
I'm pretty libertarian in general. But I really lose my shit when it comes to graffiti and litter. Anyone proposing the introduction of the death penalty for graffiti would see barely a half-hearted murmur of protest raised from me.
I’ve even got a slogan for Labour
Broken Windows Britain
Based on the Bratton policing policy in NYC: you start with zero tolerance for the small stuff (broken windows, graffiti, litter) then society fixes itself.
It works. It worked in NYC. It went from a druggy toilet to a gleaming city, once again. Crime rates plunged.
Do the same to the UK
Then you will run into a few small cultural problems in the progressive bits of the Labour party....
Did you know that the new cashier-less Amazon stores are pejorative? And why?
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Honestly, if Starmer can detoxify the Labour brand post-Corbyn, start bringing some new blood through into the Shadow Cabinet, lose the next election but with a somewhat reduced Tory majority (say anything under 50) and set his party up for a win in 2029, he'll have (retrospectively) done a good job. Labour are in such a mess right now that he has to be judged against what's possible, and that just means he needs to be Michael Howard rather than William Hague, because his chances of being David Cameron are pretty low.
But Boris took over a bad position and has achieved what his critics thought impossible. But no one credits him, they blame Corbyn & vaccines
France and Germany are ramping up but need to go much further.
To keep pace with the UK Germany need to be doing 500k a day rather than the current 300k. The Netherlands figures look particularly poor - that's the UK equivalent of 160k jabs a day.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
Fortunately, the same process that creates the Brainwashed Enlightened makes them culturally and constitutionally incapable of living around people who don't mirror their views to the letter. They can barely tolerate sharing a party with slightly differing shades of leftists, let alone sharing a town with people who consider them at best a misguided nuisance, and at worst little short of malign.
p.s. Calling those who reject the values of the Enlightenment 'Enlightened' is quite the piece of gaslighting, innit?
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
France and Germany are ramping up but need to go much further.
To keep pace with the UK Germany need to be doing 500k a day rather than the current 300k. The Netherlands figures look particularly poor - that's the UK equivalent of 160k jabs a day.
Bulgaria - right at the bottom - is the worst, because they are now deep in a nasty third wave. 155 deaths yesterday, in a pretty small country. They recently overtook the UK in deaths per million - we are now tenth and will probably be overtaken by Italy this coming month. So we drop out of the theoretical top ten (of course the excess deaths reality is much different)
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
Has Nigel lost his his mojo? Haven’t seen a ‘Keep England white’ tweet from him for a while.
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France and Germany are ramping up but need to go much further.
To keep pace with the UK Germany need to be doing 500k a day rather than the current 300k. The Netherlands figures look particularly poor - that's the UK equivalent of 160k jabs a day.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
Utterly disgraceful amount of litter in Endcliffe park this morning, I expect other parks around the country will be similar.
I walked through a country park yesterday evening - no litter to be seen.
However at the weekend I walked down a footpath that runs alongside it and there was loads there - I can only assume people were lobbing their crap over the fence into the bushes.
A lot of it was cans, mainly beer cans tbh.
This was where I saw a volunteer way off the paths in the park picking stuff up - much respect to the guy.
A lot of roadside litter round here is from the usual drive through suspects. It seems to take only about 1 mile for the packaging from Maccy D's to get launched.
The companies themselves ought to take more responsibility for this but nothing ever happens.
They opened a McDonalds back in Thornaby - litter from it was *everywhere* and once the odd complaint was made they would make a tentative effort and then ignore it afterwards.
TBH I don't blame the fast food places. There are plenty of bins available. I blame adults who both don't care about their own environment and who raise their kids to similarly not care. Its pig ignorance.
Once the stuff is in a car, though, there's no bin other than the one at home. And who wants smelly packaging sitting in their hot hatch?
It is ignorance, but sadly once one person has done it, it then appears to be fair game. Litter attracts more litter.
McDonalds (and the rest) know this happens, and yet they appear to be able to do nothing about it. They could at least organise a litter pick, and perhaps write car registrations on the packaging.
One thing I remember about driving around the US was highways being 'sponsored' by local schools etc, and the sponsor organising a litter pick. I doubt it would be allowed here, of course, what with healthandsafety and (worse) the idea that it is someone else's problem.
Politico: The Biden administration is rethinking a costly system of government-run mass vaccination sites after data revealed the program is lagging well behind a much cheaper federal effort to distribute doses via retail pharmacies.
The government has shipped millions of doses to the 21 mass vaccination hubs, or “pilot” community centers, in states such as California, Florida, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. The hubs are part of a $4 billion federal system that funds more than 1,000 smaller vaccination locations across the country and provides other vaccination support — such as supplies — to states across the country. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did not respond to repeated questions about how much the pilot sites cost.
Despite the money the federal government has spent on the mass-vaccination pilot sites, they are administering just a fraction of the shots given across the country each day. Federal data show the retail pharmacy program — which has signed up 21 chains and 17,000 stores — can reach far more Americans in a shorter time, according to four senior officials with direct knowledge of the matter. The bottom line, those sources said, is that more Americans seem to be willing to walk to their local pharmacist to get the vaccine than to travel to a federal vaccination site for the shot.
Several studies have shown that the British public, and I believe, the American has at least as much trust in pharmacists ....... generally community ones, in shops ...... as they do in GP's. My (long-ago, now) experience was that being asked for advice could be a 'many times a day' experience, especially where the same pharmacist had ben visible in the pharmacy for several years.
Here in Spain they are really good. They are heavily linked in via the prescription system and ultra helpful.
Unfortunately in Germany a doctor has to be involved in every vaccination, so it would need a change in the law to allow pharmacies to offer jabs.
Seriously? I had a three year course of cancer treatment delivered entirely by NHS nurses. No wonder vaccinations are taking so long in Germany.
Having said that, most other big European countries seem to be moving at the same speed, so it can’t be the only reason unless doctors are required in the same way in those countries as well.
At the moment, supply is the bottleneck. Even the Great AZ Pause has mostly been caught up. Most of the stories about millions of doses lying around are pretty bad faith- you do the calculation immediately after a huge delivery and bingo!
(https://covidtracker.fr/vaccintracker/ is a pretty good source for the French data; as you noted, the pace is now pretty much of a muchness for most big European countries.)
What remains to be seen is how they cope over the next month or two, as the taps open more fully.
There are doses lying around in Germany, but it's because of the policy of reserving second doses.
13.5 million doses administered out of 15.9 million delivered. True, some will be recent deliveries still on their way to vaccination centres etc. But others are reserved second doses, which is in turn partly because of German inflexibility about the timing of the second dose, and wanting to guarantee people's upcoming second dose appointments.
What will they do about younger women who’ve had one dose of AZ who now reject the 2nd, because of the 1/100,000 chance of a blood clot?
That's still not conclusive either. The background rate for women of childbearing age is about the same as what has been observed post vaccination in Germany. As it stands I'd want MHRA or WHO confirmation of this issue before accepting it.
Indeed. And even if it is conclusive your chances of catching Covid and suffering badly, or even dying, are higher by orders of magnitude. And every infected person can pass it on, or engender a horrible mutation, etc
Their risk-aversion is not logical. I always thought Germans were logical
To answer the earlier question: people who have had a first dose of AZ can get a second dose. Younger people can also still get a first dose of AZ, though it's not recommended.
Germans are not especially more or less logical than anyone else. But I would point out that when you have many millions of over 60s still waiting for a first vaccination, and you have very limited quantities of AZ, it's not really "illogical" to limit AZ to over-60s when you see a serious, if rare, side-effect in younger people. If anything, it's too "logical".
That is logical, but logic has long since departed most PB posters as soon as "Germany" is mentioned.
But by suspending use for under 60s (or whatever) and thus changing your AZ policy for, what, the fifth time? - you’ve successfully scared the shit out of everyone, AGAIN. And Germany already has a vaccine hesitancy problem.
No, this is not logical
It's not really that simple though is it? The alternative, of doing nothing when you have evidence of a problem in younger people, and you don't need to use AZ on younger people because you have so few doses, is also not going to reassure. And you can't really tell regulators to make decisions based entirely on what will worry people the least, unless you want hesitant people to totally lose all faith in the regulators.
So far Germany has demanded AZ, then recommended it only for the old, then claimed it is only 8% effective for the old, then suspended its use entirely, then reinstated it, then restricted it to the young, then suspended it for the young, and restricted it to the old
As usual, you are not remotely accurate. German regulators first recommended it for people up to 65, then for everyone, then suspended it for 3 days, then recommended it for people over 60. The initial limit to people up to 65, and the suspension, were mistakes, as I said at the time. I'm not sure about the latest move, but it is not "illogical".
Im surprised they haven't banned the pill already given how much more deadly it is than the AZ vaccine.
Just watched the Racing Post Golf preview with Steve Palmer. He is 42 with no medical problems and he has been invited for his jab this afternoon. This shows that some areas must be really getting through their populations
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
Has Nigel lost his his mojo? Haven’t seen a ‘Keep England white’ tweet from him for a while.
I was struck by how white the Scotland footie team was when they played Israel the other day
"Call for prisoners to pick up roadside litter rejected by minister
Published 01 July 2018
A councillor's suggestion that prisoners should clear roadside litter has been met with an "absolutely nonsensical" response by Michael Gove’s office. Cllr Ashley Clark (Con) wrote a letter to the government minister hoping he would agree that convicts should don high-vis jackets and clear waste across the sides of the A2 and Thanet Way.
But the response sent on behalf of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been blasted as "a joke". The letter, written by ministerial contact Sherife Tekdal, states that if convicts are used to collect rubbish then an unfair stigma that all volunteer litter-pickers are criminals will be created. It reads: “It is often recommended that those found guilty of littering should be required to participate in litter‑picking, and we recognise the obvious attraction of making the punishment fit the crime.
“We also want to encourage voluntary and community-led litter-picking activity and do not wish to discourage volunteers by implying that litter-picking is a punishment in itself. “The use of litter-picking as a sanction in itself must be handled with care, to avoid creating a perception that anyone seen litter-picking must be an offender serving a community sentence, which could deter law-abiding citizens from volunteering to take part in these activities.
“Community payback, previously community service, is therefore best used in circumstances in which volunteers are unlikely to be operating, including tackling issues on private land, or to address persistent or large-scale problems.” Disappointed Cllr Clark says the response is "pathetic drivel"."
Many years ago (>30 I think) a prison strike led to some category 3 prisoners living in a nearby army camp. While they were there they came out and litter picked and tidied our winterbourne stream. It was great. Not a chain gang with the connotations of that, but citizens giving back to society.
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
From what I remember this was a Momentum initiative. And with respect to it its something out of the distant past, seeking to politicise things like community groups. The way to bring wandering voters back to their "traditional" Labour home is not to ram hard left propaganda down their throats whilst offering them the critical community services their area needs.
It would have been like the missionaries of old - we can offer you Food, Shelter and Support but you have to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ Jeremy Corbyn. People want effective politicians in the community to get stuff done so that they aren't bothered by the bad stuff. Thats all. Labour are shrinking in places like Teesside because they have tried to Politicise everything, whilst the Tories play soft politics and look like its not propaganda.
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
Could entire schools be vaccinated in one day? Would be more efficient than vaccinating children separately.
Earlier this year, during the lockdown, we got the Y9s in on one day to be vaccinated (obviously not against Covid) so they wouldn't miss their normal slot.
In school vaccination is very much a thing and usually well organised, so yes, when we get a vaccine cleared for use in schools I expect it to be done that way.
France and Germany are ramping up but need to go much further.
To keep pace with the UK Germany need to be doing 500k a day rather than the current 300k. The Netherlands figures look particularly poor - that's the UK equivalent of 160k jabs a day.
Orban is doing scarily well, judging by this.
Yes, presumably Hungary having no qualms about using Sputnik has been a huge help in their rollout
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
Hmm, what happens if we "go native"?
I'm an "enlightened" living among the deplorables, but, well, I don't know if it's related to living here, but I'm less pro-EU than I was and simply can't wait to get my Boris-jab
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
Worldometer says 348. I can’t see the 1000 stat anywhere
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
From what I remember this was a Momentum initiative. And with respect to it its something out of the distant past, seeking to politicise things like community groups. The way to bring wandering voters back to their "traditional" Labour home is not to ram hard left propaganda down their throats whilst offering them the critical community services their area needs.
It would have been like the missionaries of old - we can offer you Food, Shelter and Support but you have to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ Jeremy Corbyn.
Again, not quite the example I had in mind:
Going to the People (Russian: Хождение в народ) was a populist movement in the Russian Empire. It was largely inspired by the work of Russian theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Lavrov, who advocated that groups of dedicated revolutionaries could inspire a mass movement to overthrow the ruling class, especially as it concerned the peasantry. In 1874, approximately 2,000 to 4,000 students, some of whom were offsprings of the nobility, traveled to rural parts of the empire in order to live among the serfs and "prepare them for their future political role."
Many of these youths had never before visited the villages of Russia, but sought to adopt their manner of dress and take up jobs as manual laborers as a way of engaging the population. They found the people often unperceptive to their revolutionary message, with many turning over their "exotic urban visitors" to government authorities. It was ultimately a failure, and by the Autumn of that year more than a thousand arrests were made.
Kinabalu may find it easier to skip straight to the next stage, when those revolutionary socialist intellectuals gave up on formenting rebellion and started assassinating government officials instead.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
That is what I mean. Get out there. Make the case. And be confident about it. Not arrogant, confident.
Many people may believe it would just mean showing the piece of paper they've been given after having the vaccinations. They may not realise it could be almost the same as a digital biomedical card that could potentially hold lots of other data about them.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
And there in a nutshell you have labours problem
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
Posted that story earlier. The interesting thing is that they are also proposing the exclusion of Switzerland - who were not, I think, excluded from Gallileo ?
Is it not a breach of the agreement we signed with them ?
The two could be related - having a security relationship might make inclusion more likely.
It's a bit like refusing to join Nato and then getting annoyed when you don't get invited on military excercises to play with the latest Nato tech.
(I do think excluding the UK from these areas of Horizon is daft and bad news for EU research as well as UK research, I just don't think the point the tweet is trying to make actually makes much sense)
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
Many people may believe it would just mean showing the piece of paper they've been given after having the vaccinations. They may not realise it could be almost the same as a digital biomedical card that could potentially hold lots of other data about them.
Given that people were content to live in an open prison for a year, I don’t think they will worry unduly about an app that - *shudder* - ‘could be almost the same as a digital biomedical card’
Honestly, PB consistently overestimates - by a huge distance - the levels of libertarianism out there, especially in the face of a plague. We just want our lives back. If this means flashing our smartphones so we can hear live music again, bring it on
Many people may believe it would just mean showing the piece of paper they've been given after having the vaccinations. They may not realise it could be almost the same as a digital biomedical card that could potentially hold lots of other data about them.
In which case support the former and not the latter. What is the problem?
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Because for some people - especially self-described centrists - Boris causes a logic error in their brain that makes rational evaluation of his electoral appeal impossible. He could win again in 2024 and 2029, and they'd still underestimate him. 'Oh, he just got lucky again', 'The media conspired against our immensely boring candidate', 'That 10-point bounce just came out of nowhere'...
I don't underestimate him. He is electoral gold. The most prescient post I have ever written on here was my early call of the Con landslide with 3 big reasons highlighted - one of them being the star power of Brand "Boris".
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
Worldometer says 348. I can’t see the 1000 stat anywhere
Most countries reporting of deaths is very confusing - here in Spain the national daily figure is often way less than that reported locally by the Junta in Andalucia. I certainly would not rely on Worldometer.
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
Worldometer says 348. I can’t see the 1000 stat anywhere
Most countries reporting of deaths is very confusing - here in Spain the national daily figure is often way less than that reported locally by the Junta in Andalucia. I certainly would not rely on Worldometer.
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
I was just going off this screenshot. I didn't confirm it. If it is "only" 350 then that is definitely comparatively good news.
Posted that story earlier. The interesting thing is that they are also proposing the exclusion of Switzerland - who were not, I think, excluded from Gallileo ?
Is it not a breach of the agreement we signed with them ?
It’s apparently being driven by the French, with misgivings in Germany, Holland, Scandi, etc.
It is clear now that France wants to use Brexit to make the EU quasi-hostile to the UK, even if this disbenefits the EU. Madness, but there it is
The inevitable corollary is that we will steer much closer to the US, Canada, Oz, the West divides into two, and the EU grows closer to Moscow and Beijing.
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
I was just going off this screenshot. I didn't confirm it.
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
Worldometer says 348. I can’t see the 1000 stat anywhere
Looking at the covidtracker.fr graphs, the issue is much more about pressure on hospitals than deaths. Makes sense, given that the risk of death is massively concentrated in care homes and among the very very old- and even mediocre vaccination schemes (like Europe) have covered those.
Remember- only a fool could say that Europe has done vaccination well. But some of the commentary here and in the British media has as much connection to reality as the old ladies twitching behind their net curtains and then passing on the gossip to their neighbours.
Many people may believe it would just mean showing the piece of paper they've been given after having the vaccinations. They may not realise it could be almost the same as a digital biomedical card that could potentially hold lots of other data about them.
Given that people were content to live in an open prison for a year, I don’t think they will worry unduly about an app that - *shudder* - ‘could be almost the same as a digital biomedical card’
Honestly, PB consistently overestimates - by a huge distance - the levels of libertarianism out there, especially in the face of a plague. We just want our lives back. If this means flashing our smartphones so we can hear live music again, bring it on
I went football training for the first time in ages last night - most of my team mates are your typical white van men really. One of them was telling me about a woman he knows, an anti vaxxer, saying the govt were bugging us via the jab, and everyone was saying “who gives a fuck if they are? we are all tracked on our phones anyway”
France and Germany are ramping up but need to go much further.
To keep pace with the UK Germany need to be doing 500k a day rather than the current 300k. The Netherlands figures look particularly poor - that's the UK equivalent of 160k jabs a day.
Bulgaria - right at the bottom - is the worst, because they are now deep in a nasty third wave. 155 deaths yesterday, in a pretty small country. They recently overtook the UK in deaths per million - we are now tenth and will probably be overtaken by Italy this coming month. So we drop out of the theoretical top ten (of course the excess deaths reality is much different)
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
ISTR that, quite a long time ago, Labour were discussing the potential of getting out into the community in the way you suggest instead of holding quite so many meetings where they were encouraging themselves by preaching to the converted.
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
From what I remember this was a Momentum initiative. And with respect to it its something out of the distant past, seeking to politicise things like community groups. The way to bring wandering voters back to their "traditional" Labour home is not to ram hard left propaganda down their throats whilst offering them the critical community services their area needs.
It would have been like the missionaries of old - we can offer you Food, Shelter and Support but you have to believe in our Lord Jesus Christ Jeremy Corbyn. People want effective politicians in the community to get stuff done so that they aren't bothered by the bad stuff. Thats all. Labour are shrinking in places like Teesside because they have tried to Politicise everything, whilst the Tories play soft politics and look like its not propaganda.
If it's the same one I'm thinking of, it predated Momentum by decades (unless that has been going a lot longer than I've been aware of). It was also the reverse of politicising community groups; more a matter of engaging with the community on equal terms over things the community were concerned about, so that people in general would have positive, non-political experiences with Labour people. Effectively building personal votes in every ward that would cascade upwards in time.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
And there in a nutshell you have labours problem
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
I think that's partly fair but another factor is that the country, as Blair knew, is at root conservative (ideologically).
That doesn't mean that the electorate will always return the Conservative Party though, as Blair showed.
The Labour Party can't win a majority if it telegraphs its non-conservative ideology. It got a way with this in the dim and distant because of union influence and other cultural factors which now have waned. That spell is largely broken and the non-patriotic and some bizarre (frankly delusional) tendencies of the LP have well and truly been rumbled by the electorate, e.g obsession with race, cancel culture etc etc.
To avoid a one-party state we need a competing party which is genuinely much more conservative (as opposed to Starmer, and Blair to a much lesser degree, lying that his party is). And, I'd argue, liberalism needs to feature much more front-and-centre than is currently the case one way or another.
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
Worldometer says 348. I can’t see the 1000 stat anywhere
Looking at the covidtracker.fr graphs, the issue is much more about pressure on hospitals than deaths. Makes sense, given that the risk of death is massively concentrated in care homes and among the very very old- and even mediocre vaccination schemes (like Europe) have covered those.
Remember- only a fool could say that Europe has done vaccination well. But some of the commentary here and in the British media has as much connection to reality as the old ladies twitching behind their net curtains and then passing on the gossip to their neighbours.
For sure. France is ramping up its vaccine, so is most of the EU, they will finish jabbing just a few weeks after us (tho that does mean quite a few extra deaths)
And yes the problem in France is hospitals, esp ICUs. There are grisly reports of ICUs hitting 100% capacity and turning away patients
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
And there in a nutshell you have labours problem
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
The enlightened do go to these places - back to their home towns after they leave uni. The result is they hate everyone there and everyone there hates them
183 arrivals on Boris Boats across the channel on Tuesday. It's a tribute to Johnsonian greatness that this doesn't even seem remotely to be a problem for the government.
It will very soon become a huge problem. That’s a thousand a week. 50,000 a year.
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
All the things you describe will never happen under Labour. The broken windows theory is hated by academics, and Labour is their party
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Sadly you are probably right. Which is why I sometimes wonder if they will ever return to power. They have been entirely captured by an academic, metropolitan elite which is incapable of addressing our real problems. And often seems actively invested in making them worse
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
They are the bright working class kid who went to university, returned to their home town and told everyone in their local they were racist, sexist losers then wondered why no one likes them, and some people want to hit them
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
On that point, guess what the Woquemadas are going bonkers about today?
This is an example of my least favourite sort of journalism, which starts the report by telling you how to think about it ('anger as...). It's not just the Guardian which does it, of course. MSNBC are the worst offenders.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
Fortunately, the same process that creates the Brainwashed Enlightened makes them culturally and constitutionally incapable of living around people who don't mirror their views to the letter. They can barely tolerate sharing a party with slightly differing shades of leftists, let alone sharing a town with people who consider them at best a misguided nuisance, and at worst little short of malign.
p.s. Calling those who reject the values of the Enlightenment 'Enlightened' is quite the piece of gaslighting, innit?
No, nice try but let's not go there. This has nothing to do with Woke. It's just about improving the efficiency of the Labour vote.
Morning all, challenging header. Just a tough read.
The problem for Labour (as others have said) is that their core support (the Enlightened) are heavily concentrated in the big cities and prestige university towns, which is ridiculously inefficient when it comes to translating votes into seats in our FPTP electoral system. The obvious answer - indeed the only answer - is for the Enlightened to start spreading themselves around the country. It's time for us to go and live in more primitive places and explain to the natives how their interests would be served by a more egalitarian society. Preach the word. Just like the missionaries of old.
A massive win/win accrues from this development. Firstly, a goodly proportion of the natives will likely be convinced by our case if we are making it casually, face to face and in situ, fellow residents who they've gotten to know and like, rather than lecturing from on high on CH4 news or in the columns of the Guardian. Imagine the natives mixing unselfconsciously with the Enlightened on a regular basis as they go about their daily lives. Down the local, in the supermarket, hanging around on street corners, they keep bumping into these progressive types, and they find people who are just nice and pleasant and normal like they are, no difference whatsoever except for being a teeny bit more intelligent and educated, which is no crime and why should it be. Imagine countless desultory and friendly conversations taking place about this & that, the football, the weather, the price of fish, but with every now and again one of the participants slipping in something thought provoking about how the country could be reformed in the economic interests of working people. It will have an effect. How could it not.
But let's say it doesn't. Let's say the natives remain impervious to logical argument and stick to their Tory voting ways. Perhaps it even backfires and they get well pissed off with the Enlightened and wish they would fuck off back to where they came from. Point is, it doesn't matter. Conversions are merely the icing on the cake. Because due to the Diaspora there is now a large contingent of progressives on the electoral roll in these godforsaken little towns and villages and they will be voting Labour, bringing lots of Conservative seats into play whilst at the same time not taking risks with Labour seats, since there will still be safe majorities in the places they have abandoned.
You might think I'm joking with this but I'm not. I'm perfectly serious. This is a demographic problem and therefore it requires a demographic solution.
Progressives of Britain Unite and log onto RightMove! You have nothing to lose but your Tory governments!
It's called RightMove for a reason. You need to set up a new site, called LeftMove.
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
Yes, LEFTmove. Absolutely.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
And there you have the problem - the "wrong draft"
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
I was just going off this screenshot. I didn't confirm it.
What are quite amazing are the fiercely held views of Centrists that
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Because for some people - especially self-described centrists - Boris causes a logic error in their brain that makes rational evaluation of his electoral appeal impossible. He could win again in 2024 and 2029, and they'd still underestimate him. 'Oh, he just got lucky again', 'The media conspired against our immensely boring candidate', 'That 10-point bounce just came out of nowhere'...
I don't underestimate him. He is electoral gold. The most prescient post I have ever written on here was my early call of the Con landslide with 3 big reasons highlighted - one of them being the star power of Brand "Boris".
It's as hard to see Johnson losing an election as it is as hard to imagine Blair ever losing one (and Clinton).
I must admit that I dislike these charisma type leaders because I think they are dangerous in that the electorate is too easily fooled by them.
I wonder whether we should, like the States, have a two-term maximum tenure?
The cases in that report is inaccurate, they think it is about 40K. France is also doing a lot less testing than we are meaning it is probably even higher than that.
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
France had 1000 deaths yesterday?!
Nothing like that as far as I can see?
I was just going off this screenshot. I didn't confirm it.
I don't know the French reporting cycle - could that be reporting for several days together, because of the weekend?
There was a technical error which meant some deaths went unreported for 10 days then got reported at once. Worldometer spreads those deaths out among preceding days. I don’t know if that’s the issue with this graph specifically but it seems to happen often with french Covid death reporting.
The current wave in France will play out differently than the UKs January wave because the most vulnerable have received at least 1 vaccine dose already, so I don’t think deaths will rise as much. The ICU occupation is shooting up though because the patients are much younger than previous waves, so each one spends longer in intensive care than an elderly person (but has a better chance of recovering).
The two could be related - having a security relationship might make inclusion more likely.
It's a bit like refusing to join Nato and then getting annoyed when you don't get invited on military excercises to play with the latest Nato tech.
(I do think excluding the UK from these areas of Horizon is daft and bad news for EU research as well as UK research, I just don't think the point the tweet is trying to make actually makes much sense)
BTW, I dealt with Paul Lever when he was in UN Dept and later in Defence Dept at the FCO. Very bright indeed, although (according to Wikipedia) he has made some iffy statements since leaving the FCO. His resume includes:
"served as chef de cabinet to Christopher Tugendhat, then vice-president of the EEC, and as head successively of the UN, Defence, and Security Policy departments in the FCO. He was head of the UK delegation to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna, with the rank of Ambassador, 1990–92; assistant Under-Secretary at the FCO 1992–94; chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee 1994–96; Director for EU and Economic Affairs at the FCO 1996–97; and Ambassador to Germany 1997–2003."
Comments
Published 01 July 2018
A councillor's suggestion that prisoners should clear roadside litter has been met with an "absolutely nonsensical" response by Michael Gove’s office. Cllr Ashley Clark (Con) wrote a letter to the government minister hoping he would agree that convicts should don high-vis jackets and clear waste across the sides of the A2 and Thanet Way.
But the response sent on behalf of the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has been blasted as "a joke". The letter, written by ministerial contact Sherife Tekdal, states that if convicts are used to collect rubbish then an unfair stigma that all volunteer litter-pickers are criminals will be created. It reads: “It is often recommended that those found guilty of littering should be required to participate in litter‑picking, and we recognise the obvious attraction of making the punishment fit the crime.
“We also want to encourage voluntary and community-led litter-picking activity and do not wish to discourage volunteers by implying that litter-picking is a punishment in itself. “The use of litter-picking as a sanction in itself must be handled with care, to avoid creating a perception that anyone seen litter-picking must be an offender serving a community sentence, which could deter law-abiding citizens from volunteering to take part in these activities.
“Community payback, previously community service, is therefore best used in circumstances in which volunteers are unlikely to be operating, including tackling issues on private land, or to address persistent or large-scale problems.” Disappointed Cllr Clark says the response is "pathetic drivel"."
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/canterbury/news/nonsensical-response-to-roadside-litter-idea-185509/
I thought it was a great idea then (and it's still a good idea now). But I don't know that it ever really happened.
(a) Starmer is doing a really good job because he’s not quite as bad as Corbyn, &
(b) Boris is “just going through a lucky vaccine bounce period” despite having taken over a party in supply and confidence w the DUP, 3rd or 4th in the polls on circa 20%, won an 80 seat majority, and got Sir Keir’s fans celebrating when the Tories don’t make 40% in a poll!
How can people be so blind?
Broken Windows Britain
Based on the Bratton policing policy in NYC: you start with zero tolerance for the small stuff (broken windows, graffiti, litter) then society fixes itself.
It works. It worked in NYC. It went from a druggy toilet to a gleaming city, once again. Crime rates plunged.
Do the same to the UK
Also when you referred to "godforsaken little towns and villages" you forgot to describe them as "deplorable-filled".
If they go silent - well, it was nice knowing you. Revolvers on the terrace....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaUEwiz3MzM
The Tories can see the things wrong, can see that they are both responsible for a lot of them and indifferent to them, and can see a way to flip this to their advantage. The absurd levels of flag-waving patriotism being demanded are a smokescreen - make people proud to be
EnglishBritish so that to point to all the things wrong makes them somehow unpatriotic.We've got 150k dead from Covid and could have done so much better -> So you back the Frogs then
Too many kids go hungry at school -> stop making excuses for forriners on the scrounge
Idiots throw McDonalds wrappers next to the bin cos they are ignorant -> working people never get a break cos the money goes on benefits and there's all these antifa terrorists threatening our statues
etc
Just clean the damn streets and fix all the potholes. You can do that. I want that
Did you know that the new cashier-less Amazon stores are pejorative? And why?
The only reason it isn’t a problem yet is because Labour is so pathetically jellified and spineless on anything ‘racial’. Blair would have been all over this.
Again it could feed into my Broken Britain narrative. ‘Even the borders are broken’. What’s the point of Brexit and ‘taking back control’ if you can’t even control people casually landing on our beaches
The current government is a terrible government; they are making an appalling hash of running the country well.
But they're blooming good at politics.
The nearest precedent I can think of is Silvio Berlusconi, and look how hard it has been to flush him away even though Italy hardly thrived under his rule.
https://www.politico.eu/coronavirus-in-europe/
Honestly, I thought it would look worse than that. Anyway, my point is that extrapolation is stupid.
https://youtu.be/7FAI_-woNh4?t=18
To keep pace with the UK Germany need to be doing 500k a day rather than the current 300k. The Netherlands figures look particularly poor - that's the UK equivalent of 160k jabs a day.
p.s. Calling those who reject the values of the Enlightenment 'Enlightened' is quite the piece of gaslighting, innit?
Migrant boats are to be welcomed, it is Farage who points at them and says ‘why? How?’
Even more worryingly is the deaths at over 1K/day. This is before tonight's announcement which I presume will try and lock things down further. Deaths generally lag 2 to 3 weeks behind cases so that number is only going to go up for the next 2 weeks at least. They could be facing 2K deaths/day. For comparison, when England locked down at the start of January in the UK there were ~750deaths/day and the peak was ~1300/deaths/day.
If Macron really were an epidemiologist then he would have done something before now. He had the warning from the UK and has dithered.
They need a new, populist Blair, but there is no sign of that
In the meantime Britain needs a new Opposition
It is ignorance, but sadly once one person has done it, it then appears to be fair game. Litter attracts more litter.
McDonalds (and the rest) know this happens, and yet they appear to be able to do nothing about it. They could at least organise a litter pick, and perhaps write car registrations on the packaging.
One thing I remember about driving around the US was highways being 'sponsored' by local schools etc, and the sponsor organising a litter pick. I doubt it would be allowed here, of course, what with healthandsafety and (worse) the idea that it is someone else's problem.
I was struck by how white the Scotland footie team was when they played Israel the other day
It would have been like the missionaries of old - we can offer you Food, Shelter and Support but you have to believe in our Lord
Jesus ChristJeremy Corbyn. People want effective politicians in the community to get stuff done so that they aren't bothered by the bad stuff. Thats all. Labour are shrinking in places like Teesside because they have tried to Politicise everything, whilst the Tories play soft politics and look like its not propaganda.In school vaccination is very much a thing and usually well organised, so yes, when we get a vaccine cleared for use in schools I expect it to be done that way.
I'm an "enlightened" living among the deplorables, but, well, I don't know if it's related to living here, but I'm less pro-EU than I was and simply can't wait to get my Boris-jab
Going to the People (Russian: Хождение в народ) was a populist movement in the Russian Empire. It was largely inspired by the work of Russian theorists such as Mikhail Bakunin and Pyotr Lavrov, who advocated that groups of dedicated revolutionaries could inspire a mass movement to overthrow the ruling class, especially as it concerned the peasantry. In 1874, approximately 2,000 to 4,000 students, some of whom were offsprings of the nobility, traveled to rural parts of the empire in order to live among the serfs and "prepare them for their future political role."
Many of these youths had never before visited the villages of Russia, but sought to adopt their manner of dress and take up jobs as manual laborers as a way of engaging the population. They found the people often unperceptive to their revolutionary message, with many turning over their "exotic urban visitors" to government authorities. It was ultimately a failure, and by the Autumn of that year more than a thousand arrests were made.
Kinabalu may find it easier to skip straight to the next stage, when those revolutionary socialist intellectuals gave up on formenting rebellion and started assassinating government officials instead.
Brilliant. More immunity for the herd.
Meanwhile a fantastic case figure from Wales
https://twitter.com/UKCovid19Stats/status/1377215105100869633
The enlightened preaching to the poor benighted savages....and the left wonder so many despise them
The interesting thing is that they are also proposing the exclusion of Switzerland - who were not, I think, excluded from Gallileo ?
Is it not a breach of the agreement we signed with them ?
It's a bit like refusing to join Nato and then getting annoyed when you don't get invited on military excercises to play with the latest Nato tech.
(I do think excluding the UK from these areas of Horizon is daft and bad news for EU research as well as UK research, I just don't think the point the tweet is trying to make actually makes much sense)
The next milestone.
So they move far away where everyone agrees with them
To me it seems progressive politics has moved too quickly for the public at large - they just aren’t outraged by the things academics think they should be. In time, no doubt they will be by some of them. But the way to make this ‘progress’ slower and more manageable is to have a Tory government diluting left wing ideas into the mainstream. The public just don’t trust the left not to over reach
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/31/democrats-primary-schedule-2024-478680
Honestly, PB consistently overestimates - by a huge distance - the levels of libertarianism out there, especially in the face of a plague. We just want our lives back. If this means flashing our smartphones so we can hear live music again, bring it on
says 381.....
https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1377209114204463108
It is clear now that France wants to use Brexit to make the EU quasi-hostile to the UK, even if this disbenefits the EU. Madness, but there it is
The inevitable corollary is that we will steer much closer to the US, Canada, Oz, the West divides into two, and the EU grows closer to Moscow and Beijing.
Cf Sputnik5
https://twitter.com/nikeshshukla/status/1377156061497462784
Remember- only a fool could say that Europe has done vaccination well. But some of the commentary here and in the British media has as much connection to reality as the old ladies twitching behind their net curtains and then passing on the gossip to their neighbours.
And sorry, I posted the wrong draft, tt was meant to say "sweet" little towns and villages. We have to get away from the sneery tone.
(Can things cascade upwards?)
That doesn't mean that the electorate will always return the Conservative Party though, as Blair showed.
The Labour Party can't win a majority if it telegraphs its non-conservative ideology. It got a way with this in the dim and distant because of union influence and other cultural factors which now have waned. That spell is largely broken and the non-patriotic and some bizarre (frankly delusional) tendencies of the LP have well and truly been rumbled by the electorate, e.g obsession with race, cancel culture etc etc.
To avoid a one-party state we need a competing party which is genuinely much more conservative (as opposed to Starmer, and Blair to a much lesser degree, lying that his party is). And, I'd argue, liberalism needs to feature much more front-and-centre than is currently the case one way or another.
And yes the problem in France is hospitals, esp ICUs. There are grisly reports of ICUs hitting 100% capacity and turning away patients
I must admit that I dislike these charisma type leaders because I think they are dangerous in that the electorate is too easily fooled by them.
I wonder whether we should, like the States, have a two-term maximum tenure?
The current wave in France will play out differently than the UKs January wave because the most vulnerable have received at least 1 vaccine dose already, so I don’t think deaths will rise as much. The ICU occupation is shooting up though because the patients are much younger than previous waves, so each one spends longer in intensive care than an elderly person (but has a better chance of recovering).
"served as chef de cabinet to Christopher Tugendhat, then vice-president of the EEC, and as head successively of the UN, Defence, and Security Policy departments in the FCO. He was head of the UK delegation to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe in Vienna, with the rank of Ambassador, 1990–92; assistant Under-Secretary at the FCO 1992–94; chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee 1994–96; Director for EU and Economic Affairs at the FCO 1996–97; and Ambassador to Germany 1997–2003."