I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
JVT did his job in a calm, clear and measured way. Which was then reported in most of our press in a calm, clear and measured way.
By having scientists who are clear, up front and honest with the public is why Britons trust the process more than other nations. No stupid leaks, no fake news. Just the truth, unvarnished, given to us with transparency.
Is this the same guy? The same "JVT". Oh yes, it is
In a calm, clear and measured way he tells us we should NOT wear masks, and that he has a "friend in Hong Kong" who agrees that masks are pointless. That would be the Hong Kong where everyone wears a fucking mask, and they have a Covid death rate per million of 27, as against our death rate of 1,862?
This isn''t even the "noble lie" of Fauci. If you listen to all JVT's early lectures on masks, he doesn't grasp the basic concept that masks are worn mainly to reduce spread, not to protect the wearer. You wear a mask to protect OTHERS, they wear a mask to protect YOU
Moreover, as late as March 2020 he did not understand that Covid transmits asymptomatically - another crucial concept - even tho this was being reported in the literature as early as mid January 2020
He is a witless berk, who has probably killed a few thousand people all by himself
I think Johnson was right. Letting the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog again would have been ridiculous, and probably led to serious riots in England.
My preferred solution is still for us to get rid of Northern Ireland, which has been an embarassing and expensive curse for centuries.
Certainly not from the Conservative and Unionist Party, the latter part of which came from opposition even to Irish Home Rule
It is true, but political positions of a century and a half ago should not determine what we think or do today.
Northern Ireland is a huge drain on our economy and politics and gives us nothing in return. The Republicans actively want to sabotage the country, and the Unionists would have landed us with Corbyn in 2017 if we hadn't bribed them. So we're much better off without them.
I feel that about London
can we ditch that too ?
You think London is a huge drain on our economy and gives us nothing in return?
Yes
Don't fully agree but you have a point. It sucks in and crowds out.
London is the brains (and piggybank) of the country. Northern Ireland is its malignant (and expensive) tumour.
I don't look upon impoverished regions of the country as being like malignant tumours. If in polemical mood I'd describe the City as being exactly like that - but let's just say that imo there are significant downsides to London's dominance and that I'd prefer a greater spread of wealth and opportunity.
Great place to live though.
I take it you're referring to London, not Northern Ireland?
We've had this discussion on here before. London is a curate's egg wrt quality of life. Greenwich, Chiswick, Richmond, Highgate - wonderful places. Catford, Lewisham, Stratford, Stockwell - I would rather live somewhere else. But then those choices may say as much about what I value.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
This is why I don't think it is viable. It already uses this much power and has a tiny fraction of the transactions of the other payment processors.
I must confess I don't fully understand bitcoin, so this is possibly either massive over-simplification or just plain wrong - but are bitcoin matters, at bottom, looking for very large numbers with certain properties? Which are valuable because numbers with those properties are deemed a bitcoin?
Apparently doorstep canvassing in Scotland has been banned from Monday. In Wales it is not allowed until Monday. Does anyone know if this seeming contradiction is true?
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Apparently doorstep canvassing in Scotland has been banned from Monday. In Wales it is not allowed until Monday. Does anyone know if this seeming contradiction is true?
Have a look at the salaries of Housing Association Chief Executives. Some of these earn three times the amount the Prime Minister gets, all for providing the service of Social Housing, for which there will always be a permanent demand in this Country.
In order for Boris Johnson to resolve any money troubles he might have, I am quite content for him to resign as Prime Minister and take a job as the Chief Executive of a Housing Association. One stone, so many birds!
Boris could even have chosen to make his career as a headmaster in a large state school and be earning more than he is as UK PM (albeit he would not get Chequers or No 10)
Ummmm...I don’t think he would have made it to Headmaster. Certainly in the state sector.
In fact he would have struggled to make it through his training year.
Although he could have been a civil servant, joined the DfE, and then gone on to be CEO of a MAT. They don’t have to be qualified teachers or, given my experience of some, have any brains at all.
Well the headmaster of Eton also makes over £200,000 a year so more than he gets as PM too, if he only ever worked in independent schools and got to be head (you do not need QTS to work in private schools, a classics degree from Oxford will do)
You don’t actually *need* QTS to work in most of the state sector, it’s just very unusual to get interviews if you don’t have it.
Leaving aside safeguarding, he simply doesn’t have the organisational or administrative skills to make it to the top in teaching. There is a reason why he succeeds brilliantly where campaigning is key and falls flat on his face in all his executive roles.
If he was not PM Boris would probably make the most money as a stand up comedian
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
This is just weak ad-hoc rationalization. The truth here is that you are wallowing in us having legged over the EU on this aspect of Brexit. Stitched them up by lying about our intentions on the Irish issue.
Same thing with @Philip_Thompson. Same thing with some other Leavers.
In fact this - wallowing smugly in "Boris" having conned the EU on Ireland - is a good 'tell' of which Leavers are hardcore eurofoamics. The ones who are driven above all else by hatred of the EU and Europe.
Not all are by any means, so it's good to have a way to recognize them.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
This is just weak ad-hoc rationalization. The truth here is that you are wallowing in us having legged over the EU on this aspect of Brexit. Stitched them up by lying about our intentions on the Irish issue.
Same thing with @Philip_Thompson. Same thing with some other Leavers.
In fact this - wallowing smugly in "Boris" having conned the EU on Ireland - is a good 'tell' of which Leavers are hardcore eurofoamics. The ones who are driven above all else by hatred of the EU and Europe.
Not all are by any means, so it's good to have a way to recognize them.
"Weak ad hoc rationalisation" is a neat way of saying "OK, yes, you're right". I might adopt it
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
This is just weak ad-hoc rationalization. The truth here is that you are wallowing in us having legged over the EU on this aspect of Brexit. Stitched them up by lying about our intentions on the Irish issue.
Same thing with @Philip_Thompson. Same thing with some other Leavers.
In fact this - wallowing smugly in "Boris" having conned the EU on Ireland - is a good 'tell' of which Leavers are hardcore eurofoamics. The ones who are driven above all else by hatred of the EU and Europe.
Not all are by any means, so it's good to have a way to recognize them.
No lies. If there's no societal difficulties there's no reason to invoke Article 16.
If there are societal difficulties, then one has to wonder why they didn't see it coming, and thus why they didn't see A16 coming?
Peace first. Solemn, sober, serious. What a sad situation. That it aids our position is entirely coincidental milord.
I think Johnson was right. Letting the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog again would have been ridiculous, and probably led to serious riots in England.
My preferred solution is still for us to get rid of Northern Ireland, which has been an embarassing and expensive curse for centuries.
Certainly not from the Conservative and Unionist Party, the latter part of which came from opposition even to Irish Home Rule
It is true, but political positions of a century and a half ago should not determine what we think or do today.
Northern Ireland is a huge drain on our economy and politics and gives us nothing in return. The Republicans actively want to sabotage the country, and the Unionists would have landed us with Corbyn in 2017 if we hadn't bribed them. So we're much better off without them.
I feel that about London
can we ditch that too ?
You think London is a huge drain on our economy and gives us nothing in return?
Yes
Don't fully agree but you have a point. It sucks in and crowds out.
London is the brains (and piggybank) of the country. Northern Ireland is its malignant (and expensive) tumour.
I don't look upon impoverished regions of the country as being like malignant tumours. If in polemical mood I'd describe the City as being exactly like that - but let's just say that imo there are significant downsides to London's dominance and that I'd prefer a greater spread of wealth and opportunity.
Great place to live though.
I take it you're referring to London, not Northern Ireland?
We've had this discussion on here before. London is a curate's egg wrt quality of life. Greenwich, Chiswick, Richmond, Highgate - wonderful places. Catford, Lewisham, Stratford, Stockwell - I would rather live somewhere else. But then those choices may say as much about what I value.
Yes, if money were no object, London would be a wonderful place to live. I can see why the super-rich like it. But to anyone with an income below the top decile, I reckon your quality of life is far better in one of the UK's other cities.
On NI - I don't think anyone is seriously proposing getting rid of it while there is a majority in NI who want to remain part of the UK. But should sentiment tip the other way, I think the mainland UK will wave it off with a barely suppressed sigh of relief. Most mainlanders haven't even been to NI. There is much less emotional connection to it than there is to any other region of the UK.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
No, the sensible thing would be this: admit there is evidence of a very very rare but dangerous side effect, but then say the benefits to the country of the whole population being vaccinated ASAP far outweigh this tiny risk, so keep calm and carry on as before, the vaccine is safe, but of course we will keep monitoring everything closely
Apparently doorstep canvassing in Scotland has been banned from Monday. In Wales it is not allowed until Monday. Does anyone know if this seeming contradiction is true?
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
Yes absolutely. When you have an independent regulator for medicines and medical products, an independent committee to advise on the use of authorised vaccines, and a nationalised health services that’s so trusted it might as well be the messiah; the role of Government is to sit back and let them do their job.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
No, the sensible thing would be this: admit there is evidence of a very very rare but dangerous side effect, but then say the benefits to the country of the whole population being vaccinated ASAP far outweigh this tiny risk, so keep calm and carry on as before, the vaccine is safe, but of course we will keep monitoring everything closely
Job done. No lies told. No cover up
In terms of medical ethics, balancing risk vs benefit for particular groups is standard.
Given the existence of an alternative (the other vaccines) it would be hard to justify continuing to use the one where there is a slight apparent risk.
This all rather reminds me of the change in the advice about blanket prescribing aspirin in older people, because of it's benefits in stopping heart attacks.
This was stopped because it was calculated that the side effects of taking aspirin regularly outweighed the benefits with respect to heart attacks.
The UK has done well in the vaccine situation. This is, in part, because of trust that the regulator is independent of government and that the regulator has a clearly defined mandate and ethical framework.
The way to maintain such trust is to get out in from of any problem, deal with it and publish the decision. Not bury the problem in a disused toilet marked "Beware of the leopard".
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Why does filling in more paperwork cause "societal problems"? It doesn't anywhere else where Boris's Brexit Agreement has caused extra paperwork.
Apparently doorstep canvassing in Scotland has been banned from Monday. In Wales it is not allowed until Monday. Does anyone know if this seeming contradiction is true?
Doorstep canvassing hasn't been allowed in Scotland so far. Cases have to fall to a certain level before it is allowed as I understand it.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
This is just weak ad-hoc rationalization. The truth here is that you are wallowing in us having legged over the EU on this aspect of Brexit. Stitched them up by lying about our intentions on the Irish issue.
Same thing with @Philip_Thompson. Same thing with some other Leavers.
In fact this - wallowing smugly in "Boris" having conned the EU on Ireland - is a good 'tell' of which Leavers are hardcore eurofoamics. The ones who are driven above all else by hatred of the EU and Europe.
Not all are by any means, so it's good to have a way to recognize them.
No lies. If there's no societal difficulties there's no reason to invoke Article 16.
If there are societal difficulties, then one has to wonder why they didn't see it coming, and thus why they didn't see A16 coming?
Peace first. Solemn, sober, serious. What a sad situation. That it aids our position is entirely coincidental milord.
If you want to show that I'm mistaken and you're not wallowing in our mendacity you need to stop transparently wallowing in our mendacity.
Same to @Leon. Same to all Leavers who are doing it. Which, I repeat, is by no means all.
At least make the effort. Won't fool me, of course, but others might not be paying such close attention.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
How about you answer the questions? I didn't say anything, it was just questions there. If I'm so ignorant why don't you share your ample knowledge with us, oh enlightened one.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Just noticed the numpty-in-chief's post. If you are still lurking Philip (I guess you do even when you are not subjecting us to your uninformed views) I never said anything about the "Northern Ireland Protocol". I simply said that your simplistic solutions are, er, simplistic.
I probably also inferred that like with other matters, you know jack shit about Northern Ireland or Ireland, or the consequences of the type of shit-for-brains "solution" that, oddly enough, involves us jingoistically waving two fingers at the EU, and by extension the Irish. The latter is really NOT a good idea, unless you care nothing for the peace process. I imagine that like many Col. Blimp type paper tigers you would run a mile at any non keyboard based warriors.
I think Johnson was right. Letting the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog again would have been ridiculous, and probably led to serious riots in England.
My preferred solution is still for us to get rid of Northern Ireland, which has been an embarassing and expensive curse for centuries.
Certainly not from the Conservative and Unionist Party, the latter part of which came from opposition even to Irish Home Rule
It is true, but political positions of a century and a half ago should not determine what we think or do today.
Northern Ireland is a huge drain on our economy and politics and gives us nothing in return. The Republicans actively want to sabotage the country, and the Unionists would have landed us with Corbyn in 2017 if we hadn't bribed them. So we're much better off without them.
I feel that about London
can we ditch that too ?
You think London is a huge drain on our economy and gives us nothing in return?
Yes
Don't fully agree but you have a point. It sucks in and crowds out.
London is the brains (and piggybank) of the country. Northern Ireland is its malignant (and expensive) tumour.
I don't look upon impoverished regions of the country as being like malignant tumours. If in polemical mood I'd describe the City as being exactly like that - but let's just say that imo there are significant downsides to London's dominance and that I'd prefer a greater spread of wealth and opportunity.
Great place to live though.
I take it you're referring to London, not Northern Ireland?
We've had this discussion on here before. London is a curate's egg wrt quality of life. Greenwich, Chiswick, Richmond, Highgate - wonderful places. Catford, Lewisham, Stratford, Stockwell - I would rather live somewhere else. But then those choices may say as much about what I value.
Yes, if money were no object, London would be a wonderful place to live. I can see why the super-rich like it. But to anyone with an income below the top decile, I reckon your quality of life is far better in one of the UK's other cities.
On NI - I don't think anyone is seriously proposing getting rid of it while there is a majority in NI who want to remain part of the UK. But should sentiment tip the other way, I think the mainland UK will wave it off with a barely suppressed sigh of relief. Most mainlanders haven't even been to NI. There is much less emotional connection to it than there is to any other region of the UK.
The problem with London is that the process that built it - the slow assimilation of villages into the mass - has been carefully and explicitly stopped. Stopped, without changing the other portion of the dynamic - the increasing population.
At this point people start with bullshit about how everyone needs to live in tiny flats. For The Greater Good.
The slight problem with that is the people living in London. Who have repeatedly forfeited the confidence of The Planners. They look at the award winning machines for living, built for them by geniuses.... and say "Fuck that. I want a Victorian house."
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
This is just weak ad-hoc rationalization. The truth here is that you are wallowing in us having legged over the EU on this aspect of Brexit. Stitched them up by lying about our intentions on the Irish issue.
Same thing with @Philip_Thompson. Same thing with some other Leavers.
In fact this - wallowing smugly in "Boris" having conned the EU on Ireland - is a good 'tell' of which Leavers are hardcore eurofoamics. The ones who are driven above all else by hatred of the EU and Europe.
Not all are by any means, so it's good to have a way to recognize them.
No lies. If there's no societal difficulties there's no reason to invoke Article 16.
If there are societal difficulties, then one has to wonder why they didn't see it coming, and thus why they didn't see A16 coming?
Peace first. Solemn, sober, serious. What a sad situation. That it aids our position is entirely coincidental milord.
If you want to show that I'm mistaken and you're not wallowing in our mendacity you need to stop transparently wallowing in our mendacity.
Same to @Leon. Same to all Leavers who are doing it. Which, I repeat, is by no means all.
At least make the effort. Won't fool me, of course, but others might not be paying such close attention.
I'm not wallowing, all this was debated up front. It was warned up front that there could be societal difficulties. All parties agreed that peace must come first.
So if the Protocol is causing difficulties, as had been warned about, then its time to put peace first. As we committed to do. We should emphasise our commitment to peace first.
I'd rather not derail this thread on Ireland, which generates more heat than light.
And I'm certainly not an expert on trade.
But the vast bulk of trade can be managed through a trusted trader / self-decleration / spot-check system. And you can use intelligence led monitoring to cover the rest.
The free movement of people is already covered by the CTA.
And yet such an easy solution eludes us - because it isn't based in reality. The bulk of Irish trade is food. We need to completely align our SPS standards with the EU and do a deal to remove the checks. Our standards ARE completely aligned, but apparently we can't agree a deal because at some point in the future the EU may increase their standards just to spite us.
Even outside of food, there are naysayers on this forum including your good self decrying the idea of agreed alignment which is the basis for trusted trader / self-declaration systems.
There is plenty of relevance to Scotland though - England thinking that it can drag savage appendages like NI and Scotland around to do something stupid against their will. The big push towards another independence vote up here is largely thanks to Brexit (and the Boris corrupt organisation), and they are literally rioting in NI.
"Respect democracy" doesn't work when its imposed destruction.
We don't "need" to align our SPS with the EU.
It would be entirely possible to diverge with the EU but to recognise each others's SPS as "equivalent" and remove the need for checks etc . That may affect the "integrity" of the Single Market but so be it, we would be making the same compromise in return. That is a genuine compromise, not chaining one party to another like a slave.
Mate, you keep dancing on this same pinhead. If our standards are "equivalent" then it means they are close enough to the required standard. Which they are now. And will be in the future as we declare that standards will only ever be increased. So we could do this as you suggest, but it is declaring that our standards will different *but directly comparable* to EU ones. Which you won't accept.
We can't wildly diverge our standards and recognise an equivalence which isn't there.
Yes we can. We can recognise our standards as currently equivalent but not commit to alignment, with a dispute system if divergence occurs in the future.
No commitments then, and if divergence leads to issues in the future you cross that bridge when you get there. If it doesn't, there's no issue.
We can do whatever we want - the issue is so can the EU and because we won't agree to the EU's terms the EU are imposing the WTO rules they impose on imports from all third party countries.
Indeed.
So our choice is to remove all Irish Sea border checks and then let the EU come up with a solution. If they impose checks on the Irish land border that's their choice. If they don't, then the problem is solved - NI is in UK and NI has open border with the EU.
Either way we do nothing and let the EU act or blink.
I don't think we have any checks on our side of the Irish sea. But how do you propose to remove the checks in Dublin or (for that matter) Belfast.
Belfast is part of the UK, it is on our side of the Irish sea. We simply stop doing any checks whatsoever in Belfast.
If the Republic wants to do checks in Dublin that's their prerogative, let them do that and own the consequences.
Extraordinary cakeism!
Now everyone knew an ERG Brexit would have ramifications for the GFA.
Now, as a former Remainer I accept Richard Tyndall's argument that Brexit was all about the "sovereignty" and we would have to live with any collateral consequences. He accepts that for "sovereignty" to be regained bad things would happen and it was a price worth paying
Your (and Boris Johnson's) argument is an out and out lie. You claim we regained our mystical "sovereignty", and there are no consequences, only those imposed on a Sovereign England by foreigners interfering with England's sovereignty.
Of course its cakeism!
So is the EU's notion that they can have peace in NI and their definition of "integrity of the Single Market". That is cakeism and it has failed, its their problem to fix.
If we refuse to do any checks in Belfast then I accept our decisions may have consequences in our relations with them, that's up to them to impose if they choose to do so. If they choose to erect border posts along the Irish land border that's their choice, we can't stop them doing that if they choose to do so. I don't think they will though, do you?
In my job - I will tell people that their decision is likely to result in an issue and highlight how to avoid or mitigate the issue.
It is, however, not my job to fix an issue their decision created and nor is it the EUs...
The UK has nothing to fix. We don't want a sea border or a land border, so we say we will not operate either.
If the EU reciprocate, problem solved. If they don't, they need to come up with a fix.
What is there for us to fix?
Likely EU response would be to say it was a breach of the withdrawal treaty and refuse to enter into free trade agreement unless we properly control all points of entry
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Why does filling in more paperwork cause "societal problems"? It doesn't anywhere else where Boris's Brexit Agreement has caused extra paperwork.
Because its Northern Ireland. There's a tenuous peace process and all communities need to feel they're being treated with respect, not just one.
Have a look at the salaries of Housing Association Chief Executives. Some of these earn three times the amount the Prime Minister gets, all for providing the service of Social Housing, for which there will always be a permanent demand in this Country.
In order for Boris Johnson to resolve any money troubles he might have, I am quite content for him to resign as Prime Minister and take a job as the Chief Executive of a Housing Association. One stone, so many birds!
Boris could even have chosen to make his career as a headmaster in a large state school and be earning more than he is as UK PM (albeit he would not get Chequers or No 10)
Ummmm...I don’t think he would have made it to Headmaster. Certainly in the state sector.
In fact he would have struggled to make it through his training year.
Although he could have been a civil servant, joined the DfE, and then gone on to be CEO of a MAT. They don’t have to be qualified teachers or, given my experience of some, have any brains at all.
Well the headmaster of Eton also makes over £200,000 a year so more than he gets as PM too, if he only ever worked in independent schools and got to be head (you do not need QTS to work in private schools, a classics degree from Oxford will do)
You don’t actually *need* QTS to work in most of the state sector, it’s just very unusual to get interviews if you don’t have it.
Leaving aside safeguarding, he simply doesn’t have the organisational or administrative skills to make it to the top in teaching. There is a reason why he succeeds brilliantly where campaigning is key and falls flat on his face in all his executive roles.
If he was not PM Boris would probably make the most money as a stand up comedian
Sadly not mutually exclusive roles
True. But I've stopped laughing. Stopped a while ago, in fact.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
And yet, the EMA has NOT recommended that AZ be restricted by age.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
I'd rather not derail this thread on Ireland, which generates more heat than light.
And I'm certainly not an expert on trade.
But the vast bulk of trade can be managed through a trusted trader / self-decleration / spot-check system. And you can use intelligence led monitoring to cover the rest.
The free movement of people is already covered by the CTA.
And yet such an easy solution eludes us - because it isn't based in reality. The bulk of Irish trade is food. We need to completely align our SPS standards with the EU and do a deal to remove the checks. Our standards ARE completely aligned, but apparently we can't agree a deal because at some point in the future the EU may increase their standards just to spite us.
Even outside of food, there are naysayers on this forum including your good self decrying the idea of agreed alignment which is the basis for trusted trader / self-declaration systems.
There is plenty of relevance to Scotland though - England thinking that it can drag savage appendages like NI and Scotland around to do something stupid against their will. The big push towards another independence vote up here is largely thanks to Brexit (and the Boris corrupt organisation), and they are literally rioting in NI.
"Respect democracy" doesn't work when its imposed destruction.
We don't "need" to align our SPS with the EU.
It would be entirely possible to diverge with the EU but to recognise each others's SPS as "equivalent" and remove the need for checks etc . That may affect the "integrity" of the Single Market but so be it, we would be making the same compromise in return. That is a genuine compromise, not chaining one party to another like a slave.
Mate, you keep dancing on this same pinhead. If our standards are "equivalent" then it means they are close enough to the required standard. Which they are now. And will be in the future as we declare that standards will only ever be increased. So we could do this as you suggest, but it is declaring that our standards will different *but directly comparable* to EU ones. Which you won't accept.
We can't wildly diverge our standards and recognise an equivalence which isn't there.
Yes we can. We can recognise our standards as currently equivalent but not commit to alignment, with a dispute system if divergence occurs in the future.
No commitments then, and if divergence leads to issues in the future you cross that bridge when you get there. If it doesn't, there's no issue.
We can do whatever we want - the issue is so can the EU and because we won't agree to the EU's terms the EU are imposing the WTO rules they impose on imports from all third party countries.
Indeed.
So our choice is to remove all Irish Sea border checks and then let the EU come up with a solution. If they impose checks on the Irish land border that's their choice. If they don't, then the problem is solved - NI is in UK and NI has open border with the EU.
Either way we do nothing and let the EU act or blink.
I don't think we have any checks on our side of the Irish sea. But how do you propose to remove the checks in Dublin or (for that matter) Belfast.
I think his argument is that if the RoI was to impose a hard border to do RoI-NI checks following abolition (or a 'technological solution' improvement) of GB-NI checks, they're welcome to do so (they won't do so). Similar for the EU (also not stupid enough to do so).
Then we reach the only sustainable outcome for NI - a largely free border with both the UK and RoI, with some smuggling happening. The key to reaching that is keeping the EU utterly disinterested, while the parties with skin in the game find a workable solution.
Precisely!
It has been the obvious and only solution all along.
Sadly some people are so far up the EU's backside that they actually convince themselves that the UK must align with the EU as a real solution, as opposed to this.
Indeed. "Why won't you accept a long-term solution where you allow smuggling". Every responsible nation and trading area is happy to accept smuggling....
Every responsible nation and trading area accepts that smuggling is a fact of life and does their best to police and interdict.
You are taking a zero-COVID approach to policy
Correction - the EU are taking a zero-COVID approach to that policy (and that is their right).
Is it? The EU agreed to work on a trusted trader scheme. I see no evidence they have done so. As Charles has pointed out, it takes 95% of the current issues away.
They complained that the UK wanted too many trusted traders.
I'm not sure how the number of traders is relevant. They either meet the criteria to be on the scheme or they don't. If the criteria are too loose, take issue with that, not with the number of traders.
I think Johnson was right. Letting the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog again would have been ridiculous, and probably led to serious riots in England.
My preferred solution is still for us to get rid of Northern Ireland, which has been an embarassing and expensive curse for centuries.
Certainly not from the Conservative and Unionist Party, the latter part of which came from opposition even to Irish Home Rule
It is true, but political positions of a century and a half ago should not determine what we think or do today.
Northern Ireland is a huge drain on our economy and politics and gives us nothing in return. The Republicans actively want to sabotage the country, and the Unionists would have landed us with Corbyn in 2017 if we hadn't bribed them. So we're much better off without them.
I feel that about London
can we ditch that too ?
You think London is a huge drain on our economy and gives us nothing in return?
Yes
Don't fully agree but you have a point. It sucks in and crowds out.
London is the brains (and piggybank) of the country. Northern Ireland is its malignant (and expensive) tumour.
I don't look upon impoverished regions of the country as being like malignant tumours. If in polemical mood I'd describe the City as being exactly like that - but let's just say that imo there are significant downsides to London's dominance and that I'd prefer a greater spread of wealth and opportunity.
Great place to live though.
I take it you're referring to London, not Northern Ireland?
We've had this discussion on here before. London is a curate's egg wrt quality of life. Greenwich, Chiswick, Richmond, Highgate - wonderful places. Catford, Lewisham, Stratford, Stockwell - I would rather live somewhere else. But then those choices may say as much about what I value.
It's with a certain sheepishness that I confess to never never never having set foot in Northern Ireland.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Why does filling in more paperwork cause "societal problems"? It doesn't anywhere else where Boris's Brexit Agreement has caused extra paperwork.
Well yes, paperwork can be dealt with and there is undoubtedly some element of initial difficulties getting used to it but there are way more than that, its the practical outcome of some seriously nuts regulation and how that has impacted to Bob on the street. That is then seen in the context of the constitutional position which is very very tricky territory that people will go and kill someone else for.
Again its all workable in practice with goodwill. As regards policing in the country which remarkably seems to have been missed by people on the mainland in how much ire that situation caused, that's a different story.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
And yet, the EMA has NOT recommended that AZ be restricted by age.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
The EMA hasn't recommended stopping the use in under 30s because the whole of europe is riddled with Covid, they don't have alternate vaccines and there isn't the same degree of population immunity we have with prior infection and vaccination in the UK. It's a very different risk equation to the MHRA.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
How about you answer the questions? I didn't say anything, it was just questions there. If I'm so ignorant why don't you share your ample knowledge with us, oh enlightened one.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16.
Three simple questions.
There are no simple solutions you plonker, and any solution is very unlikely to be magicked up by an inexperienced keyboard warrior like yourself. Brexit has made the situation in NI worse without a doubt, and it will take cool heads to try and un-detonate the time bomb left by Mr. Back of a Fag Packet Johnson. The fact that you think it is all part of a great scheme by the Clown just reinforces how naive and gullible you are. Ramping up the anti by winding up the Irish government has to be one of the most stupid and ignorant things I have ever seen even you write. Dumb, dumb dumb. Now write about something you do have experience of...oh hang on...
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
And yet, the EMA has NOT recommended that AZ be restricted by age.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
What part of the EMA are dealing with different risk ratios to the MHRA are you struggling to understand?
Australia have different risk ratios to Europe too.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
How about you answer the questions? I didn't say anything, it was just questions there. If I'm so ignorant why don't you share your ample knowledge with us, oh enlightened one.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16.
Three simple questions.
There are no simple solutions you plonker, and any solution is very unlikely to be magicked up by an inexperienced keyboard warrior like yourself. Brexit has made the situation in NI worse without a doubt, and it will take cool heads to try and un-detonate the time bomb left by Mr. Back of a Fag Packet Johnson. The fact that you think it is all part of a great scheme by the Clown just reinforces how naive and gullible you are. Ramping up the anti by winding up the Irish government has to be one of the most stupid and ignorant things I have ever seen even you write. Dumb, dumb dumb. Now write about something you do have experience of...oh hang on...
I only read the first seven words, and gave you a like!
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
How about you answer the questions? I didn't say anything, it was just questions there. If I'm so ignorant why don't you share your ample knowledge with us, oh enlightened one.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16.
Three simple questions.
There are no simple solutions you plonker, and any solution is very unlikely to be magicked up by an inexperienced keyboard warrior like yourself. Brexit has made the situation in NI worse without a doubt, and it will take cool heads to try and un-detonate the time bomb left by Mr. Back of a Fag Packet Johnson. The fact that you think it is all part of a great scheme by the Clown just reinforces how naive and gullible you are. Ramping up the anti by winding up the Irish government has to be one of the most stupid and ignorant things I have ever seen even you write. Dumb, dumb dumb. Now write about something you do have experience of...oh hang on...
I know there are no simple solutions there you plonker, its been my point all along. So you're agreeing with me, well done. 👏👏👏
That is why I want all parties to come together to get a messy compromise.
It is your side of the debate that wanted a "simple solution" like "the UK should align with Europe". That's not an option, so we need a sane compromise not one of your simple solutions.
Questions, should the wee prick that chucked a petrol bomb into an open bus door be done for attempted murder, and would 'the Shinners went to a funeral' be a valid defence?
I see that the usual suspects are on again blaming the Irish for the decisions taken by the British government and their little helpers, NI Unionists.
Meanwhile a bus driver was lucky not to be killed last night.
And, no, I don't have any answers either - any more than anyone else on here does.
Will drop in later.
Wind and rain back - which rather scuppers my gardening plans. Bother.
I have an answer.
You may not like it, but its an answer.
Drop the checks, stop fucking around, and deal with this in fresh negotiations. Until fresh negotiations reach an outcome, there's no checks by anyone.
Again, you may not like it, but its an answer. The best answer all along.
The EU can't drop the checks - what part of that fundamental issue (due to WTO rules) do completely and utterly fail to grasp....
Or do you recommend the British Government creates a law that allows the NI police to stop the EU border officers from doing their job?
It creates an incentive for the EU to negotiate a sensible deal. Or even better to allow the RoI and UK to negotiate a sensible deal.
The new people - people who voted No in '14, Remain in '16, and are so horrified by Brexit that they've moved to Sindy, will have to confront at some point the reasoning that Sindy and Brexit are the same thing. In both instances, the overt argument is that it's OK to cut yourself off from your nearest neighbour that you share a land border with, to go to a geographically more distant but larger market. In the final reckoning many of those will forgive Brexit. Especially when people remember that Ferries are rubbish.
Boris could win it if he chose to, but amongst other reasons to not have it, I also think he sees himself in opposition to Cameron and won't do anything Cameron did.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
How about you answer the questions? I didn't say anything, it was just questions there. If I'm so ignorant why don't you share your ample knowledge with us, oh enlightened one.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16.
Three simple questions.
Well maybe some clever person has creating some trouble as part of their thinking
I said yesterday that the pauses in the use of AZ have likely already cost more lives than could potentially be saved from avoiding clots. Add on the inevitable increase in vaccine hesitancy, and resulting increased transmission and cases, and we are going to end up in a situation where many times more people die as a result.
I think Johnson was right. Letting the Northern Irish tail wag the British dog again would have been ridiculous, and probably led to serious riots in England.
My preferred solution is still for us to get rid of Northern Ireland, which has been an embarassing and expensive curse for centuries.
Certainly not from the Conservative and Unionist Party, the latter part of which came from opposition even to Irish Home Rule
It is true, but political positions of a century and a half ago should not determine what we think or do today.
Northern Ireland is a huge drain on our economy and politics and gives us nothing in return. The Republicans actively want to sabotage the country, and the Unionists would have landed us with Corbyn in 2017 if we hadn't bribed them. So we're much better off without them.
I feel that about London
can we ditch that too ?
You think London is a huge drain on our economy and gives us nothing in return?
Yes
Don't fully agree but you have a point. It sucks in and crowds out.
London is the brains (and piggybank) of the country. Northern Ireland is its malignant (and expensive) tumour.
I don't look upon impoverished regions of the country as being like malignant tumours. If in polemical mood I'd describe the City as being exactly like that - but let's just say that imo there are significant downsides to London's dominance and that I'd prefer a greater spread of wealth and opportunity.
Great place to live though.
I take it you're referring to London, not Northern Ireland?
We've had this discussion on here before. London is a curate's egg wrt quality of life. Greenwich, Chiswick, Richmond, Highgate - wonderful places. Catford, Lewisham, Stratford, Stockwell - I would rather live somewhere else. But then those choices may say as much about what I value.
It's with a certain sheepishness that I confess to never never never having set foot in Northern Ireland.
I’ve only ever paid two brief visits. Seeing all the flags and murals and walls is a bit weird when you consider it’s part of our own country. But it’s a friendly place to visit; just a shame they single out the most obnoxious unpleasant and offensive people they can find and elect them as their politicians. Does their image no good whatsoever.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
How about you answer the questions? I didn't say anything, it was just questions there. If I'm so ignorant why don't you share your ample knowledge with us, oh enlightened one.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16.
Three simple questions.
Well maybe some clever person has creating some trouble as part of their thinking
Well yes that is entirely predictable. Indeed it was what was threatened, though mainly from the Nationalist PoV ignoring the Loyalists who are now giving as good as the Nationalists threatened. Entirely predictable.
It is why I said all along that the negotiations should have included all relevant parties, not just May and Barnier early on.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
The problem with that idea, is that
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed. - The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
That's huge for French society. Almost like abolishing Oxbridge.
Intriguing move
Apart from language (which they do way better than us), I don't really know what they teach them in those places. When I first came to Scotland I was on a University course with a number of French postrgaduate students. They were fine, a little arrogant but not nasty with it, so far so good. But they really struggled with the essays and coursework because of a total lack of familiarity with using the scholarly apparatus - footnotes, citations, reading lists. They couldn't understand why they couldn't just dream something up and it be accepted. I think we see this in some of Macron's solemn pronouncements that actually sound quite stupid.
I'd rather not derail this thread on Ireland, which generates more heat than light.
And I'm certainly not an expert on trade.
But the vast bulk of trade can be managed through a trusted trader / self-decleration / spot-check system. And you can use intelligence led monitoring to cover the rest.
The free movement of people is already covered by the CTA.
And yet such an easy solution eludes us - because it isn't based in reality. The bulk of Irish trade is food. We need to completely align our SPS standards with the EU and do a deal to remove the checks. Our standards ARE completely aligned, but apparently we can't agree a deal because at some point in the future the EU may increase their standards just to spite us.
Even outside of food, there are naysayers on this forum including your good self decrying the idea of agreed alignment which is the basis for trusted trader / self-declaration systems.
There is plenty of relevance to Scotland though - England thinking that it can drag savage appendages like NI and Scotland around to do something stupid against their will. The big push towards another independence vote up here is largely thanks to Brexit (and the Boris corrupt organisation), and they are literally rioting in NI.
"Respect democracy" doesn't work when its imposed destruction.
We don't "need" to align our SPS with the EU.
It would be entirely possible to diverge with the EU but to recognise each others's SPS as "equivalent" and remove the need for checks etc . That may affect the "integrity" of the Single Market but so be it, we would be making the same compromise in return. That is a genuine compromise, not chaining one party to another like a slave.
Mate, you keep dancing on this same pinhead. If our standards are "equivalent" then it means they are close enough to the required standard. Which they are now. And will be in the future as we declare that standards will only ever be increased. So we could do this as you suggest, but it is declaring that our standards will different *but directly comparable* to EU ones. Which you won't accept.
We can't wildly diverge our standards and recognise an equivalence which isn't there.
Yes we can. We can recognise our standards as currently equivalent but not commit to alignment, with a dispute system if divergence occurs in the future.
No commitments then, and if divergence leads to issues in the future you cross that bridge when you get there. If it doesn't, there's no issue.
We can do whatever we want - the issue is so can the EU and because we won't agree to the EU's terms the EU are imposing the WTO rules they impose on imports from all third party countries.
Indeed.
So our choice is to remove all Irish Sea border checks and then let the EU come up with a solution. If they impose checks on the Irish land border that's their choice. If they don't, then the problem is solved - NI is in UK and NI has open border with the EU.
Either way we do nothing and let the EU act or blink.
I don't think we have any checks on our side of the Irish sea. But how do you propose to remove the checks in Dublin or (for that matter) Belfast.
I think his argument is that if the RoI was to impose a hard border to do RoI-NI checks following abolition (or a 'technological solution' improvement) of GB-NI checks, they're welcome to do so (they won't do so). Similar for the EU (also not stupid enough to do so).
Then we reach the only sustainable outcome for NI - a largely free border with both the UK and RoI, with some smuggling happening. The key to reaching that is keeping the EU utterly disinterested, while the parties with skin in the game find a workable solution.
Precisely!
It has been the obvious and only solution all along.
Sadly some people are so far up the EU's backside that they actually convince themselves that the UK must align with the EU as a real solution, as opposed to this.
Indeed. "Why won't you accept a long-term solution where you allow smuggling". Every responsible nation and trading area is happy to accept smuggling....
Every responsible nation and trading area accepts that smuggling is a fact of life and does their best to police and interdict.
You are taking a zero-COVID approach to policy
Correction - the EU are taking a zero-COVID approach to that policy (and that is their right).
Is it? The EU agreed to work on a trusted trader scheme. I see no evidence they have done so. As Charles has pointed out, it takes 95% of the current issues away.
They complained that the UK wanted too many trusted traders.
A cynic might say that the EU is dragging its feet and coming up with lame excuses to try and increase domestic pressure on the government to agree unilateral alignment in key areas as the likes of Rochdale and other say we should.
As with everything in the EU/UK relationship it takes two to tango. Neither side free from blame and both sides need to hold to previously agreed actions. For the EU that means ensuring there is a robust trusted trader scheme that captures 98% of trade as they agreed to and for the UK it means dropping the unilateral exemption on exports to NI once that scheme is available and ensuring that nominated trusted traders are abiding by the rules of the scheme.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
And yet, the EMA has NOT recommended that AZ be restricted by age.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
What part of the EMA are dealing with different risk ratios to the MHRA are you struggling to understand?
Australia have different risk ratios to Europe too.
This is the committee led by the guy, Jonathan Van Tam, which solemnly told us not to wear masks, "because I have a friend in Hong Kong who says masks are crap". He said this in March 2020
Hong Kong, March 12, 2020:
"David Hui, a respiratory medicine expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studied the 2002 to 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) extensively, says it’s “common sense” that wearing a mask would protect against infectious diseases like COVID-19.
“If you are standing in front of someone who is sick, the mask will give some protection,” Hui says. “The mask provides a barrier from respiratory droplets, which is predominantly how the virus spreads.”
He also says that the role of a face mask may be especially important in the epidemic due to the nature of the virus. Patients with COVID-19 often have mild or even no symptoms, and some researchers believe it can also be transmitted when patients are asymptomatic—meaning patients can be contagious and don’t know they’re sick."
"Joseph Tsang, an infectious disease specialist who also worked as a consultant for Hong Kong's Hospital Authority, says the purpose of wearing a mask is two-fold. “Wearing a mask is not just for protecting yourself from getting infected, but also minimizing the chance of potential infection harboring in your body from spreading to people around you,” he tells TIME."
Jonathan Van Tam is either a liar or an idiot. I have thought for a while it was the former. I suspect, after yesterday, that he is the latter. And yet you trust this gormless fool with your life, and the public health of the nation
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
And yet, the EMA has NOT recommended that AZ be restricted by age.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
What part of the EMA are dealing with different risk ratios to the MHRA are you struggling to understand?
Australia have different risk ratios to Europe too.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
And yet, the EMA has NOT recommended that AZ be restricted by age.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
What part of the EMA are dealing with different risk ratios to the MHRA are you struggling to understand?
Australia have different risk ratios to Europe too.
Australia doesn't have other vaccines.
They also don't have a pandemic raging.
3500 people dying a day excess across the continent of Europe.
Questions, should the wee prick that chucked a petrol bomb into an open bus door be done for attempted murder, and would 'the Shinners went to a funeral' be a valid defence?
PB continues to be obsessed with Scotland, while the PM's lies come home to roost in Northern Ireland.
Varadkar and Coveney are the root cause of current Belfast theatre. The posh boys saw a sleeping dog and just kept poking it despite saner voices saying leave it.
No, it is Johnsons deal. We signed up to it, we need to keep our word.
I am surprised that so many PB Tories want to give in to rioters, when even a sit down protest in Bristol gets their goat.
The current structure is unworkable. It's only the deal because Vardkar and Coveney refused to look at alternatives.
@Alanbrooke and I both know something about Irish politics (him more than me to be fair!)
What alternatives? This was always an unsolvable problem of Brexit.
The basic way to make this work is a trusted trader scheme.
It's not monitoring every crossing of the border (for which the technology doesn't exist) but licensing the relatively small number of firms who are responsible for 95%+ of the cross-border trade.
Good idea, but that will still not satisfy the Unionists. People on here ( I am not including you in though) who make categoric statements about answers to this challenge clearly have no understanding of the mentality of many people in NI and in the republic. They are amongst the nicest people I have ever had contact with, but if you fuck with them they can be the nastiest in the world. They will literally die on a hill over a principle that most people in the rest of Western Europe would think trivial. They can make the ERG or the European Commission look like models of reason and compromise. That said it is a place that is close to my heart and I do wish people like Philip who clearly have zero understanding would shut the fuck up on the subject
I've a good understanding of the history on both sides up until the GFA
What I struggle to understand is people who say: the facts on the ground have changed, but we must stick fast to a structure which no longer works as intended. Even if it brings the house down. I can only assume that those who do have another agenda. Which is sad - and not a bit frightening - that they are willing to risk peace and other people's lives to achieve their political ends.
Far better to say that the assumptions on which the GFA was created no longer hold true so let's look for a solution that achieves the GFA's objectives.
(edit: it will satisfy the Unionists, because it means no checks GB/NI, free movement under the CTA, and no checks on the vast bulk of traffic NI/RoI. The only cost is a bit of smuggling... which - shock horror - happens already because of different VAT regimes. It's so perfect that there must be something wrong...)
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
The problem with that idea, is that
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed. - The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
You really think people would have drilled into the detail of "low exposure risk" of "2 in 10,000" in a "certain age group" and then gone AHA when they noticed the figures 1.1 against 0.8???
They would not. And besides, even if they did (and they wouldn't) the JCVI would just say yes we said there is a miniscule risk, but the benefits of everyone getting vaxed ASAP outweigh these tiny risks, in terms of transmission, suppression, countering hesitancy. And that would be entirely reasonable as a response
Instead the British government has announced a British vaccine is dangerous, That is the signal going around the world. It is monumental folly. I hope my fears are wrong.
A lot of Sarwar's approvals come from SNP voters who like him but prefer Sturgeon. That seems to be his problem: everyone likes him - but not as much as they like someone else. Labour will only move into second with switches from the SNP. They look very unlikely this time round.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
No, the sensible thing would be this: admit there is evidence of a very very rare but dangerous side effect, but then say the benefits to the country of the whole population being vaccinated ASAP far outweigh this tiny risk, so keep calm and carry on as before, the vaccine is safe, but of course we will keep monitoring everything closely
Job done. No lies told. No cover up
Bluf. Medical risks low, but perceptions and messaging vital to get right.
The Sun and other newspapers got it wrong, ramming the blatant spin approach isn’t going to convince people. The hand of silly nationalism was behind today’s silly headlines. The more persuasive approach would have been to have stuck with the truth, rapid reaction on a balanced and targeted approach to help those with greater risk of vaccine issue who have less issue of covid at same time. Overall figures including everyone should not have been used, quick and targeted measures to protect those most at risk, also due to the wonderful fact there are other options should have been the story and the headlines from broadcast media/24 to paper.
It’s shocking that when there is a nationalistic angle on vaccines, being able to play it straight goes out the window.
The truth is we have already long passed the point of sharing, the nationalism has ensured this mistake, because the longer it’s out there in the rest of the world mutating the bigger the threat it is to us and what we are doing.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
And yet, the EMA has NOT recommended that AZ be restricted by age.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
But the rest of Big Pharma is laughing behind its hand....
"So much for the "not for profit" vaccine. He he he....."
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
The problem with that idea, is that
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed. - The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
You really think people would have drilled into the detail of "low exposure risk" of "2 in 10,000" in a "certain age group" and then gone AHA when they noticed the figures 1.1 against 0.8???
They would not. And besides, even if they did (and they wouldn't) the JCVI would just say yes we said there is a miniscule risk, but the benefits of everyone getting vaxed ASAP outweigh these tiny risks, in terms of transmission, suppression, countering hesitancy. And that would be entirely reasonable as a response
Instead the British government has announced a British vaccine is dangerous, That is the signal going around the world. It is monumental folly. I hope my fears are wrong.
Yes of course they would drill into that detail. There are entire communities dedicated to digging out anything to substantiate their claims.
If the facts actually backed the antivaxxers and the MHRA covered them up it would destroy confidence in everything. It would be telling the world antivaxxers were right and the government was covering it up.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
The problem with that idea, is that
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed. - The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
You really think people would have drilled into the detail of "low exposure risk" of "2 in 10,000" in a "certain age group" and then gone AHA when they noticed the figures 1.1 against 0.8???
They would not. And besides, even if they did (and they wouldn't) the JCVI would just say yes we said there is a miniscule risk, but the benefits of everyone getting vaxed ASAP outweigh these tiny risks, in terms of transmission, suppression, countering hesitancy. And that would be entirely reasonable as a response
Instead the British government has announced a British vaccine is dangerous, That is the signal going around the world. It is monumental folly. I hope my fears are wrong.
Yes, they would have noticed.
This is the age of the Internet. Everything is out there. And lots of people entertaining themselves mining the data.
You have 2 choices in such circumstance -
- Bury the story in the style of a bad airport novel. This has a small problem. It never works. - Come out ahead of it. Tell your story first.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
The problem with that idea, is that
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed. - The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
You really think people would have drilled into the detail of "low exposure risk" of "2 in 10,000" in a "certain age group" and then gone AHA when they noticed the figures 1.1 against 0.8???
They would not. And besides, even if they did (and they wouldn't) the JCVI would just say yes we said there is a miniscule risk, but the benefits of everyone getting vaxed ASAP outweigh these tiny risks, in terms of transmission, suppression, countering hesitancy. And that would be entirely reasonable as a response
Instead the British government has announced a British vaccine is dangerous, That is the signal going around the world. It is monumental folly. I hope my fears are wrong.
I don't know about the rest of the world but as I said yesterday, over here the only people getting excited by it are those who were already not inclined to get the vaccine. I'm not sure it's going to make a huge amount of difference and for the under 30s group in general they've raised the value of the other three vaccines so all things being rational it may actually increase vaccination rates for that group.
Its graduates include Mr Macron himself and ex-presidents François Hollande and Jacques Chirac.
Pulling up that ladder, eh?
Optics are tricky since (I assume) he went there but the idea is to replace a ladder with a trampoline. Wider and can take far more people. Instead of one person climbing, ten bounce.
The truth is we have already long passed the point of sharing, the nationalism has ensured this mistake, because the longer it’s out there in the rest of the world mutating the bigger the threat it is to us and what we are doing.
There's a cartoon that neatly encapsulates that sentiment...
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
The problem with that idea, is that
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed. - The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
You really think people would have drilled into the detail of "low exposure risk" of "2 in 10,000" in a "certain age group" and then gone AHA when they noticed the figures 1.1 against 0.8???
They would not. And besides, even if they did (and they wouldn't) the JCVI would just say yes we said there is a miniscule risk, but the benefits of everyone getting vaxed ASAP outweigh these tiny risks, in terms of transmission, suppression, countering hesitancy. And that would be entirely reasonable as a response
Instead the British government has announced a British vaccine is dangerous, That is the signal going around the world. It is monumental folly. I hope my fears are wrong.
Yes of course they would drill into that detail. There are entire communities dedicated to digging out anything to substantiate their claims.
If the facts actually backed the antivaxxers and the MHRA covered them up it would destroy confidence in everything. It would be telling the world antivaxxers were right and the government was covering it up.
You're insane if you think that's a good idea.
That idiotic, bumbling press conference yesterday will kill several thousand people worldwide. End of.
"RECALLING that Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom
The Withdrawal Agreement, as ratified by the EU, the RoI, the UK and as hosted on the EU's own website says it explicitly. Northern Ireland is part of the customs territory of the United Kingdom, there are no ifs or buts about that, that is international law. Checkmate.
What am I wrong on precisely you pillock? Checkmate?!! I doubt you would win against a five year old in a game of draughts! Actually you would probably find "snap" a little perplexing
You were wrong in falsely claiming that NI was part of the EU's customs territory not the UK's. It is explicitly recognised as the other way around, NI is part of the UK's territory.
The NI Protocol was quite clever. If there's no societal difficulties likely to persist from the Protocol then who cares, life goes on.
If there are societal difficulties likely to persist then the Protocol Article 16 gives the UK (and the EU) unilateral rights to do whatever it considers necessary to resolve those difficulties.
So either way we have no issue. If there's no difficulties there's no problem. If there are difficulties (and everyone agrees there are) we invoke Article 16 and move on.
That's why it was clever negotiations.
Much from you about this today. Energizer bunny.
In fact I get your position completely, but let’s take the lipstick off the pig. The EU’s biggest red line in Brexit was to protect the integrity of their single market. Since all sides – absolutely everyone - agreed there mustn’t under any circumstances be a border in Ireland it meant a border in the Irish Sea. That solemn undertaking was expressed in the Protocol. Letter and spirit.
You are saying we should renege on this. We should now refuse to implement the Irish Sea border and present them with a ‘devil and deep blue sea’ choice – put up a border in Ireland after all or accept a violation of the integrity of the single market. Which, I repeat, was their biggest red line, perhaps their one and only genuine red line.
“Tough,” you might say. Or “Cool, we win!” We protect the UK single market and if they put a border across Ireland and it causes trouble that’s “on them” (to use the rather chippy phrase that the more bumptious Leavers seem to like). Also “on them” if they choose to live with a hole in their single market. Ditto if they take us to court and get embroiled in that for years. All on them.
And you’re right in a sense. It is on them. It’s on them for assuming that the UK government was negotiating the Brexit deal in good faith. For assuming that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were not a political incarnation of Delboy and Rodney.
But now they know better, and so does the rest of the world. It’s a “win” at the price of looking like a rogue nation that has chosen to defect from normal good practice in international affairs and instead conduct itself according to the grubby character of the individual who just happens to be our PM at this moment.
Yay.
Except that your precious EU, so keen to defend the integrity of the single market, decided to put a border across Ireland and the single market WITHOUT EVEN ASKING IRELAND and only changed their minds when told, in slow simple words, that this was the most moronic act in EU history, which is quite some feat in itself
Bollocks to all this "red line holding", "legalistic" "rules-based organisation" crapola about the EU.
The EU is nothing of the sort. It bends and breaks rules all the time. From the Fiskal Kompakt to Spitzenkandidat, from letting Greece in the euro to shattering the rules on ECB borrowing to the smuggling of the EU Constitution past the voters by ignoring referendums, it is a grotesque bureaucratic racket. Fuck the EU. They are owed no debt of honour, the word is not in the EU lexicon.
What the EU is, however, is a pragmatic, slow-moving entity which serves to increase the wealth of its major states, especially France and Germany, even if it sometimes fails at this, quite badly.
It is time for that pragmatism to take over. If they can adopt an entire Constitution via a swindle, they can ignore a few chocolate hobnobs crossing a customs desk in Carrickfergus
The EU does what is in their best interest.
Currently the EU believes it is in their best interest that no chocolate hobnobs enter the EU (including Northern Ireland) without a whole lot of extra paperwork.
The question is how do you change the game so it's in the EU's interest to ignore those hobnobs and I really don't think there is a way of doing so that Boris could politically accept.
Are there societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Blimey, I go off to do a bit of work and come back on an hour later and you are still spouting shit on a subject (and a complex geography) where you have already more than amply demonstrated you have zero knowledge or perspective on. Do shut up on the subject. Please.
How about you answer the questions? I didn't say anything, it was just questions there. If I'm so ignorant why don't you share your ample knowledge with us, oh enlightened one.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16.
Three simple questions.
Well maybe some clever person has creating some trouble as part of their thinking
Well yes that is entirely predictable. Indeed it was what was threatened, though mainly from the Nationalist PoV ignoring the Loyalists who are now giving as good as the Nationalists threatened. Entirely predictable.
It is why I said all along that the negotiations should have included all relevant parties, not just May and Barnier early on.
Despite the fact that I don't recall a single senior Sinn Fein politician suggesting some kind of return to violence, Dissident republicans are not exactly the most effective going and are well managed by the police & MI5 and despite the fact there was never a plan to put customs posts on the border, yet some people kept talking about customs posts on the border.
I said it last night that the current patchy send the kids out riot tactics wouldn't really have an impact and if loyalist groups really wanted to get people to get serious they needed to kill an EU official.
Yet somehow, after about 5 nights of trouble going on elsewhere, suddenly everyone is noticing. Why is that? Was it the severity? Not so sure, wasn't THAT bad. Was it the fact that there was some interface trouble with both communities out having a go? Or was it as I suggested, geography, right in the cockpit Belfast heartland of loyalism and didn't happen without someone's say so.
I'd rather not derail this thread on Ireland, which generates more heat than light.
And I'm certainly not an expert on trade.
But the vast bulk of trade can be managed through a trusted trader / self-decleration / spot-check system. And you can use intelligence led monitoring to cover the rest.
The free movement of people is already covered by the CTA.
And yet such an easy solution eludes us - because it isn't based in reality. The bulk of Irish trade is food. We need to completely align our SPS standards with the EU and do a deal to remove the checks. Our standards ARE completely aligned, but apparently we can't agree a deal because at some point in the future the EU may increase their standards just to spite us.
Even outside of food, there are naysayers on this forum including your good self decrying the idea of agreed alignment which is the basis for trusted trader / self-declaration systems.
There is plenty of relevance to Scotland though - England thinking that it can drag savage appendages like NI and Scotland around to do something stupid against their will. The big push towards another independence vote up here is largely thanks to Brexit (and the Boris corrupt organisation), and they are literally rioting in NI.
"Respect democracy" doesn't work when its imposed destruction.
We don't "need" to align our SPS with the EU.
It would be entirely possible to diverge with the EU but to recognise each others's SPS as "equivalent" and remove the need for checks etc . That may affect the "integrity" of the Single Market but so be it, we would be making the same compromise in return. That is a genuine compromise, not chaining one party to another like a slave.
Mate, you keep dancing on this same pinhead. If our standards are "equivalent" then it means they are close enough to the required standard. Which they are now. And will be in the future as we declare that standards will only ever be increased. So we could do this as you suggest, but it is declaring that our standards will different *but directly comparable* to EU ones. Which you won't accept.
We can't wildly diverge our standards and recognise an equivalence which isn't there.
Yes we can. We can recognise our standards as currently equivalent but not commit to alignment, with a dispute system if divergence occurs in the future.
No commitments then, and if divergence leads to issues in the future you cross that bridge when you get there. If it doesn't, there's no issue.
We can do whatever we want - the issue is so can the EU and because we won't agree to the EU's terms the EU are imposing the WTO rules they impose on imports from all third party countries.
Indeed.
So our choice is to remove all Irish Sea border checks and then let the EU come up with a solution. If they impose checks on the Irish land border that's their choice. If they don't, then the problem is solved - NI is in UK and NI has open border with the EU.
Either way we do nothing and let the EU act or blink.
I don't think we have any checks on our side of the Irish sea. But how do you propose to remove the checks in Dublin or (for that matter) Belfast.
I think his argument is that if the RoI was to impose a hard border to do RoI-NI checks following abolition (or a 'technological solution' improvement) of GB-NI checks, they're welcome to do so (they won't do so). Similar for the EU (also not stupid enough to do so).
Then we reach the only sustainable outcome for NI - a largely free border with both the UK and RoI, with some smuggling happening. The key to reaching that is keeping the EU utterly disinterested, while the parties with skin in the game find a workable solution.
Precisely!
It has been the obvious and only solution all along.
Sadly some people are so far up the EU's backside that they actually convince themselves that the UK must align with the EU as a real solution, as opposed to this.
Indeed. "Why won't you accept a long-term solution where you allow smuggling". Every responsible nation and trading area is happy to accept smuggling....
Every responsible nation and trading area accepts that smuggling is a fact of life and does their best to police and interdict.
You are taking a zero-COVID approach to policy
Correction - the EU are taking a zero-COVID approach to that policy (and that is their right).
So what is their approach on, say, the Polish / Ukranian border?
It’s shocking that when there is a nationalistic angle on vaccines, being able to play it straight goes out the window.
The truth is we have already long passed the point of sharing, the nationalism has ensured this mistake, because the longer it’s out there in the rest of the world mutating the bigger the threat it is to us and what we are doing.
The nationalistic angle on vaccines is that we have a national interest in reaching herd immunity so that we can get our economy functioning again without people dying.
Your second point is logically wrong. Sharing an insignificant number of vaccines does nothing to reduce the risk of mutations elsewhere.
I wonder whether there will be common underlying conditions between the people who have had the adverse effects to AZ?
Jonathan Van Tam needs to go to jail. This is what they have done, alongside Macron and the "German health official" who briefed Handelsblatt
?! What nonsense. The MHRA have played a completely straight and sensible bat with regards to vaccinations.
Let's wait and see. If there is no uptick in vaccine hesitancy as a result of this, I have offered to pour mild curry sauce on my gonads. Which I think is fair. If, however, vax skepticism DOES increase, then you have to hit your genitals repeatedly with a boomerang. At noon. Half way down Piccadilly
Deal?
The counterfactual isn't that there is a (tiny tiny) problem with the AZ vaccine though, it's a massive cover up. That wouldn't end well.
It's also impossible. No way a cover up would stick. It's completely unethical to recommend a vaccine (any medication/intervention) where the risks appear to outweigh the benefits. To believe that everyone with access to the data would toe the line is fantasy. Even if they did, there are other teams, other countries. Any cover up would - rightly - fail and no one would trust any vaccine or medication in this country ever again. And with good reason.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
I agree but think it could have been handled better with a simple provision change in the system and a press release rather than a big public press conference. A proper paper explaining the risk differential would have been fine.
The problem with that idea, is that
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed. - The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
You really think people would have drilled into the detail of "low exposure risk" of "2 in 10,000" in a "certain age group" and then gone AHA when they noticed the figures 1.1 against 0.8???
They would not. And besides, even if they did (and they wouldn't) the JCVI would just say yes we said there is a miniscule risk, but the benefits of everyone getting vaxed ASAP outweigh these tiny risks, in terms of transmission, suppression, countering hesitancy. And that would be entirely reasonable as a response
Instead the British government has announced a British vaccine is dangerous, That is the signal going around the world. It is monumental folly. I hope my fears are wrong.
Yes of course they would drill into that detail. There are entire communities dedicated to digging out anything to substantiate their claims.
If the facts actually backed the antivaxxers and the MHRA covered them up it would destroy confidence in everything. It would be telling the world antivaxxers were right and the government was covering it up.
You're insane if you think that's a good idea.
That idiotic, bumbling press conference yesterday will kill several thousand people worldwide. End of.
That sensible, transparent press conference will save several thousand lives in the UK by ensuring continued trust in the independence and integrity of our regulators.
Comments
In a calm, clear and measured way he tells us we should NOT wear masks, and that he has a "friend in Hong Kong" who agrees that masks are pointless. That would be the Hong Kong where everyone wears a fucking mask, and they have a Covid death rate per million of 27, as against our death rate of 1,862?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-52153145
This isn''t even the "noble lie" of Fauci. If you listen to all JVT's early lectures on masks, he doesn't grasp the basic concept that masks are worn mainly to reduce spread, not to protect the wearer. You wear a mask to protect OTHERS, they wear a mask to protect YOU
Moreover, as late as March 2020 he did not understand that Covid transmits asymptomatically - another crucial concept - even tho this was being reported in the literature as early as mid January 2020
He is a witless berk, who has probably killed a few thousand people all by himself
We've had this discussion on here before. London is a curate's egg wrt quality of life. Greenwich, Chiswick, Richmond, Highgate - wonderful places. Catford, Lewisham, Stratford, Stockwell - I would rather live somewhere else. But then those choices may say as much about what I value.
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16?
Our descendants will think we were insane.
Deal?
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/04/04/andrew-yangs-asian-american-superpower-479011
Same thing with @Philip_Thompson. Same thing with some other Leavers.
In fact this - wallowing smugly in "Boris" having conned the EU on Ireland - is a good 'tell' of which Leavers are hardcore eurofoamics. The ones who are driven above all else by hatred of the EU and Europe.
Not all are by any means, so it's good to have a way to recognize them.
If there are societal difficulties, then one has to wonder why they didn't see it coming, and thus why they didn't see A16 coming?
Peace first. Solemn, sober, serious. What a sad situation. That it aids our position is entirely coincidental milord.
On NI - I don't think anyone is seriously proposing getting rid of it while there is a majority in NI who want to remain part of the UK. But should sentiment tip the other way, I think the mainland UK will wave it off with a barely suppressed sigh of relief.
Most mainlanders haven't even been to NI. There is much less emotional connection to it than there is to any other region of the UK.
Job done. No lies told. No cover up
The lock’s arrived. Enjoy!
So it's not banned as of next Monday as you imply - it's a continuation of the current ban
He kept his hat on indoors.
We have trust in vaccinations here for a reason: the people making the recommendations are competent and trustworthy. Undo that and we've got far bigger problems than a few Covid vaccine refusers.
Given the existence of an alternative (the other vaccines) it would be hard to justify continuing to use the one where there is a slight apparent risk.
This all rather reminds me of the change in the advice about blanket prescribing aspirin in older people, because of it's benefits in stopping heart attacks.
This was stopped because it was calculated that the side effects of taking aspirin regularly outweighed the benefits with respect to heart attacks.
The UK has done well in the vaccine situation. This is, in part, because of trust that the regulator is independent of government and that the regulator has a clearly defined mandate and ethical framework.
The way to maintain such trust is to get out in from of any problem, deal with it and publish the decision. Not bury the problem in a disused toilet marked "Beware of the leopard".
It doesn't anywhere else where Boris's Brexit Agreement has caused extra paperwork.
Same to @Leon. Same to all Leavers who are doing it. Which, I repeat, is by no means all.
At least make the effort. Won't fool me, of course, but others might not be paying such close attention.
Do you think there are currently societal difficulties?
If yes, are they likely to persist?
If yes, why not invoke Article 16.
Three simple questions.
I probably also inferred that like with other matters, you know jack shit about Northern Ireland or Ireland, or the consequences of the type of shit-for-brains "solution" that, oddly enough, involves us jingoistically waving two fingers at the EU, and by extension the Irish. The latter is really NOT a good idea, unless you care nothing for the peace process. I imagine that like many Col. Blimp type paper tigers you would run a mile at any non keyboard based warriors.
At this point people start with bullshit about how everyone needs to live in tiny flats. For The Greater Good.
The slight problem with that is the people living in London. Who have repeatedly forfeited the confidence of The Planners. They look at the award winning machines for living, built for them by geniuses.... and say "Fuck that. I want a Victorian house."
So if the Protocol is causing difficulties, as had been warned about, then its time to put peace first. As we committed to do. We should emphasise our commitment to peace first.
Your arguments are otherwise nonsense. Their science is nonsense. The only way you can argue AZ is more dangerous for the young than Covid is when there is "low exposure of 2 Covid cases in 10,000". Which is like announcing it's "fine to play on the M1" on Christmas Day
Their science also ignores the benefits of lowered transmission, from all and every vaccine, and the impact on vax hesitancy of their decision around the world (not just in the UK). I see Australia, this morning, has limited AZ to over 50s. The Philippines, which has a terrible Covid problem, has suspended it for anyone under 60
This is the cheapest vaccine available, it is made not for profit, its IP has been exported for free, especially to India, so they can churn it out by the billion. It can be stored in a simple fridge
We are staring at a potential disaster because Jonathan "don't wear masks" Van Tam is a ******** ***** *****
For a few years now, it's been very unprofitable to mine Bitcoin unless you're finding a way for someone else to pay the power bill.
Again its all workable in practice with goodwill. As regards policing in the country which remarkably seems to have been missed by people on the mainland in how much ire that situation caused, that's a different story.
It's a very different risk equation to the MHRA.
Pulling up that ladder, eh?
Australia have different risk ratios to Europe too.
Great news for Oxbridge, Harvard etc...
Intriguing move
That is why I want all parties to come together to get a messy compromise.
It is your side of the debate that wanted a "simple solution" like "the UK should align with Europe". That's not an option, so we need a sane compromise not one of your simple solutions.
https://twitter.com/belfast_1979/status/1379868368111595529?s=20
Boris could win it if he chose to, but amongst other reasons to not have it, I also think he sees himself in opposition to Cameron and won't do anything Cameron did.
If it does happen, 45% Yes.
It is why I said all along that the negotiations should have included all relevant parties, not just May and Barnier early on.
- The anti-vax types would have kicked off when they noticed.
- The press would have demanded answers
... and we would have ended up with the press conference we had yesterday, from a worse starting position.
As with everything in the EU/UK relationship it takes two to tango. Neither side free from blame and both sides need to hold to previously agreed actions. For the EU that means ensuring there is a robust trusted trader scheme that captures 98% of trade as they agreed to and for the UK it means dropping the unilateral exemption on exports to NI once that scheme is available and ensuring that nominated trusted traders are abiding by the rules of the scheme.
Hong Kong, March 12, 2020:
"David Hui, a respiratory medicine expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong who studied the 2002 to 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) extensively, says it’s “common sense” that wearing a mask would protect against infectious diseases like COVID-19.
“If you are standing in front of someone who is sick, the mask will give some protection,” Hui says. “The mask provides a barrier from respiratory droplets, which is predominantly how the virus spreads.”
He also says that the role of a face mask may be especially important in the epidemic due to the nature of the virus. Patients with COVID-19 often have mild or even no symptoms, and some researchers believe it can also be transmitted when patients are asymptomatic—meaning patients can be contagious and don’t know they’re sick."
"Joseph Tsang, an infectious disease specialist who also worked as a consultant for Hong Kong's Hospital Authority, says the purpose of wearing a mask is two-fold. “Wearing a mask is not just for protecting yourself from getting infected, but also minimizing the chance of potential infection harboring in your body from spreading to people around you,” he tells TIME."
https://time.com/5799964/coronavirus-face-mask-asia-us/
Jonathan Van Tam is either a liar or an idiot. I have thought for a while it was the former. I suspect, after yesterday, that he is the latter. And yet you trust this gormless fool with your life, and the public health of the nation
3500 people dying a day excess across the continent of Europe.
0 excess in the UK and Australia.
Not the same thing at all.
What I struggle to understand is people who say: the facts on the ground have changed, but we must stick fast to a structure which no longer works as intended. Even if it brings the house down. I can only assume that those who do have another agenda. Which is sad - and not a bit frightening - that they are willing to risk peace and other people's lives to achieve their political ends.
Far better to say that the assumptions on which the GFA was created no longer hold true so let's look for a solution that achieves the GFA's objectives.
(edit: it will satisfy the Unionists, because it means no checks GB/NI, free movement under the CTA, and no checks on the vast bulk of traffic NI/RoI. The only cost is a bit of smuggling... which - shock horror - happens already because of different VAT regimes. It's so perfect that there must be something wrong...)
They would not. And besides, even if they did (and they wouldn't) the JCVI would just say yes we said there is a miniscule risk, but the benefits of everyone getting vaxed ASAP outweigh these tiny risks, in terms of transmission, suppression, countering hesitancy. And that would be entirely reasonable as a response
Instead the British government has announced a British vaccine is dangerous, That is the signal going around the world. It is monumental folly. I hope my fears are wrong.
The Sun and other newspapers got it wrong, ramming the blatant spin approach isn’t going to convince people. The hand of silly nationalism was behind today’s silly headlines. The more persuasive approach would have been to have stuck with the truth, rapid reaction on a balanced and targeted approach to help those with greater risk of vaccine issue who have less issue of covid at same time. Overall figures including everyone should not have been used, quick and targeted measures to protect those most at risk, also due to the wonderful fact there are other options should have been the story and the headlines from broadcast media/24 to paper.
It’s shocking that when there is a nationalistic angle on vaccines, being able to play it straight goes out the window.
The truth is we have already long passed the point of sharing, the nationalism has ensured this mistake, because the longer it’s out there in the rest of the world mutating the bigger the threat it is to us and what we are doing.
"So much for the "not for profit" vaccine. He he he....."
If the facts actually backed the antivaxxers and the MHRA covered them up it would destroy confidence in everything. It would be telling the world antivaxxers were right and the government was covering it up.
You're insane if you think that's a good idea.
This is the age of the Internet. Everything is out there. And lots of people entertaining themselves mining the data.
You have 2 choices in such circumstance -
- Bury the story in the style of a bad airport novel. This has a small problem. It never works.
- Come out ahead of it. Tell your story first.
I said it last night that the current patchy send the kids out riot tactics wouldn't really have an impact and if loyalist groups really wanted to get people to get serious they needed to kill an EU official.
Yet somehow, after about 5 nights of trouble going on elsewhere, suddenly everyone is noticing. Why is that? Was it the severity? Not so sure, wasn't THAT bad. Was it the fact that there was some interface trouble with both communities out having a go? Or was it as I suggested, geography, right in the cockpit Belfast heartland of loyalism and didn't happen without someone's say so.
Your second point is logically wrong. Sharing an insignificant number of vaccines does nothing to reduce the risk of mutations elsewhere.