This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
The BBC, particularly in the East, surely cannot be described as ‘left-wing’ by anyone, other than the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg!
Perhaps not left-wing, but it certainly has a particular set of values which it regards as self-evident. It is very keen on diversity as long as all the people it employs share those values. Questions are asked and programmes commissioned on the assumption that those values are so obviously true that if anyone disagrees the task is to find out why those people are wrong/lying, rather than to investigate to see if they might have a point.
I think that this is difficult because there is an argument that a national broadcaster should regard some values as self evident. Equality for women, anti-racism, the unacceptability of homophobia are perhaps simple examples. Those challenging those sort of values should in turn be challenged robustly because they are "British" values.
Where I think the BBC has lost its way is that it has applied those values in a highly simplistic way. So, the BBC has been extremely slow to report much of the Rotherham sex abuse stories because of fear that this might encourage racism, it has not wanted to challenge sexual discrimination in the Islamic community and it has been uncritical of much of the nonsense that comes from Stonewall. In many cases they have equiperated fairness with neutrality and this is simply wrong where British values are not being upheld.
I accept that it is a difficult balance, we are a diverse and multicultural nation and the BBC should reflect that but my criticism of them would rather be that they have not stood up for our values enough rather than they have been biased towards them.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
It's a very old argument in a new guise. Once upon a time, the argument was that the lower classes should not be enfranchised (or alternatively, the franchise should be weighted in favour of the wealthy) because then they'd just vote for all sorts of free stuff.
Similar debate in the lead up to the US constitution. Though they preferred "better sort of people" to the term wealthy.
Start the Putney Debate Party - enfranchisement only for those with "a stake in the Publick Goode"
Headquarters at Putney Pies - just across the street from Putney Church.
On a serious note, the Roman "democracy" was actually an oligarchy massively weighted in favour of the rich. Quite specifically - no elections to the Senate, just a wealth qualification. Voting by tribes - think gerrymandering districts but on an epic scale. Oh, and moderate any ructions by a bit of slaughter of the lower classes.
The reason Boris Johnson won a majority in 2019 was mainly because the Left vote splintered a bit from the 2017 election, but the Tories did do a little bit better among 35 to 54 year olds.
What is clear, however, is that Brexit has accentuated the age divide.
Brexit, or Corbyn? Those old enough to remember when there were lots of Corbyn-types around, knew it wasn’t for them - whereas the younger voters were taken in by the magic grandpa.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. PM Corbyn was a pretty frightening thought for those of us that can remember the last time the middle to far left held sway in the country. Although I am a Brexit-sceptic, I can understand why some people saw it as something "patriotic". If you then amplify this by Labour having a leader who seemed to be ashamed of his country , you can see why older voters would have been repelled from voting Labour, and either stayed at home or voted blue.
You know Nige, if you're in London, we should catch up over a beer. I think, despite our different positions on brexit, we'd get on well.
The concern shouldn’t be about age per se, but about economic activity. That the economically inactive apparently have a stranglehold on our democracy is certainly not a healthy state of affairs, and leads to distorted policies that protect them whilst shifting the burden onto those still contributing to growing the economy.
A glaring example would be council tax support, where nowadays both the unemployed and the lowest income of working families have to pay a significant proportion of the council tax whereas millions of pensioners still have their council tax paid for them in full by order of HMG.
Who are these pensioners not paying council tax? Asking because I want to make sure my parents aren't missing out on something.
Ultimately, the problem is that no democracy has ever gone down the road of only letting net tax payers vote. Should those employed in the public sector get a vote?
I was surprised by that comment and have not heard it before
There is a reduction if the pensioner loses their spouse but not paying Council tax at all is not the case
I would need evidence of this to be honest
There are also reductions if you are on benefits, pension credits , etc I believe
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
I don't watch Sky so I don't know about their output. The idea that the BBC's news output is leftwing is laughable, with smug Tory Nick Robinson, government spokesperson Laura Kuensberg etc. I can't listen to it. I have Magic on in the car to keep my blood pressure down.
BBC is not left wing, but it is achingly metropolitan elite, woke etc and out of touch with a lot of country. The nadir for me is Countryfile, which is a programme made by Townies, for Townies about days out in the country for Townies. It has no relation to its predecessor, The Farming Programme? My sister, who worked on farms for years, just laughs at it.
Townyfile is OK, and still has some quite nice articles on it. The person that makes my rural blood boil is that tw*t Chris Packham on "Nature Watch"
Packham is actually very knowledgeable about wildlife even if leftwing
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
The BBC, particularly in the East, surely cannot be described as ‘left-wing’ by anyone, other than the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg!
You must be joking if you think the BBC is balanced
Not managing to be balanced all the time does not mean attempting to maintain balance should just be abandoned.
But the reaction to GB news has been absurd. Some statements from its founders make me doubtful about its motivations and direction, nor is there a market for balanced news i think, but as noted above it's not even broadcast yet - skepticism, sure, but we cannot condemn it yet.
Anything that weakens the BBC stranglehold on news has to be a good thing.
What BBC stranglehold on news? What about news agencies (like Reuters), newspapers and other broadcasters? Will GB News even be a newsgathering operation or will it just be reading out agency reports?
Squareroot 2 is an obsessive, almost to the extent of pottiness, BBC hater. Saddo
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
No, you should stay within the confines of your agricultural commune.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
The fact that, although everybody knew the Wuhan lab was a prime candidate, this knowledge was “tainted” and ignored for a year in the eyes of the media because it was promoted by those of a right leaning tendency, shows how left biased UK and US media are.
A thought experiment:
How would people react differently to the lab leak theory if the lab had been in the USA or Britain or Israel.
Like it
The equivalent in Britain would be a new and unusually nasty form of kittiwake bubonic plague appearing just 2 miles from Porton Down. A plague whose nearest genetic equivalent is only found in kittiwakes on a particular island in the Orkneys, a remote island which, it turns out, was visited for many years by boffins from porton down, who went their specifically to collect samples of kittiwake bubonic plague. So they could take them back to porton down to study, and alter, and to make them unusually nasty
Call me Cap’n Conspiracy, but in this scenario I don’t think many people would be shrugging and saying, ‘oh well, it probably came from a Lidl in Salisbury, shit happens’
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
For example Boris beat Corbyn by a vast 47% margin amongst over 65s in 2019 compared to the 24% margin Cameron beat Ed Miliband by in 2015 amongst retirees
The comparison is quite useful in itself.
But I think it will help perpetuate this idea that over time, demographics favour Labour as older Tory voters die and younger Labour voters turn 18.
Of course if that had been the case, Labour would have had a majority from at the very latest 1992.
Generally the average voter votes Labour from when they get their first vote as they leave school and continue to vote Labour as they attend university, if they do and through their 20s when they are renting free and single and early 30s. By their mid 30s if they are married and have bought their first property they start to consider voting Tory and by the time they reach retirement age in their 60s they will likely own their own home outright and continue voting Tory at every general election until they die
The EU will soon adopt a “code of conduct“ for how 27 should interact with UK. Will force a level of transparency, co-ordination on EU capitals & their dealings with London
Unprecedented for EU to do this with a 3rd country. Shows how European Union trust there is with United Kingdom at moment
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Yep - and it's human nature to want both someone to blame and a simple solution (close the labs!) when it might in fact just be a case of shit happens. Many would find the lab theory most acceptable - we know who to blame and we can do something about it. Second best is pinning it down to a wet market (we know broadly who to blame and we can at least shout at China about doing something about that). Worst is that a bat happened to shit in someones sandwich somewhere. Not much we can do about that (Martin Cruz Smith's Nightwing comes to mind)
Look at the circumstantial evidence. Jeez
Don't get me wrong, the lab theory is entirely plausible. I'm merely saying that, in the absence of more than circumstantial evidence, we should be careful because the lab theory is naturally appealing.
If it was the lab, we'll probably never prove it, in the absence of official Chinese desire to expose it, a whistleblower or identification of a patient zero closely connected to the lab (the last probably requires official Chinese desire to find the source, too). If it was a random bat* somewhere, we're also likely to struggle to pin it down, in the absence of identifying a patient zero close to a colony of bats who are all found to have the virus. We (China, the international community) should try though, nonetheless, as working out what happened could be very valuable, particularly if it was a lab issue and a non-obvious error.
*For 'bat' read any creature, need not be a bat of course.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
It's a very old argument in a new guise. Once upon a time, the argument was that the lower classes should not be enfranchised (or alternatively, the franchise should be weighted in favour of the wealthy) because then they'd just vote for all sorts of free stuff.
Similar debate in the lead up to the US constitution. Though they preferred "better sort of people" to the term wealthy.
Start the Putney Debate Party - enfranchisement only for those with "a stake in the Publick Goode"
Headquarters at Putney Pies - just across the street from Putney Church.
On a serious note, the Roman "democracy" was actually an oligarchy massively weighted in favour of the rich. Quite specifically - no elections to the Senate, just a wealth qualification. Voting by tribes - think gerrymandering districts but on an epic scale. Oh, and moderate any ructions by a bit of slaughter of the lower classes.
The single strongest motivating force for the confederation of rebellious states getting together to agree the US constitution was their leaders' fear that without it, the protection of private property would prove impossible.
Which, apart from the inconvenient detail of slavery, might not have been the worst of motivations.
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
For example Boris beat Corbyn by a vast 47% margin amongst over 65s in 2019 compared to the 24% margin Cameron beat Ed Miliband by in 2015 amongst retirees
I would say that the British Electoral Stdy has a much bigger sample and is a better guide than the Ipsos survey
They are not necessarily contradictory, given Labour had a vast lead amongst under 35s and the Tories only had a narrower lead amongst 35 to 54s Labour would still lead under 55s overall even if in reality their lead was really only with under 35s.
It was only amongst over 55s and retirees the Tories really had a vast lead in 2019
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
The EU will soon adopt a “code of conduct“ for how 27 should interact with UK. Will force a level of transparency, co-ordination on EU capitals & their dealings with London
Unprecedented for EU to do this with a 3rd country. Shows how European Union trust there is with United Kingdom at moment
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
Jesus Christ. Do some reading. Even the Wuhan institute of virology admits the nearest ancestor is the bat in the cave in Yunnan, where they went to get bats for many years. To study novel bat coronaviruses
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
I don't watch Sky so I don't know about their output. The idea that the BBC's news output is leftwing is laughable, with smug Tory Nick Robinson, government spokesperson Laura Kuensberg etc. I can't listen to it. I have Magic on in the car to keep my blood pressure down.
BBC is not left wing, but it is achingly metropolitan elite, woke etc and out of touch with a lot of country. The nadir for me is Countryfile, which is a programme made by Townies, for Townies about days out in the country for Townies. It has no relation to its predecessor, The Farming Programme? My sister, who worked on farms for years, just laughs at it.
Townyfile is OK, and still has some quite nice articles on it. The person that makes my rural blood boil is that tw*t Chris Packham on "Nature Watch"
Packham is actually very knowledgeable about wildlife even if leftwing
I've never had occasion to care about Packham's politics, other than thinking that he's probably Green.
What always strikes me about Countryfile is that most if not all the interviewees speak in Received Pronunciation. They were in NW Wales last Sunday; I know the accent is not the same as S Wales but you'd have been hard-pressed to think they were anywhere but one of the nicer parts of the Home Counties.
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
I don't watch Sky so I don't know about their output. The idea that the BBC's news output is leftwing is laughable, with smug Tory Nick Robinson, government spokesperson Laura Kuensberg etc. I can't listen to it. I have Magic on in the car to keep my blood pressure down.
BBC is not left wing, but it is achingly metropolitan elite, woke etc and out of touch with a lot of country. The nadir for me is Countryfile, which is a programme made by Townies, for Townies about days out in the country for Townies. It has no relation to its predecessor, The Farming Programme? My sister, who worked on farms for years, just laughs at it.
I think the BBC simply take the view that since minorities pay the license fee it shouldn't go out of its way to offend them. What you see as achingly woke I would ascribe mostly to a desire not to offend anyone. Of course the problem is that some people will find that inoffensiveness offensive. It's a lot easier for newspapers who can be as unpleasant as they like as long as they don't offend their (very narrow) readership. I can't comment on Countryfile as I've never watched it.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
Jesus Christ. Do some reading. Even the Wuhan institute of virology admits the nearest ancestor is the bat in the cave in Yunnan, where they went to get bats for many years. To study novel bat coronaviruses
"Nearest ancestor" isn't even close to being the same thing as 'it came from the cave'. And the term ancestor is being misused if you think it means that it did.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
Jesus Christ. Do some reading. Even the Wuhan institute of virology admits the nearest ancestor is the bat in the cave in Yunnan, where they went to get bats for many years. To study novel bat coronaviruses
"Nearest ancestor" isn't even close to being the same thing as 'it came from the cave'. And the term ancestor is being misused if you think it means that it did.
Maybe we should all lay off Leon, including me.
After all this is better than his obsession with aliens.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
The BBC, particularly in the East, surely cannot be described as ‘left-wing’ by anyone, other than the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg!
Perhaps not left-wing, but it certainly has a particular set of values which it regards as self-evident. It is very keen on diversity as long as all the people it employs share those values. Questions are asked and programmes commissioned on the assumption that those values are so obviously true that if anyone disagrees the task is to find out why those people are wrong/lying, rather than to investigate to see if they might have a point.
I think that this is difficult because there is an argument that a national broadcaster should regard some values as self evident. Equality for women, anti-racism, the unacceptability of homophobia are perhaps simple examples. Those challenging those sort of values should in turn be challenged robustly because they are "British" values.
Where I think the BBC has lost its way is that it has applied those values in a highly simplistic way. So, the BBC has been extremely slow to report much of the Rotherham sex abuse stories because of fear that this might encourage racism, it has not wanted to challenge sexual discrimination in the Islamic community and it has been uncritical of much of the nonsense that comes from Stonewall. In many cases they have equiperated fairness with neutrality and this is simply wrong where British values are not being upheld.
I accept that it is a difficult balance, we are a diverse and multicultural nation and the BBC should reflect that but my criticism of them would rather be that they have not stood up for our values enough rather than they have been biased towards them.
I’d agree with almost all of that, apart from your mis-use of the word “equiperated”.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
The fact that, although everybody knew the Wuhan lab was a prime candidate, this knowledge was “tainted” and ignored for a year in the eyes of the media because it was promoted by those of a right leaning tendency, shows how left biased UK and US media are.
A thought experiment:
How would people react differently to the lab leak theory if the lab had been in the USA or Britain or Israel.
I'd have more confidence that it was being investigated thoroughly and would come to light if true. Partly due to having a bit more faith in the governments/arms-length investigatory powers - or at least that public demand for an investigation would be unstoppable - and partly due to thinking it more likely there would be a whistleblower given the (fear of) consequences for said whistelblower would be less severe than they could be in China.
Having said that, a cover-up or at least a cover-up attempt would still be quite possible.
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
I don't watch Sky so I don't know about their output. The idea that the BBC's news output is leftwing is laughable, with smug Tory Nick Robinson, government spokesperson Laura Kuensberg etc. I can't listen to it. I have Magic on in the car to keep my blood pressure down.
BBC is not left wing, but it is achingly metropolitan elite, woke etc and out of touch with a lot of country. The nadir for me is Countryfile, which is a programme made by Townies, for Townies about days out in the country for Townies. It has no relation to its predecessor, The Farming Programme? My sister, who worked on farms for years, just laughs at it.
Townyfile is OK, and still has some quite nice articles on it. The person that makes my rural blood boil is that tw*t Chris Packham on "Nature Watch"
Packham is actually very knowledgeable about wildlife even if leftwing
I've never had occasion to care about Packham's politics, other than thinking that he's probably Green.
What always strikes me about Countryfile is that most if not all the interviewees speak in Received Pronunciation. They were in NW Wales last Sunday; I know the accent is not the same as S Wales but you'd have been hard-pressed to think they were anywhere but one of the nicer parts of the Home Counties.
To be honest this is the thing I hate most about the BBC: the tyranny of RP, the most horrible accent in Britain.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Yep - and it's human nature to want both someone to blame and a simple solution (close the labs!) when it might in fact just be a case of shit happens. Many would find the lab theory most acceptable - we know who to blame and we can do something about it. Second best is pinning it down to a wet market (we know broadly who to blame and we can at least shout at China about doing something about that). Worst is that a bat happened to shit in someones sandwich somewhere. Not much we can do about that (Martin Cruz Smith's Nightwing comes to mind)
Look at the circumstantial evidence. Jeez
I'm sure lots of people have had your "mad theory" in the back of their minds.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
Jesus Christ. Do some reading. Even the Wuhan institute of virology admits the nearest ancestor is the bat in the cave in Yunnan, where they went to get bats for many years. To study novel bat coronaviruses
"Nearest ancestor" isn't even close to being the same thing as 'it came from the cave'. And the term ancestor is being misused if you think it means that it did.
Maybe we should all lay off Leon, including me.
After all this is better than his obsession with aliens.
Don’t lay off. The dumb mulish stupidity is entertaining me
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
Jesus Christ. Do some reading. Even the Wuhan institute of virology admits the nearest ancestor is the bat in the cave in Yunnan, where they went to get bats for many years. To study novel bat coronaviruses
"Nearest ancestor" isn't even close to being the same thing as 'it came from the cave'. And the term ancestor is being misused if you think it means that it did.
Maybe we should all lay off Leon, including me.
After all this is better than his obsession with aliens.
Don’t lay off. The dumb mulish stupidity is entertaining me
There has to be a reason why you persist in it. I suppose. Though I'd call it polished stupidity.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
Jesus Christ. Do some reading. Even the Wuhan institute of virology admits the nearest ancestor is the bat in the cave in Yunnan, where they went to get bats for many years. To study novel bat coronaviruses
"Nearest ancestor" isn't even close to being the same thing as 'it came from the cave'. And the term ancestor is being misused if you think it means that it did.
Maybe we should all lay off Leon, including me.
After all this is better than his obsession with aliens.
To be fair to Leon, the lab leak theory of Covid is I think the most plausible one currently, although I would buy the cock up version much more readily than the conspiracy one, and we really don't know either way right now.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
1)Why don't people have to bring the polling card to the polling station 2)Postal voting on demand 3)Is there much of a fraud problem at the moment? Fifteen years ago yes but what has happened recently? 4)If there is a problem it presumably relates to 2 which the government don't want to address
Fingerprinting is interesting. Could this be joined up to check people aren't voting at multiple polling stations?
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
“Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.
“To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country3. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions4,5, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs1.”
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
Yes, Green opposition to HS2 is absurd. Surely the Greens should be consistently seeking to divert cars and freight off the roads on to rails. And advocating radical transport solutions, electric tramways in cities and so forth.
The inevitable ecological damage caused by such schemes is a 'price worth paying' for the greater good, surely?
Who are these pensioners not paying council tax? Asking because I want to make sure my parents aren't missing out on something.
Ultimately, the problem is that no democracy has ever gone down the road of only letting net tax payers vote. Should those employed in the public sector get a vote?
Even if such a method was decided upon, what is net?
I've been working over twenty years now and I'm not convinced I'm a net tax payer. Sure I pay VAT (well, sorta), PAYE (well, sorta), council tax, road tax etc but what do I get back out of the system? I don't claim any benefit at all, but I do make use of state owned roads, my bins get collected and the street is lit at night. What value would I place on these?
You aren't being raped or murdered by either invading armies or hordes of thugs. You are able to buy stuff in the shops without having to take a wheelbarrow full of fivers. You can say what you like about the state without being hauled off for random torture or murder by security police. You benefit from a nation that is (largely) healthy, educated and productive.
To name a few. You are very much a net tax payer - and the freedom to pretend that you are not is also what benefit you get from paying your taxes.
One reason I am very passionate about the NHS is just how much I have taken from it. A whole litany of interventions over my 48 years, two of which would have carried me away before my time, and several of the others would have been life changing. And the price to me? Other than prescriptions, nothing, nada - at the point of care. In no way will I ever pay enough tax to cover it. The flip side is that for many, they will pay more in tax to the NHS (indirectly) and never use it. But it is an amazing thing we have done.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
Probably trainsphobic.
If they wear smart suits, would that make them cross dressers?
The EU will soon adopt a “code of conduct“ for how 27 should interact with UK. Will force a level of transparency, co-ordination on EU capitals & their dealings with London
Unprecedented for EU to do this with a 3rd country. Shows how European Union trust there is with United Kingdom at moment
Or, just possibly, that there is far more interaction between the UK and most Member States than there will be with any other country. The desperation of the Iberian countries, Greece and Cyprus for UK holiday makers is a good example. From Brussels this looks like freedom of movement within Schengen without the right to reside, a problem that seems to be the sticking point with Switzerland also.
What I want to see is a cooling of temperatures and a healing of slights, real and perceived that came out of the bruising Brexit process. We still have to repair the mess with NI, the mutual recognition of standards in services, space programs and no doubt many others. It is not in our interests, or indeed the EUs, to keep finding slights to be offended by. We need to calm down and try to be pragmatic here. It won't be easy.
1)Why don't people have to bring the polling card to the polling station 2)Postal voting on demand 3)Is there much of a fraud problem at the moment? Fifteen years ago yes but what has happened recently? 4)If there is a problem it presumably relates to 2 which the government don't want to address
Fingerprinting is interesting. Could this be joined up to check people aren't voting at multiple polling stations?
Fingerprinting voters would probably discourage a small but significant minority of the electorate. Given what else they might believe that might be argued as a feature rather than a bug.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLC trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
When I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
They could start by stopping downweighting themselves and actually turning out to vote.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
Probably trainsphobic.
If they wear smart suits, would that make them cross dressers?
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
It's a very old argument in a new guise. Once upon a time, the argument was that the lower classes should not be enfranchised (or alternatively, the franchise should be weighted in favour of the wealthy) because then they'd just vote for all sorts of free stuff.
And, if the elderly faithfully voted for the Left, we'd hear much less of the argument.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
The fact that, although everybody knew the Wuhan lab was a prime candidate, this knowledge was “tainted” and ignored for a year in the eyes of the media because it was promoted by those of a right leaning tendency, shows how left biased UK and US media are.
A thought experiment:
How would people react differently to the lab leak theory if the lab had been in the USA or Britain or Israel.
Like it
The equivalent in Britain would be a new and unusually nasty form of kittiwake bubonic plague appearing just 2 miles from Porton Down. A plague whose nearest genetic equivalent is only found in kittiwakes on a particular island in the Orkneys, a remote island which, it turns out, was visited for many years by boffins from porton down, who went their specifically to collect samples of kittiwake bubonic plague. So they could take them back to porton down to study, and alter, and to make them unusually nasty
Call me Cap’n Conspiracy, but in this scenario I don’t think many people would be shrugging and saying, ‘oh well, it probably came from a Lidl in Salisbury, shit happens’
Novichok? Also 5 miles from Porton Down. Just sayin'
George P Bush announces he is running for Texas Attorney General
They need to sort out the naming scheme for George Bushes more logically; P should have come before W, not a few years later. Perhaps we should use Greek letters?
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Yep - and it's human nature to want both someone to blame and a simple solution (close the labs!) when it might in fact just be a case of shit happens. Many would find the lab theory most acceptable - we know who to blame and we can do something about it. Second best is pinning it down to a wet market (we know broadly who to blame and we can at least shout at China about doing something about that). Worst is that a bat happened to shit in someones sandwich somewhere. Not much we can do about that (Martin Cruz Smith's Nightwing comes to mind)
Look at the circumstantial evidence. Jeez
Don't get me wrong, the lab theory is entirely plausible. I'm merely saying that, in the absence of more than circumstantial evidence, we should be careful because the lab theory is naturally appealing.
If it was the lab, we'll probably never prove it, in the absence of official Chinese desire to expose it, a whistleblower or identification of a patient zero closely connected to the lab (the last probably requires official Chinese desire to find the source, too). If it was a random bat* somewhere, we're also likely to struggle to pin it down, in the absence of identifying a patient zero close to a colony of bats who are all found to have the virus. We (China, the international community) should try though, nonetheless, as working out what happened could be very valuable, particularly if it was a lab issue and a non-obvious error.
*For 'bat' read any creature, need not be a bat of course.
If we’d really focused on finding the origin of the virus, from day 1, we would have had a chance at locating the provenance - perhaps. Instead, the media labelled anyone who looked at the lab theory as a Trumpite loon, and Facebook actually banned any comments referencing it. Insane. And this went on for a year?!
It doesn’t help that the USA is also implicated: funding GoF research at Wuhan
Now, I agree, we will likely never know. Market or lab. We will be left in a deeply uneasy situation where most people are highly suspicious of the lab, and certain about the ensuing cover-up - but cannot definitively prove anything
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
The BBC, particularly in the East, surely cannot be described as ‘left-wing’ by anyone, other than the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg!
Perhaps not left-wing, but it certainly has a particular set of values which it regards as self-evident. It is very keen on diversity as long as all the people it employs share those values. Questions are asked and programmes commissioned on the assumption that those values are so obviously true that if anyone disagrees the task is to find out why those people are wrong/lying, rather than to investigate to see if they might have a point.
I think that this is difficult because there is an argument that a national broadcaster should regard some values as self evident. Equality for women, anti-racism, the unacceptability of homophobia are perhaps simple examples. Those challenging those sort of values should in turn be challenged robustly because they are "British" values.
Where I think the BBC has lost its way is that it has applied those values in a highly simplistic way. So, the BBC has been extremely slow to report much of the Rotherham sex abuse stories because of fear that this might encourage racism, it has not wanted to challenge sexual discrimination in the Islamic community and it has been uncritical of much of the nonsense that comes from Stonewall. In many cases they have equiperated fairness with neutrality and this is simply wrong where British values are not being upheld.
I accept that it is a difficult balance, we are a diverse and multicultural nation and the BBC should reflect that but my criticism of them would rather be that they have not stood up for our values enough rather than they have been biased towards them.
I’d agree with almost all of that, apart from your mis-use of the word “equiperated”.
The reason Boris Johnson won a majority in 2019 was mainly because the Left vote splintered a bit from the 2017 election, but the Tories did do a little bit better among 35 to 54 year olds.
What is clear, however, is that Brexit has accentuated the age divide.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
The fact that, although everybody knew the Wuhan lab was a prime candidate, this knowledge was “tainted” and ignored for a year in the eyes of the media because it was promoted by those of a right leaning tendency, shows how left biased UK and US media are.
A thought experiment:
How would people react differently to the lab leak theory if the lab had been in the USA or Britain or Israel.
I'd have more confidence that it was being investigated thoroughly and would come to light if true. Partly due to having a bit more faith in the governments/arms-length investigatory powers - or at least that public demand for an investigation would be unstoppable - and partly due to thinking it more likely there would be a whistleblower given the (fear of) consequences for said whistelblower would be less severe than they could be in China.
Having said that, a cover-up or at least a cover-up attempt would still be quite possible.
It was an amazing coincidence that the Chinese whistleblower died.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
It is also highly persuasive, if you need to be persuaded that it came from the lab
You seem to have decided well in advance of any evidence!
Maybe your alien chums brought it with them from Zog, on one of their survelling outings?
I think the key point is that the lab leak hypothesis is most dramatic and exciting. Leon has a journalist’s soul, which means drama and excitement (and, preferably, outrage where possible) are key heuristics. You can’t blame journalists. Their job is grabbing attention from a busy populace, and that’s what works. Highlighting the unrepresentative and unusual, often in fields where they have little background (because they don’t really have the time for expertise).
Sometimes they’re even right. Although these are not the metrics to be used to best judge what is and is not right, sheer chance will occasionally cause a bullseye.
Not remotely convinced at the moment, but I’m open to actual evidence.
Where is the ‘actual evidence’ of a natural non-lab origin for this novel bat coronavirus? How did it get from a cave in Yunnan to the centre of Wuhan, 1000 miles away? How did it make that geographical and zoological leap from the cave?
A Yunnanese cave which was, of course, being visited by teams of scientists collecting dozens of novel bat coronaviruses, scientists who then took their samples back to their globally unique lab. 1000 miles away. In the centre of Wuhan
Why are you assuming the virus came from the cave ? There is no evidence of that.
Where is the evidence the virus came from a wet market?
“Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.
“To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country3. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions4,5, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs1.”
Were they doing "gain of function research" in 2017? The article says they were looking for the "deadly SARS virus" that broke out in 2002 in Guangdong province - also 1000 miles away from the caves.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
Probably trainsphobic.
If they wear smart suits, would that make them cross dressers?
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
The BBC, particularly in the East, surely cannot be described as ‘left-wing’ by anyone, other than the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg!
Perhaps not left-wing, but it certainly has a particular set of values which it regards as self-evident. It is very keen on diversity as long as all the people it employs share those values. Questions are asked and programmes commissioned on the assumption that those values are so obviously true that if anyone disagrees the task is to find out why those people are wrong/lying, rather than to investigate to see if they might have a point.
I think that this is difficult because there is an argument that a national broadcaster should regard some values as self evident. Equality for women, anti-racism, the unacceptability of homophobia are perhaps simple examples. Those challenging those sort of values should in turn be challenged robustly because they are "British" values.
Where I think the BBC has lost its way is that it has applied those values in a highly simplistic way. So, the BBC has been extremely slow to report much of the Rotherham sex abuse stories because of fear that this might encourage racism, it has not wanted to challenge sexual discrimination in the Islamic community and it has been uncritical of much of the nonsense that comes from Stonewall. In many cases they have equiperated fairness with neutrality and this is simply wrong where British values are not being upheld.
I accept that it is a difficult balance, we are a diverse and multicultural nation and the BBC should reflect that but my criticism of them would rather be that they have not stood up for our values enough rather than they have been biased towards them.
I’d agree with almost all of that, apart from your mis-use of the word “equiperated”.
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
I don't watch Sky so I don't know about their output. The idea that the BBC's news output is leftwing is laughable, with smug Tory Nick Robinson, government spokesperson Laura Kuensberg etc. I can't listen to it. I have Magic on in the car to keep my blood pressure down.
BBC is not left wing, but it is achingly metropolitan elite, woke etc and out of touch with a lot of country. The nadir for me is Countryfile, which is a programme made by Townies, for Townies about days out in the country for Townies. It has no relation to its predecessor, The Farming Programme? My sister, who worked on farms for years, just laughs at it.
I think the BBC simply take the view that since minorities pay the license fee it shouldn't go out of its way to offend them. What you see as achingly woke I would ascribe mostly to a desire not to offend anyone. Of course the problem is that some people will find that inoffensiveness offensive. It's a lot easier for newspapers who can be as unpleasant as they like as long as they don't offend their (very narrow) readership. I can't comment on Countryfile as I've never watched it.
Re countryfile, its about the choice of stories it presents, not about not offending minorities. There are are clear problems and issues in the countryside that go a bit beyond poor internet links and the locals being a bit sniffy about incomers. The programme presents the countryside as a plaything for people to visit for fun (no issue with that) but it is also home and work for vast swathes of the country.
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
For example Boris beat Corbyn by a vast 47% margin amongst over 65s in 2019 compared to the 24% margin Cameron beat Ed Miliband by in 2015 amongst retirees
The comparison is quite useful in itself.
But I think it will help perpetuate this idea that over time, demographics favour Labour as older Tory voters die and younger Labour voters turn 18.
Of course if that had been the case, Labour would have had a majority from at the very latest 1992.
Generally the average voter votes Labour from when they get their first vote as they leave school and continue to vote Labour as they attend university, if they do and through their 20s when they are renting free and single and early 30s. By their mid 30s if they are married and have bought their first property they start to consider voting Tory and by the time they reach retirement age in their 60s they will likely own their own home outright and continue voting Tory at every general election until they die
Although your analysis is correct, these patterns are not inevitable.
There's an assumption on here that those who are retired vote out of narrow self-interest, and of course many do. But it's worth remembering that retired people usually have kids, maybe in their 30s/40s, and often grandchildren. It doesn't take that much for older people to be persuaded that what may be in their own narrow self-interest is actually not in the interest of their kids or grandkids, especially if they see their kids prospects being tarnished by specific policies. I make no claim to nobility, but when I come to vote, given that I am comfortable retired, I'm more interested in what the offer is to my offspring and to the public good than to me personally.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
When I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
They could start by stopping downweighting themselves and actually turning out to vote.
This goes two ways I think - one reason the young don’t vote is because they often aren’t registered to vote: Circumstances force them to move around a lot from one rented room to the next & earning enough to make the next rent payment unsurprisingly takes precedence over things like registering to vote.
The retired on the other hand have a stable income, paid by the state & usually have stable housing of one sort or another. They aren’t (in general) moving around chasing jobs or simply trying to keep a roof over their heads.
The voting register is something of an anacronims in the modern age - modern technology makes it obsolete in its current form. As things currently stand, the register is more of a soft property barrier to voting than anything else - the more secure your accommodation, the more likely you are to be on the register & therefore able to vote. Perhaps alongside other voting reforms, a government interested in every citizen having a stake in their society should make it so that it was always possible for people to vote, regardless of where & how they live?
(Obviously I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen - it would be so wildly against the interests of the current government to encourage the young to vote more after all - but it’s a useful thought experiment.)
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Why would car ownership fall ?
If there is any fundamental shift away from city living to wanting bigger homes with gardens or working from home then the opposite will happen.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
If you weighted votes by the average expected number of decades of life remaining, in bands based on the midpoint, the weightings would be pretty straightforward:
Under 30s: six votes 30-40: five votes 40-50: four votes 50-60: three votes 60-70: two votes 70 and over: one vote
I think once you move away from one person one (ideally transferable) vote, there is so much potential for abuse by an unscrupulous government that it's very dangerous.
So I think a solution is to extend the principle of one person, one vote, to the section of the population currently denied the vote. Under-18s.
Now, I wouldn't expect six year olds to be casting votes, so I think it would be reasonable for their parent to vote for them by proxy.
This expands the size of the electorate by many millions in a way that counters the strength of the pensioner vote, but without opening the system to arbitrary abuse.
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
For example Boris beat Corbyn by a vast 47% margin amongst over 65s in 2019 compared to the 24% margin Cameron beat Ed Miliband by in 2015 amongst retirees
The comparison is quite useful in itself.
But I think it will help perpetuate this idea that over time, demographics favour Labour as older Tory voters die and younger Labour voters turn 18.
Of course if that had been the case, Labour would have had a majority from at the very latest 1992.
Generally the average voter votes Labour from when they get their first vote as they leave school and continue to vote Labour as they attend university, if they do and through their 20s when they are renting free and single and early 30s. By their mid 30s if they are married and have bought their first property they start to consider voting Tory and by the time they reach retirement age in their 60s they will likely own their own home outright and continue voting Tory at every general election until they die
Although your analysis is correct, these patterns are not inevitable.
There's an assumption on here that those who are retired vote out of narrow self-interest, and of course many do. But it's worth remembering that retired people usually have kids, maybe in their 30s/40s, and often grandchildren. It doesn't take that much for older people to be persuaded that what may be in their own narrow self-interest is actually not in the interest of their kids or grandkids, especially if they see their kids prospects being tarnished by specific policies. I make no claim to nobility, but when I come to vote, given that I am comfortable retired, I'm more interested in what the offer is to my offspring and to the public good than to me personally.
My view, Mr Al, almost exactly.
However, surely your third sentence should start 'It shouldn't ......
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
When I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
They could start by stopping downweighting themselves and actually turning out to vote.
This goes two ways I think - one reason the young don’t vote is because they often aren’t registered to vote: Circumstances force them to move around a lot from one rented room to the next & earning enough to make the next rent payment unsurprisingly takes precedence over things like registering to vote.
The retired on the other hand have a stable income, paid by the state & usually have stable housing of one sort or another. They aren’t (in general) moving around chasing jobs or simply trying to keep a roof over their heads.
The voting register is something of an anacronims in the modern age - modern technology makes it obsolete in its current form. As things currently stand, the register is more of a soft property barrier to voting than anything else - the more secure your accommodation, the more likely you are to be on the register & therefore able to vote. Perhaps alongside other voting reforms, a government interested in every citizen having a stake in their society should make it so that it was always possible for people to vote, regardless of where & how they live?
(Obviously I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen - it would be so wildly against the interests of the current government to encourage the young to vote more after all - but it’s a useful thought experiment.)
What would you replace it with? After all, a list of who is allowed to vote is sort of required at some point. Would you allow people to register as they vote (which strikes me as a good solution, having spent several seconds thinking about it)? If so they really are going to need ID.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
When I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
They could start by stopping downweighting themselves and actually turning out to vote.
This goes two ways I think - one reason the young don’t vote is because they often aren’t registered to vote: Circumstances force them to move around a lot from one rented room to the next & earning enough to make the next rent payment unsurprisingly takes precedence over things like registering to vote.
The retired on the other hand have a stable income, paid by the state & usually have stable housing of one sort or another. They aren’t (in general) moving around chasing jobs or simply trying to keep a roof over their heads.
The voting register is something of an anacronims in the modern age - modern technology makes it obsolete in its current form. As things currently stand, the register is more of a soft property barrier to voting than anything else - the more secure your accommodation, the more likely you are to be on the register & therefore able to vote. Perhaps alongside other voting reforms, a government interested in every citizen having a stake in their society should make it so that it was always possible for people to vote, regardless of where & how they live?
(Obviously I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen - it would be so wildly against the interests of the current government to encourage the young to vote more after all - but it’s a useful thought experiment.)
It really isn't hard to register to vote. You are invited to update your details by your local authority every year, it takes 2 minutes, and there is a big push in advance of each general election.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
In 1997 I was still working with 6 years to go before I could draw any of my pensions. I was a senior (in my speciality) NHS staff member, and my views were similar to those with whom I worked. In other words the issues which faced me then were not necessarily those which face me 20+ years later, although as far as I am concerned, I've stayed on the left. I wonder why I'm unusual.
“Pensions” may be a clue. I am guessing you are still relatively well off. Many others of your age group are not so secure. Do they trust a Labour Party that has shown little concern for them or do they trust a party which has, at least on the major issue before Covid, accepted the will of the electorate?
I am not a Tory and never voted for them but can easily understand why a party that seems to value Palestinians over poor people in their own country and refused to accept the result of the referendum and campaigned to have it reversed is less relevant to them.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
Yes, Green opposition to HS2 is absurd. Surely the Greens should be consistently seeking to divert cars and freight off the roads on to rails. And advocating radical transport solutions, electric tramways in cities and so forth.
The inevitable ecological damage caused by such schemes is a 'price worth paying' for the greater good, surely?
Indeed. The single biggest advantage of HS2 is the capacity it frees up for freight trains - each one of which can take a hundred long-distance lorry journeys off the roads. Every Green should be massively in favour of it, but they appear instead to be fans of smelly Diesel engines used to transport stuff.
1)Why don't people have to bring the polling card to the polling station 2)Postal voting on demand 3)Is there much of a fraud problem at the moment? Fifteen years ago yes but what has happened recently? 4)If there is a problem it presumably relates to 2 which the government don't want to address
Fingerprinting is interesting. Could this be joined up to check people aren't voting at multiple polling stations?
Fingerprinting voters would probably discourage a small but significant minority of the electorate. Given what else they might believe that might be argued as a feature rather than a bug.
Yes, I can think of one contrary poster on here who would never vote again if fingerprints were involved. Might be a good thing.
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
The BBC, particularly in the East, surely cannot be described as ‘left-wing’ by anyone, other than the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg!
Perhaps not left-wing, but it certainly has a particular set of values which it regards as self-evident. It is very keen on diversity as long as all the people it employs share those values. Questions are asked and programmes commissioned on the assumption that those values are so obviously true that if anyone disagrees the task is to find out why those people are wrong/lying, rather than to investigate to see if they might have a point.
I think that this is difficult because there is an argument that a national broadcaster should regard some values as self evident. Equality for women, anti-racism, the unacceptability of homophobia are perhaps simple examples. Those challenging those sort of values should in turn be challenged robustly because they are "British" values.
Where I think the BBC has lost its way is that it has applied those values in a highly simplistic way. So, the BBC has been extremely slow to report much of the Rotherham sex abuse stories because of fear that this might encourage racism, it has not wanted to challenge sexual discrimination in the Islamic community and it has been uncritical of much of the nonsense that comes from Stonewall. In many cases they have equiperated fairness with neutrality and this is simply wrong where British values are not being upheld.
I accept that it is a difficult balance, we are a diverse and multicultural nation and the BBC should reflect that but my criticism of them would rather be that they have not stood up for our values enough rather than they have been biased towards them.
I’d agree with almost all of that, apart from your mis-use of the word “equiperated”.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
George P Bush announces he is running for Texas Attorney General
They need to sort out the naming scheme for George Bushes more logically; P should have come before W, not a few years later. Perhaps we should use Greek letters?
Either that, or buy the Bush family a new book of baby names- one that hasn't had nearly all the pages ripped out.
"It looks like the LibDems’ candidate for the Chesham and Amersham by-election, Sarah Green, isn’t being entirely truthful about the length of her commute. Despite claiming to live in Amersham (on both the statement of persons nominated and her campaign material), there is still no Sarah Green on the electoral roll anywhere in the town. Pretty odd, considering Lib Dem campaigners are insisting she’s lived there for the last two years…"
“Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.
“To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country3. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions4,5, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs1.”
From the 2017 article, regarding SARS1: "Another outstanding question is how a virus from bats in Yunnan could travel to animals and humans around 1,000 kilometres away in Guangdong, without causing any suspected cases in Yunnan itself. That “has puzzled me a long time”, says Tu."
So the best identified source of SARS1 is 1000 miles from the first detected outbreak, just as it is 1000 miles from first detection of the Covid-19 outbreak. Mysteries in both cases (but in the latter case there's a possible vector via transport to the lab in Wuhan). But if such a jump was possible in the first case it was also possible in the second, without the lab. That's why the evidence is not compelling for me, although the lab explanation is certainly plausible.
Edit: Sorry, miles/km difference. But stil large distances
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
When I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
They could start by stopping downweighting themselves and actually turning out to vote.
This goes two ways I think - one reason the young don’t vote is because they often aren’t registered to vote: Circumstances force them to move around a lot from one rented room to the next & earning enough to make the next rent payment unsurprisingly takes precedence over things like registering to vote.
The retired on the other hand have a stable income, paid by the state & usually have stable housing of one sort or another. They aren’t (in general) moving around chasing jobs or simply trying to keep a roof over their heads.
The voting register is something of an anacronims in the modern age - modern technology makes it obsolete in its current form. As things currently stand, the register is more of a soft property barrier to voting than anything else - the more secure your accommodation, the more likely you are to be on the register & therefore able to vote. Perhaps alongside other voting reforms, a government interested in every citizen having a stake in their society should make it so that it was always possible for people to vote, regardless of where & how they live?
(Obviously I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen - it would be so wildly against the interests of the current government to encourage the young to vote more after all - but it’s a useful thought experiment.)
One could observe how strange it is that whatever barriers make it hard to register the young to vote seem to vanish altogether where HMRC or the Student Loans Company are concerned...
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Okay, so which stations are going to get an increase in services into and out of New Street as a result?
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
Yes, Green opposition to HS2 is absurd. Surely the Greens should be consistently seeking to divert cars and freight off the roads on to rails. And advocating radical transport solutions, electric tramways in cities and so forth.
The inevitable ecological damage caused by such schemes is a 'price worth paying' for the greater good, surely?
Indeed. The single biggest advantage of HS2 is the capacity it frees up for freight trains - each one of which can take a hundred long-distance lorry journeys off the roads. Every Green should be massively in favour of it, but they appear instead to be fans of smelly Diesel engines used to transport stuff.
Take what freight off the roads though ?
I can understand using rail from Felixstowe docks to some Amazon distribution site.
But goods from a supplier to a factory and then products from the factory to a customer are not going to be sent by rail.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
“Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.
“To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country3. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions4,5, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs1.”
From the 2017 article, regarding SARS1: "Another outstanding question is how a virus from bats in Yunnan could travel to animals and humans around 1,000 kilometres away in Guangdong, without causing any suspected cases in Yunnan itself. That “has puzzled me a long time”, says Tu."
So the best identified source of SARS1 is 1000 miles from the first detected outbreak, just as it is 1000 miles from first detection of the Covid-19 outbreak. Mysteries in both cases (but in the latter case there's a possible vector via transport to the lab in Wuhan). But if such a jump was possible in the first case it was also possible in the second, without the lab. That's why the evidence is not compelling for me, although the lab explanation is certainly plausible.
Edit: Sorry, miles/km difference. But stil large distances
Possible, as ‘Tu’ says, but puzzling. This is more evidence AGAINST natural zoonosis
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
Wheng I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
Doing it on the basis of economic inactivity is clearly invidious and overlooks that many younger people are similarly inactive, as others have said.
The best argument in favour would be to weight votes by average remaining life expectancy, which would upweight the votes of the young on the grounds that they will suffer the consequences of today's policy decisions for much longer.
Yes the heart of the argument is that it tends to make government policy rather short termist and not put enough emphasis on things like global warming and environmental factors. I am not sure that is entirely accurate but it is what is contended.
If they ever get around to replacing the Lords, it would be interesting to play around with getting better representation in the political process for groups underserved by one person one vote. This is after all the same premise for bishops sitting in Parliament. The inverting demographic period is an obvious target.
But what about going a step further and having a ring fenced lobby empowered on behalf of those not yet born? I call it the Cathedral Lobby, in place to ensure proper attention on big challenges and opportunities for human civilisation that are a) highly likely to occur, b) are improbable in our lifetime, and c) will take a multi generational effort to confront. Climate change broadly fits this of course but also supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, shifting global polarity, solar weather, AI, bioengineering etc... And on the opportunities side, interstellar probes (and travel), terraforming, AI, bioengineering, fusion and Dyson spheres etc...
Politics as it exists is just so mundane.
I am not sure that "not enough emphasis on climate change" is a very convincing case at the moment . It's the thing dominating everything for the next half century.
Unless it involves voters spending their own money, in which case it gets thrown into the long grass.
Do we have any evidence that the very young demographic are actually any good at practical policy?
Weirdly the free speech warriors on here who love to report on every goings on in individual American schools and tie them to the end of Western Civilisation missed this story that finally came to a conclusion today
It's almost like they aren't concerned about free speech and more that they just mindlessly consuming and regurgitating an endless stream of curated culture war stories designed to enrage them.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Surely stopping at New Street would be preferable if more expensive.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Why would car ownership fall ?
If there is any fundamental shift away from city living to wanting bigger homes with gardens or working from home then the opposite will happen.
I was thinking that ownership will fall if cars become prohibitively expensive.
How would people react differently to the lab leak theory if the lab had been in the USA or Britain or Israel.
Unfortunately, IF it is a lab leak then the reaction of the rest of the world will always be dependent on whether it was accidental or deliberate, but most importantly of all, how important that country is.
If this was an accidental lab leak from Botswana, you can be sure sanctions and maybe war would follow. If its a deliberate leak from China you can be sure nothing will be done.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
When I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
They could start by stopping downweighting themselves and actually turning out to vote.
This goes two ways I think - one reason the young don’t vote is because they often aren’t registered to vote: Circumstances force them to move around a lot from one rented room to the next & earning enough to make the next rent payment unsurprisingly takes precedence over things like registering to vote.
The retired on the other hand have a stable income, paid by the state & usually have stable housing of one sort or another. They aren’t (in general) moving around chasing jobs or simply trying to keep a roof over their heads.
The voting register is something of an anacronims in the modern age - modern technology makes it obsolete in its current form. As things currently stand, the register is more of a soft property barrier to voting than anything else - the more secure your accommodation, the more likely you are to be on the register & therefore able to vote. Perhaps alongside other voting reforms, a government interested in every citizen having a stake in their society should make it so that it was always possible for people to vote, regardless of where & how they live?
(Obviously I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen - it would be so wildly against the interests of the current government to encourage the young to vote more after all - but it’s a useful thought experiment.)
It really isn't hard to register to vote. You are invited to update your details by your local authority every year, it takes 2 minutes, and there is a big push in advance of each general election.
Plenty simply aren't interested.
74 per cent of those aged 25-34 were correctly registered to vote ahead of the last election. The way people are talking on this threat you'd think it was 25%.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
Yes, Green opposition to HS2 is absurd. Surely the Greens should be consistently seeking to divert cars and freight off the roads on to rails. And advocating radical transport solutions, electric tramways in cities and so forth.
The inevitable ecological damage caused by such schemes is a 'price worth paying' for the greater good, surely?
Indeed. The single biggest advantage of HS2 is the capacity it frees up for freight trains - each one of which can take a hundred long-distance lorry journeys off the roads. Every Green should be massively in favour of it, but they appear instead to be fans of smelly Diesel engines used to transport stuff.
Take what freight off the roads though ?
I can understand using rail from Felixstowe docks to some Amazon distribution site.
But goods from a supplier to a factory and then products from the factory to a customer are not going to be sent by rail.
Yes - trains are awesome for "I need 10,000 tons of coal a week, delivered from the port to my steel mill"
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Well, it is, partly at any rate. Providing more capacity, meaning more local services so people don’t need cars, at any rate in suburban areas.
Hmmm. How many people drive to work because the trains are too crowded/too infrequent?
How many people would drive into central Birmingham if they had trains that were every ten minutes and had seats?
I don't know, is there research on this? For London, the train/tube/bus/bike are the only realistic options unless you're on £150,000+ a year and have a private car parking space available.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLA trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
It will include a whole new station at Curzon Street!
Surely stopping at New Street would be preferable if more expensive.
Remarkable Newsweek article, telling the story of how a bunch of online amateur Sherlocks sleuthed the lab leak hypothesis, and made it mainstream
Simultaneously dispiriting and encouraging. Dispiriting because of the terrible lies and evasions from China, and the duplicitous omerta from western scientists, encouraging because it shows that concerned citizens around the world can make a massive difference, just with a phone, a laptop and the Net
The reason Boris Johnson won a majority in 2019 was mainly because the Left vote splintered a bit from the 2017 election, but the Tories did do a little bit better among 35 to 54 year olds.
What is clear, however, is that Brexit has accentuated the age divide.
Thanks for posting that. It does show the limits of the "you get your blue rosette along with your mortgage" and "no heart, no head" theories. It's not that they were wrong, but they only applied to a smallish sector of the population.
Up to 2015, there were substantial chunks of young Conservatives and retired Socialists.
By 2017, things had changed. And whilst that doesn't prove it's a Brexit split (in which case we, as a society, have all sorts of problems), it's pretty strongly suggestive.
I think "par" for the Conservatives, when they're winning, is about 35% of the youth vote. Currently that seems to be about 20%.
I agree that's a problem, but it's not terminal - voting behaviour can and does change with age.
We have lots of examples on this website of young voters who voted for Blair in 1997/2001 who are now Tory in middle-age.
(The link is to a journalist/blogger who is a longstanding and outspoken supporter of HS2, so be aware he is incredibly critical of the Green stance on this - but you could probably deduce that from the link!)
Would the Greens rather we all used cars, rather than trains?
To be fair to the Greens, the case for HS2 is definitely not about getting people out of their cars.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Why would car ownership fall ?
If there is any fundamental shift away from city living to wanting bigger homes with gardens or working from home then the opposite will happen.
I was thinking that ownership will fall if cars become prohibitively expensive.
But why would that happen ?
I suppose the government could tax them into being prohibitively expensive but do you think that would happen
The only two elections I can find where the Tories won the youth vote (of those 18-34 years) in recent years is the 1979GE and 1983GE.
I presume that's because policies like Right to Buy and Trade Union reform appealed to them, together with increased choice, and the Tories looked both reformist and modern.
This kind of divide is only going to get worse once the oldies are watching 24 hour Tory propaganda on Gammon Boomer News.
Why are the left so scared of GBnews, they have Sky and the BBC
I don't watch Sky so I don't know about their output. The idea that the BBC's news output is leftwing is laughable, with smug Tory Nick Robinson, government spokesperson Laura Kuensberg etc. I can't listen to it. I have Magic on in the car to keep my blood pressure down.
BBC is not left wing, but it is achingly metropolitan elite, woke etc and out of touch with a lot of country. The nadir for me is Countryfile, which is a programme made by Townies, for Townies about days out in the country for Townies. It has no relation to its predecessor, The Farming Programme? My sister, who worked on farms for years, just laughs at it.
Townyfile is OK, and still has some quite nice articles on it. The person that makes my rural blood boil is that tw*t Chris Packham on "Nature Watch"
Packham is actually very knowledgeable about wildlife even if leftwing
But he also shows a very unhealthy contempt for both the democratic process and the law.
And from time to time delivers the most blatant lies, which he fails to withdraw.
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
In 1997 I was still working with 6 years to go before I could draw any of my pensions. I was a senior (in my speciality) NHS staff member, and my views were similar to those with whom I worked. In other words the issues which faced me then were not necessarily those which face me 20+ years later, although as far as I am concerned, I've stayed on the left. I wonder why I'm unusual.
“Pensions” may be a clue. I am guessing you are still relatively well off. Many others of your age group are not so secure. Do they trust a Labour Party that has shown little concern for them or do they trust a party which has, at least on the major issue before Covid, accepted the will of the electorate?
I am not a Tory and never voted for them but can easily understand why a party that seems to value Palestinians over poor people in their own country and refused to accept the result of the referendum and campaigned to have it reversed is less relevant to them.
I suspect you make fair points; although it is somewhat surprising to me that the people who in 1975 voted overwhelmingly for Europe appear to be so hostile to it now. I was active in the pro-Europe campaign in my 30's, in 1975, and most of those who thought it a Good Idea were my age.
Incidentally my son has been very active in school debating for a couple of years now and indeed has his house cup competition today. It is a very common motion that the voting of those over 75 should either be restricted or down weighted in some way so that the young are encouraged to take part and the policy mix is better focused in their direction.
When I first heard of this idea I had some considerable difficultly in reconciling it with democracy but there is no doubt that our policy mix has been heavily influenced by the increasing number of the elderly and their propensity to vote. The triple lock is perhaps the most egregious example but there are many others. The motion tends to win amongst school kids!
They could start by stopping downweighting themselves and actually turning out to vote.
This goes two ways I think - one reason the young don’t vote is because they often aren’t registered to vote: Circumstances force them to move around a lot from one rented room to the next & earning enough to make the next rent payment unsurprisingly takes precedence over things like registering to vote.
The retired on the other hand have a stable income, paid by the state & usually have stable housing of one sort or another. They aren’t (in general) moving around chasing jobs or simply trying to keep a roof over their heads.
The voting register is something of an anacronims in the modern age - modern technology makes it obsolete in its current form. As things currently stand, the register is more of a soft property barrier to voting than anything else - the more secure your accommodation, the more likely you are to be on the register & therefore able to vote. Perhaps alongside other voting reforms, a government interested in every citizen having a stake in their society should make it so that it was always possible for people to vote, regardless of where & how they live?
(Obviously I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen - it would be so wildly against the interests of the current government to encourage the young to vote more after all - but it’s a useful thought experiment.)
What would you replace it with? After all, a list of who is allowed to vote is sort of required at some point. Would you allow people to register as they vote (which strikes me as a good solution, having spent several seconds thinking about it)? If so they really are going to need ID.
A half-way house might be to keep the existing register, but permit voting with ID for those not on the register, registering those new voters in the process? That way the anti-ID crowd can stay happy (as has been pointed out, registering to vote is not /that/ onerous).
In general, I think we ought to err on the side of making barriers to voting as low as possible, subject to keeping the vote itself secure & reliable.
Except the New Statesman figures include students amongst the figure for 'excluding retirees.'
As I showed last night IPSOS Mori had the Tories winning all classes amongst over 65s in 2019 and the Tories won ABs, C1s and C2s amongst 35-54s with Labour winning DEs amongst that age group.
Labour won all classes amongst 18 to 34s though so it is really only students and under 35s not yet on the property ladder Labour won, once workers neared 40 and got on the property ladder they voted Tory (with only those low paid workers or the unemployed still in social housing or renting over 40 in social class DE sticking with Labour).
Blair of course even managed to win retirees over 65 in 1997 41% to 36% for the Tories and in 2001 he only lost them by 1% to Hague and in 2005 by just 4% to Howard. Even Brown only lost them by 13% in 2010 and so it really is a particularly post Brexit phenomonon.
In 1997 I was still working with 6 years to go before I could draw any of my pensions. I was a senior (in my speciality) NHS staff member, and my views were similar to those with whom I worked. In other words the issues which faced me then were not necessarily those which face me 20+ years later, although as far as I am concerned, I've stayed on the left. I wonder why I'm unusual.
“Pensions” may be a clue. I am guessing you are still relatively well off. Many others of your age group are not so secure. Do they trust a Labour Party that has shown little concern for them or do they trust a party which has, at least on the major issue before Covid, accepted the will of the electorate?
I am not a Tory and never voted for them but can easily understand why a party that seems to value Palestinians over poor people in their own country and refused to accept the result of the referendum and campaigned to have it reversed is less relevant to them.
I suspect you make fair points; although it is somewhat surprising to me that the people who in 1975 voted overwhelmingly for Europe appear to be so hostile to it now. I was active in the pro-Europe campaign in my 30's, in 1975, and most of those who thought it a Good Idea were my age.
It is surely to be welcomed that so many sinners have repented.
Comments
Where I think the BBC has lost its way is that it has applied those values in a highly simplistic way. So, the BBC has been extremely slow to report much of the Rotherham sex abuse stories because of fear that this might encourage racism, it has not wanted to challenge sexual discrimination in the Islamic community and it has been uncritical of much of the nonsense that comes from Stonewall. In many cases they have equiperated fairness with neutrality and this is simply wrong where British values are not being upheld.
I accept that it is a difficult balance, we are a diverse and multicultural nation and the BBC should reflect that but my criticism of them would rather be that they have not stood up for our values enough rather than they have been biased towards them.
Headquarters at Putney Pies - just across the street from Putney Church.
On a serious note, the Roman "democracy" was actually an oligarchy massively weighted in favour of the rich. Quite specifically - no elections to the Senate, just a wealth qualification. Voting by tribes - think gerrymandering districts but on an epic scale. Oh, and moderate any ructions by a bit of slaughter of the lower classes.
There is no evidence of that.
The equivalent in Britain would be a new and unusually nasty form of kittiwake bubonic plague appearing just 2 miles from Porton Down. A plague whose nearest genetic equivalent is only found in kittiwakes on a particular island in the Orkneys, a remote island which, it turns out, was visited for many years by boffins from porton down, who went their specifically to collect samples of kittiwake bubonic plague. So they could take them back to porton down to study, and alter, and to make them unusually nasty
Call me Cap’n Conspiracy, but in this scenario I don’t think many people would be shrugging and saying, ‘oh well, it probably came from a Lidl in Salisbury, shit happens’
Unprecedented for EU to do this with a 3rd country. Shows how European Union trust there is with United Kingdom at moment
https://twitter.com/Mij_Europe/status/1400353592339468288?s=20
If it was the lab, we'll probably never prove it, in the absence of official Chinese desire to expose it, a whistleblower or identification of a patient zero closely connected to the lab (the last probably requires official Chinese desire to find the source, too). If it was a random bat* somewhere, we're also likely to struggle to pin it down, in the absence of identifying a patient zero close to a colony of bats who are all found to have the virus. We (China, the international community) should try though, nonetheless, as working out what happened could be very valuable, particularly if it was a lab issue and a non-obvious error.
*For 'bat' read any creature, need not be a bat of course.
Which, apart from the inconvenient detail of slavery, might not have been the worst of motivations.
It was only amongst over 55s and retirees the Tories really had a vast lead in 2019
What always strikes me about Countryfile is that most if not all the interviewees speak in Received Pronunciation. They were in NW Wales last Sunday; I know the accent is not the same as S Wales but you'd have been hard-pressed to think they were anywhere but one of the nicer parts of the Home Counties.
It's a lot easier for newspapers who can be as unpleasant as they like as long as they don't offend their (very narrow) readership.
I can't comment on Countryfile as I've never watched it.
And the term ancestor is being misused if you think it means that it did.
After all this is better than his obsession with aliens.
That said, it has occurred to me that one argument for HS2 could be that car ownership is going to fall appreciably in the next 20 years.
But I'm not sure I'd want to make that argument if I were the government...
Having said that, a cover-up or at least a cover-up attempt would still be quite possible.
The greens are split on hs2 - here in the West Midlands, they are mainly pro-hs2.
Though I'd call it polished stupidity.
https://hs2.green/
But most of the leadership of the GPEW is against it.
1)Why don't people have to bring the polling card to the polling station
2)Postal voting on demand
3)Is there much of a fraud problem at the moment? Fifteen years ago yes but what has happened recently?
4)If there is a problem it presumably relates to 2 which the government don't want to address
Fingerprinting is interesting. Could this be joined up to check people aren't voting at multiple polling stations?
“Bat cave solves mystery of deadly SARS virus — and suggests new outbreak could occur
Chinese scientists find all the genetic building blocks of SARS in a single population of horseshoe bats.
“To clinch the case, a team led by Shi Zheng-Li and Cui Jie of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China sampled thousands of horseshoe bats in locations across the country3. “The most challenging work is to locate the caves, which usually are in remote areas,” says Cui. After finding a particular cave in Yunnan, southwestern China, in which the strains of coronavirus looked similar to human versions4,5, the researchers spent five years monitoring the bats that lived there, collecting fresh guano and taking anal swabs1.”
The date? December 2017
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07766-9
The inevitable ecological damage caused by such schemes is a 'price worth paying' for the greater good, surely?
What I want to see is a cooling of temperatures and a healing of slights, real and perceived that came out of the bruising Brexit process. We still have to repair the mess with NI, the mutual recognition of standards in services, space programs and no doubt many others. It is not in our interests, or indeed the EUs, to keep finding slights to be offended by. We need to calm down and try to be pragmatic here. It won't be easy.
And will HS2 improve capacity into and out of Birmingham? Most of the EUS to MAN/LIV/GLC trains by-pass Birmingham through the Trent Valley.
Perhaps we should use Greek letters?
It doesn’t help that the USA is also implicated: funding GoF research at Wuhan
Now, I agree, we will likely never know. Market or lab. We will be left in a deeply uneasy situation where most people are highly suspicious of the lab, and certain about the ensuing cover-up - but cannot definitively prove anything
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/equiparate#:~:text=2.-,obsolete,Collins English Dictionary.
There's an assumption on here that those who are retired vote out of narrow self-interest, and of course many do. But it's worth remembering that retired people usually have kids, maybe in their 30s/40s, and often grandchildren. It doesn't take that much for older people to be persuaded that what may be in their own narrow self-interest is actually not in the interest of their kids or grandkids, especially if they see their kids prospects being tarnished by specific policies. I make no claim to nobility, but when I come to vote, given that I am comfortable retired, I'm more interested in what the offer is to my offspring and to the public good than to me personally.
The retired on the other hand have a stable income, paid by the state & usually have stable housing of one sort or another. They aren’t (in general) moving around chasing jobs or simply trying to keep a roof over their heads.
The voting register is something of an anacronims in the modern age - modern technology makes it obsolete in its current form. As things currently stand, the register is more of a soft property barrier to voting than anything else - the more secure your accommodation, the more likely you are to be on the register & therefore able to vote. Perhaps alongside other voting reforms, a government interested in every citizen having a stake in their society should make it so that it was always possible for people to vote, regardless of where & how they live?
(Obviously I don’t expect anything of the sort to happen - it would be so wildly against the interests of the current government to encourage the young to vote more after all - but it’s a useful thought experiment.)
If there is any fundamental shift away from city living to wanting bigger homes with gardens or working from home then the opposite will happen.
So I think a solution is to extend the principle of one person, one vote, to the section of the population currently denied the vote. Under-18s.
Now, I wouldn't expect six year olds to be casting votes, so I think it would be reasonable for their parent to vote for them by proxy.
This expands the size of the electorate by many millions in a way that counters the strength of the pensioner vote, but without opening the system to arbitrary abuse.
However, surely your third sentence should start 'It shouldn't ......
Plenty simply aren't interested.
I am not a Tory and never voted for them but can easily understand why a party that seems to value Palestinians over poor people in their own country and refused to accept the result of the referendum and campaigned to have it reversed is less relevant to them.
https://order-order.com/2021/06/02/libdems-lying-here-amersham-by-election-candidate-still-lives-in-london/
"Another outstanding question is how a virus from bats in Yunnan could travel to animals and humans around 1,000 kilometres away in Guangdong, without causing any suspected cases in Yunnan itself. That “has puzzled me a long time”, says Tu."
So the best identified source of SARS1 is 1000 miles from the first detected outbreak, just as it is 1000 miles from first detection of the Covid-19 outbreak. Mysteries in both cases (but in the latter case there's a possible vector via transport to the lab in Wuhan). But if such a jump was possible in the first case it was also possible in the second, without the lab. That's why the evidence is not compelling for me, although the lab explanation is certainly plausible.
Edit: Sorry, miles/km difference. But stil large distances
I can understand using rail from Felixstowe docks to some Amazon distribution site.
But goods from a supplier to a factory and then products from the factory to a customer are not going to be sent by rail.
Unless it involves voters spending their own money, in which case it gets thrown into the long grass.
Do we have any evidence that the very young demographic are actually any good at practical policy?
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1400198313769639936?s=19
It's almost like they aren't concerned about free speech and more that they just mindlessly consuming and regurgitating an endless stream of curated culture war stories designed to enrage them.
If this was an accidental lab leak from Botswana, you can be sure sanctions and maybe war would follow.
If its a deliberate leak from China you can be sure nothing will be done.
Cynic, aren't I?
I agree that's a problem, but it's not terminal - voting behaviour can and does change with age.
We have lots of examples on this website of young voters who voted for Blair in 1997/2001 who are now Tory in middle-age.
"Even if it's a zoonotic outbreak, which I think is highly unlikely, China comes out of the pandemic with its reputation in tatters"
On our new #PlanetNormal podcast, former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove speaks to @AllisonPearson and @LiamHalligan
https://twitter.com/telegraph/status/1400349028223758338?s=21
I suppose the government could tax them into being prohibitively expensive but do you think that would happen
I presume that's because policies like Right to Buy and Trade Union reform appealed to them, together with increased choice, and the Tories looked both reformist and modern.
And from time to time delivers the most blatant lies, which he fails to withdraw.
Countryfile is just soft in the head.
I was active in the pro-Europe campaign in my 30's, in 1975, and most of those who thought it a Good Idea were my age.
In general, I think we ought to err on the side of making barriers to voting as low as possible, subject to keeping the vote itself secure & reliable.