This is the right call by the govt. Anything that stands in the way of domestic reopening on 21st needs to be swept away, because that is the overwhelming priority. And if there’s a variant of concern getting their scientists excited then right now you lock the door.
In a month and a bit all the over 40s will he double vaxxed and all the over 18s vaxxed once, which should knock the stuffing out of any new variant sufficiently to buy time for a booster programme if needed, without non-pharma-intervention. Hit those vaccine hurdles and show the reopening wasn’t a cluster and then it is the right time to talk about loosening external restrictions.
It would be extremely illogical for the Government to have taken the decision it did over Portugal (which let's face it, was based on a "spike" in case numbers, whatever they claim about the circulating of unknown 'variants' - if case number hadn't gone up, they wouldn't have done anything), and continue with the domestic road map on June 21st.
That's not to definitely say it won't happen, but it would be extremely illogical given what is currently happening to UK case numbers. It makes no real sense to say that we can disregard info on case numbers in this country because of the extent to which we are vaccinated, but not make decisions on people travelling from abroad on the same basis (and remember - the restrictions are on people coming here, not people leaving this country - that is just a knock on corollary). If UK vaccination protects against rising case numbers here, then UK vaccination protects against people coming here from places with rising case numbers abroad.
I’m not aware that they give us the data regularly but we must be sequencing the greater proportion of positive test results in the Uk. There’s now early data on the efficacy of our vaccines against the variants in widest circulation in this country, with two doses doing the job against the Indian variant but one seemingly a bit weaker.
They don’t have good data on whatever new variant is circulating in Portugal.
To me the policy should be simple at this point. We use vaccination to return to normal domestically while keeping the backdoor shut. As other countries reach herd immunity through vaccination we open up travel to them, probably with a requirement that any travellers incoming or outgoing are double vaxxed. For other countries where new variants are still popping up, well we’ll have to wait until 2022 when they have their house in order.
Other posters are right that there’s no strategic thinking to any of this, it’s all just reactionary bollocks. The government should be clear: we will do everything in our power to open fully in June and ensure no domestic winter restrictions. And this is how we will achieve it...
Instead it’s all wishy washy “yes laura people deserve a holiday”.
To give Portugal some credit, they are probably second only to us in the world as a percentage of cases sequenced. (And the US is third.)
One comment Mike - there will be plenty of people in Batley and Spen who have booked foreign holidays as well. This announcement may cause a few more to shift to the independent candidates and make Labour’s job at holding just a little easier.
There'll be far, far more who have a summer holiday booked in the UK - who will be mighty relieved if on 14th, Boris announces that domestic Covid measures are at an end. That is when, for most, the feel-good factor kicks in. At least in the UK we can have our lives back.
B&S votes on the 17th.
Well I'll state this now and let's see if I'm wrong: I do not believe that on June 21st Boris Johnson will 'give back' all of our internal freedoms.
I put 'give back' in ' ' because it's not his fucking freedom to give. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Government has had to suspend some of our freedoms during the worst health event in our lifetime. They have had to do that because, whilst most people are sensible and exercise extreme caution, they are put at risk by a sizeable minority who think they have the inalienable freedom to be a dickhead.
It's called responsible government. Hell, there's enough folk on here who are happy to proclaim that same government was irresponsible in not suspending our freedoms much harder, much sooner.
The contrast between the weeks of notice before we restricted travel to India - which delay supplied us with our current mini third wave - and the hours of notice for quarantine for travellers from a country whose rates of infection are not wildly different from ours, will not be lost on those who are exercised about this.
And thinking back to Cheltenham last year, Johnson is a very slow learner.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
The EU has almost entirely stopped using AZ. Their tracker of vaccines recieved shows an almost complete stop of AZ arrivals from May 22 (down to just 2m/week from 10m).
Edit to add: Looking at last week, the EU is now 80% Pfizer (17m), 10% Moderna (3m), 10% J&J + AZ (3m).
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
This is an utter nonsense. I'm fuming.
Chill out.. good health is better than a serious risk of catching covid. A sense of perspective is needed. A double vaccination is no guarantee of immunity.
That's the second person to tell me to chill. TSE told me yesterday to 'calm down dear' which tells me a lot about him.
You are the one needing a sense of perspective. I have received two of the amazing vaccinations and I DON'T CARE if I now risk getting covid. Why? Because I am fit and healthy and with both jabs I'm not going to die of covid. There are 15 to 20 more likely ways in which I could die. I am perfectly well aware that there is no guarantee of immunity. So what? I have criss-crossed the globe all my life, with a host of dangers and many vaccinations to attempt to keep me safe. I've lived through several other pandemics, more deadly than covid. I know full well that none of the vaccinations were guarantees of immunity just as getting in a car, crossing the road, flying on a plane, or eating my toast are not guarantees of my safety.
THAT is the perspective we all now need. Once you are double jabbed you should live your life and cast out this dreadful, disastrous, hideous fear mongering which has reduced people to wobbling wrecks.
So don't tell me to chill. This tory voter is right fucked off and Boris Johnson can stick his government up his arse.
I shan't vote for them ever again.
Asymmetric transmission imposes risks on others. There are large numbers of unvaccinated who have not yet been offered vaccination
Also you could do what my wife has done & just go anyway. Just build the self isolation and cost into your plans and cut your cloth accordingly
As ever though it will not impact the rich, ordinary people will not be able to afford all the tests and additional non paid days off work etc.
Life was ever thus.
But if people really want 2 weeks abroad they can just take the quarantine time out of their remaining holiday time (admittedly that doesn’t work for gig workers but thats a much bigger abuse that needs to be fixed)
I'm sure that will be OK for a few folk, but most will be wondering what on earth was the point of the green light category.
And I'm pretty sure the travel industry is not quite so sanguine.
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
One comment Mike - there will be plenty of people in Batley and Spen who have booked foreign holidays as well. This announcement may cause a few more to shift to the independent candidates and make Labour’s job at holding just a little easier.
There'll be far, far more who have a summer holiday booked in the UK - who will be mighty relieved if on 14th, Boris announces that domestic Covid measures are at an end. That is when, for most, the feel-good factor kicks in. At least in the UK we can have our lives back.
B&S votes on the 17th.
Let's not forget that hospitality - at what is meant to be its busiest and most profitable time of year - is still operating under restrictions which make its business more costly and barely profitable, if that. And that is after it lost a significant part of last year's revenue and was completely closed for months on end. Furlough has helped but it is not a replacement for lost revenue.
We are wasting the benefits of our vaccination programme, it seems to me .... and allowing a mentality to develop which puts the elimination of any health risk on a par with our freedom to live life fully. This last is unacceptable. The point of good health is to be able to live not the other way around. The point of life is not to have good health - and yet this seems to be the approach of some commentators and politicians. It is disappointing and worrying.
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
Yes, I hadn't realised the difficulties with the border going on into the mid-twenties, nor that we got the Irish Free State to agree the current border by forgiving them the Imperial War Debt. An interesting precedent.
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
This is an utter nonsense. I'm fuming.
The interesting thing about Covid is that people have been happy to willingly accept draconian restrictions on their freedom, indicating that they don't really value it all that much.
I don't think that follows at all.
For a rational individual, the decision is one that weighs both sides of the equation. The key element on the other side of the equation is the medical consequences (for oneself and the knock on risk for friends and family) of catching the virus.
I suspect that people value their freedom highly, but feared dying from the virus even more. Now that the latter fear is fast receding, it is entirely reasonable that people protest more about arbitrary limitations on our freedom.
The reality as I see it is more mundane: people just accepted the rules and adapted to them by breaking them. For the most part they don't really care about their freedom, as I said before it is only a diminishing cohort of libertarian tory MP's who are bothered about that - same lot who are worried about wokeness.
It is massively instructing - you can lock people down forever and then gradually introduce surveillance to enforce compliance. This is the english path to totalitarianism.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
Good morning everybody.
If 'the NI protocol was never acceptable', why did we agree to it, and indeed, why did our PM sign up to it. Did he not know what he was doing? Come to that, why did Lord Frost recommend he sign it?
My wife returned from a visit to our (small) local supermarket a couple of days ago and told me there were quite a few spaces on the shelves.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
This is the right call by the govt. Anything that stands in the way of domestic reopening on 21st needs to be swept away, because that is the overwhelming priority. And if there’s a variant of concern getting their scientists excited then right now you lock the door.
In a month and a bit all the over 40s will he double vaxxed and all the over 18s vaxxed once, which should knock the stuffing out of any new variant sufficiently to buy time for a booster programme if needed, without non-pharma-intervention. Hit those vaccine hurdles and show the reopening wasn’t a cluster and then it is the right time to talk about loosening external restrictions.
It would be extremely illogical for the Government to have taken the decision it did over Portugal (which let's face it, was based on a "spike" in case numbers, whatever they claim about the circulating of unknown 'variants' - if case number hadn't gone up, they wouldn't have done anything), and continue with the domestic road map on June 21st.
That's not to definitely say it won't happen, but it would be extremely illogical given what is currently happening to UK case numbers. It makes no real sense to say that we can disregard info on case numbers in this country because of the extent to which we are vaccinated, but not make decisions on people travelling from abroad on the same basis (and remember - the restrictions are on people coming here, not people leaving this country - that is just a knock on corollary). If UK vaccination protects against rising case numbers here, then UK vaccination protects against people coming here from places with rising case numbers abroad.
I’m not aware that they give us the data regularly but we must be sequencing the greater proportion of positive test results in the Uk. There’s now early data on the efficacy of our vaccines against the variants in widest circulation in this country, with two doses doing the job against the Indian variant but one seemingly a bit weaker.
They don’t have good data on whatever new variant is circulating in Portugal.
To me the policy should be simple at this point. We use vaccination to return to normal domestically while keeping the backdoor shut. As other countries reach herd immunity through vaccination we open up travel to them, probably with a requirement that any travellers incoming or outgoing are double vaxxed. For other countries where new variants are still popping up, well we’ll have to wait until 2022 when they have their house in order.
Other posters are right that there’s no strategic thinking to any of this, it’s all just reactionary bollocks. The government should be clear: we will do everything in our power to open fully in June and ensure no domestic winter restrictions. And this is how we will achieve it...
Instead it’s all wishy washy “yes laura people deserve a holiday”.
To give Portugal some credit, they are probably second only to us in the world as a percentage of cases sequenced. (And the US is third.)
And the government is briefing that, sadly, the Portuguese only have themselves to blame (for having more advanced sequencing).
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
I have. Fascinating. My father remembered some of the events - he was a child at the time - and in his village there was a famous assault on the local police barracks (Fergal Keane wrote about it in his book "Wounds: Memoir of War and Love").
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
Yes, I hadn't realised the difficulties with the border going on into the mid-twenties, nor that we got the Irish Free State to agree the current border by forgiving them the Imperial War Debt. An interesting precedent.
Although as I recall they still had to pay pensions for those civil servants based in Ireland.
*Looks round expectantly for ballistic turnip incoming from Ayrshire*
More seriously, that was a good deal for the Irish Free State, because otherwise they would have ended up either with yet another war - which they really could have done without - or humiliation over the Boundary Commission (which to be blunt, hadn't covered itself in glory with its suggestions). No debt, no boundary commission, no war. When Cosgrave said he wanted 'a huge nought' he got three for the price of one. Man was a genius. We could do with somebody of his quality right now.
The losers were the Nationalists of Londonderry, Tyrone and Fermanagh, plus the Unionists of Donegal. Unfortunately, they ended up being pawns in a power play.
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
This is an utter nonsense. I'm fuming.
Chill out.. good health is better than a serious risk of catching covid. A sense of perspective is needed. A double vaccination is no guarantee of immunity.
That's the second person to tell me to chill. TSE told me yesterday to 'calm down dear' which tells me a lot about him.
You are the one needing a sense of perspective. I have received two of the amazing vaccinations and I DON'T CARE if I now risk getting covid. Why? Because I am fit and healthy and with both jabs I'm not going to die of covid. There are 15 to 20 more likely ways in which I could die. I am perfectly well aware that there is no guarantee of immunity. So what? I have criss-crossed the globe all my life, with a host of dangers and many vaccinations to attempt to keep me safe. I've lived through several other pandemics, more deadly than covid. I know full well that none of the vaccinations were guarantees of immunity just as getting in a car, crossing the road, flying on a plane, or eating my toast are not guarantees of my safety.
THAT is the perspective we all now need. Once you are double jabbed you should live your life and cast out this dreadful, disastrous, hideous fear mongering which has reduced people to wobbling wrecks.
So don't tell me to chill. This tory voter is right fucked off and Boris Johnson can stick his government up his arse.
I shan't vote for them ever again.
Asymmetric transmission imposes risks on others. There are large numbers of unvaccinated who have not yet been offered vaccination
Also you could do what my wife has done & just go anyway. Just build the self isolation and cost into your plans and cut your cloth accordingly
As ever though it will not impact the rich, ordinary people will not be able to afford all the tests and additional non paid days off work etc.
Life was ever thus.
But if people really want 2 weeks abroad they can just take the quarantine time out of their remaining holiday time (admittedly that doesn’t work for gig workers but thats a much bigger abuse that needs to be fixed)
I'm sure that will be OK for a few folk, but most will be wondering what on earth was the point of the green light category.
And I'm pretty sure the travel industry is not quite so sanguine.
My winter break in Madeira was booked as a bargain when it was in the Red category, then it was Green, and now Amber. I expect it will be Green again by December.
Two of my colleagues were off for a week in Portugal on Monday, now cancelled. They are not sure what to do now. Another had Easyjet cancel his flight to Croatia at a week's notice. I think this quite common as airlines realise half full planes are not viable for business.
The crux of the problem that @Cocky_cockney raises is that this government is functionally incompetent. I have been banging the drum for ages that "we won, we're popular, it doesn't matter" isn't good enough. Lies, corruption, incompetence, strategy based on newspaper headlines - this isn't how good government is done.
Since the start it has been blindingly obvious this clowncar government don't know how to communicate. Guidance that is contradicted one minister on the radio to the next that contradicts the law. A new 5 stage plan launched at 3.5. Regional tiers supposedly all the same but the rules are different in each place affected.
So it isn't a surprise that we're here. If you are double vaccinated then why do you need to isolate for 10 days and take 3 tests to come back from countries who have less pox than we do? Its illogical and stupid. They declared that 6 people in a choir couldn't meet covid secure in a venue to sing, but bands can play with the audience singing along. Who makes this shit up?
Fundamentally they do it and they get away with it because @Philip_Thompson and @Cocky_cockney etc rightly tear chunks of the government but vote for it anyway. They think you are stupid and tret you accordingly.
Of course the very slow rate of vaccination is not willfulness by the government. What has happened is that after a period where we almost took it for granted that they would roll a 6 every time on vaccinations they have come up with a couple of 1s in that large volumes of vaccine that they expected to have has not arrived. I suppose statistically this was likely to happen at some point but the timing is seriously disappointing and I find it bizarre that we can have front pages like those in the thread header with so little discussion of it.
Supply is higher than the rate of vaccination currently. We've now tipped into demand issues as 30-39 year olds are busier and more difficult to book into the available daytime slots. The government should really just open up to all 18+ ASAP so capacity utilisation hits close to 100% again. A friend of mine has booked her first dose for next weekend as it was the first evening/weekend slot available. She did this last week.
It's really frustrating because we could potentially double the first dose rate with more evening appointment availablity but the government is just ignoring this need and trying to cram busy under 40s into the 6pm-8pm and reduced weekend capacity appointments.
Agreed. My twentysomething son was one of thousands who queued (in vain) for the surplus doses briefly on offer a couple of day's back. If they opened vaccination to all, take up would spike rapidly.
One comment Mike - there will be plenty of people in Batley and Spen who have booked foreign holidays as well. This announcement may cause a few more to shift to the independent candidates and make Labour’s job at holding just a little easier.
There'll be far, far more who have a summer holiday booked in the UK - who will be mighty relieved if on 14th, Boris announces that domestic Covid measures are at an end. That is when, for most, the feel-good factor kicks in. At least in the UK we can have our lives back.
B&S votes on the 17th.
And if cases keep rising and rising? In a few months time every adult will have been offered two jabs that for most people protect against severe illness. The time will come when the government must accept that if people choose not to be vaccinated, the state will have to finally stand back and let many of them get infected with COVID.
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
I've been in some very dangerous situations. I have been attacked by a rioting mob. I've been held up by drunk child soldiers and on another occasion had a gun held to my head. I've used up my nine lives and then some.
What have we told you about holidaying in Blackpool?
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
Good morning everybody.
If 'the NI protocol was never acceptable', why did we agree to it, and indeed, why did our PM sign up to it. Did he not know what he was doing? Come to that, why did Lord Frost recommend he sign it?
My wife returned from a visit to our (small) local supermarket a couple of days ago and told me there were quite a few spaces on the shelves.
We signed up to it because we wanted a deal with the EU with transitional provisions and there was no deal available without it. I think we expected to be able to find something better before the transitional arrangements expired but we haven't.
As for Lord Frost he looked at the deal overall and decided it was in the UK interest. He was probably right but it looks less clear cut now than it did then.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
However fondue are of a pun, that was rather cheesy...
Of course the very slow rate of vaccination is not willfulness by the government. What has happened is that after a period where we almost took it for granted that they would roll a 6 every time on vaccinations they have come up with a couple of 1s in that large volumes of vaccine that they expected to have has not arrived. I suppose statistically this was likely to happen at some point but the timing is seriously disappointing and I find it bizarre that we can have front pages like those in the thread header with so little discussion of it.
"large volumes of vaccine that they expected to have has not arrived."
No one's fault, these things happen but it hasn't helped.
In vaccines, there are very few prizes for second or third place. The reality is that Pfizer/BioNTech is easy and quick to manufacture, and extremely efficacious. Everyone else is basically stuffed.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
However fondue are of a pun, that was rather cheesy...
Oil ave you know I didn't get enough sleep last night.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
However fondue are of a pun, that was rather cheesy...
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
Yes, I hadn't realised the difficulties with the border going on into the mid-twenties, nor that we got the Irish Free State to agree the current border by forgiving them the Imperial War Debt. An interesting precedent.
Although as I recall they still had to pay pensions for those civil servants based in Ireland.
*Looks round expectantly for ballistic turnip incoming from Ayrshire*
More seriously, that was a good deal for the Irish Free State, because otherwise they would have ended up either with yet another war - which they really could have done without - or humiliation over the Boundary Commission (which to be blunt, hadn't covered itself in glory with its suggestions). No debt, no boundary commission, no war. When Cosgrave said he wanted 'a huge nought' he got three for the price of one. Man was a genius. We could do with somebody of his quality right now.
The losers were the Nationalists of Londonderry, Tyrone and Fermanagh, plus the Unionists of Donegal. Unfortunately, they ended up being pawns in a power play.
And they have been ever since.
Spike Milligan described the border as being drawn by four men holding one pencil and drawing it across a map.
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
This is an utter nonsense. I'm fuming.
Chill out.. good health is better than a serious risk of catching covid. A sense of perspective is needed. A double vaccination is no guarantee of immunity.
That's the second person to tell me to chill. TSE told me yesterday to 'calm down dear' which tells me a lot about him.
You are the one needing a sense of perspective. I have received two of the amazing vaccinations and I DON'T CARE if I now risk getting covid. Why? Because I am fit and healthy and with both jabs I'm not going to die of covid. There are 15 to 20 more likely ways in which I could die. I am perfectly well aware that there is no guarantee of immunity. So what? I have criss-crossed the globe all my life, with a host of dangers and many vaccinations to attempt to keep me safe. I've lived through several other pandemics, more deadly than covid. I know full well that none of the vaccinations were guarantees of immunity just as getting in a car, crossing the road, flying on a plane, or eating my toast are not guarantees of my safety.
THAT is the perspective we all now need. Once you are double jabbed you should live your life and cast out this dreadful, disastrous, hideous fear mongering which has reduced people to wobbling wrecks.
So don't tell me to chill. This tory voter is right fucked off and Boris Johnson can stick his government up his arse.
I shan't vote for them ever again.
Asymmetric transmission imposes risks on others. There are large numbers of unvaccinated who have not yet been offered vaccination
Also you could do what my wife has done & just go anyway. Just build the self isolation and cost into your plans and cut your cloth accordingly
As ever though it will not impact the rich, ordinary people will not be able to afford all the tests and additional non paid days off work etc.
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
This is an utter nonsense. I'm fuming.
Chill out.. good health is better than a serious risk of catching covid. A sense of perspective is needed. A double vaccination is no guarantee of immunity.
That's the second person to tell me to chill. TSE told me yesterday to 'calm down dear' which tells me a lot about him.
You are the one needing a sense of perspective. I have received two of the amazing vaccinations and I DON'T CARE if I now risk getting covid. Why? Because I am fit and healthy and with both jabs I'm not going to die of covid. There are 15 to 20 more likely ways in which I could die. I am perfectly well aware that there is no guarantee of immunity. So what? I have criss-crossed the globe all my life, with a host of dangers and many vaccinations to attempt to keep me safe. I've lived through several other pandemics, more deadly than covid. I know full well that none of the vaccinations were guarantees of immunity just as getting in a car, crossing the road, flying on a plane, or eating my toast are not guarantees of my safety.
THAT is the perspective we all now need. Once you are double jabbed you should live your life and cast out this dreadful, disastrous, hideous fear mongering which has reduced people to wobbling wrecks.
So don't tell me to chill. This tory voter is right fucked off and Boris Johnson can stick his government up his arse.
I shan't vote for them ever again.
Asymmetric transmission imposes risks on others. There are large numbers of unvaccinated who have not yet been offered vaccination
Also you could do what my wife has done & just go anyway. Just build the self isolation and cost into your plans and cut your cloth accordingly
As ever though it will not impact the rich, ordinary people will not be able to afford all the tests and additional non paid days off work etc.
Life was ever thus.
But if people really want 2 weeks abroad they can just take the quarantine time out of their remaining holiday time (admittedly that doesn’t work for gig workers but thats a much bigger abuse that needs to be fixed)
I'm sure that will be OK for a few folk, but most will be wondering what on earth was the point of the green light category.
And I'm pretty sure the travel industry is not quite so sanguine.
My winter break in Madeira was booked as a bargain when it was in the Red category, then it was Green, and now Amber. I expect it will be Green again by December.
Two of my colleagues were off for a week in Portugal on Monday, now cancelled. They are not sure what to do now. Another had Easyjet cancel his flight to Croatia at a week's notice. I think this quite common as airlines realise half full planes are not viable for business.
It's the Red Funnel for me...
Landing at Madeira airport is far, far riskier than the potential threat of Covid....
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
Sure, but those places are mainly not allowing unrestricted travel.
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
I think SE and East Asia are about to blow up. Vietnam sounds bad, and barely any vaccinations.
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
I think it's less the conversations on the board that are surreal than the position of the media and the continued dithering by the government.
That's what's driving the conversations on here.
If they saw sense and locked every member of Indie Sage in the nearest convenient psychiatric hospital for six months we'd all be talking about how much we're looking forward to normality next week.
The crux of the problem that @Cocky_cockney raises is that this government is functionally incompetent. I have been banging the drum for ages that "we won, we're popular, it doesn't matter" isn't good enough. Lies, corruption, incompetence, strategy based on newspaper headlines - this isn't how good government is done.
Since the start it has been blindingly obvious this clowncar government don't know how to communicate. Guidance that is contradicted one minister on the radio to the next that contradicts the law. A new 5 stage plan launched at 3.5. Regional tiers supposedly all the same but the rules are different in each place affected.
So it isn't a surprise that we're here. If you are double vaccinated then why do you need to isolate for 10 days and take 3 tests to come back from countries who have less pox than we do? Its illogical and stupid. They declared that 6 people in a choir couldn't meet covid secure in a venue to sing, but bands can play with the audience singing along. Who makes this shit up?
Fundamentally they do it and they get away with it because @Philip_Thompson and @Cocky_cockney etc rightly tear chunks of the government but vote for it anyway. They think you are stupid and tret you accordingly.
On linkedIn I currently see a thread from knowledgeable people complaining about another further coming HMRC attack on self employment.
The simple fact is that with the Tories on 40% percentage of the vote they can (sadly) do what they want.
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
Yes, I hadn't realised the difficulties with the border going on into the mid-twenties, nor that we got the Irish Free State to agree the current border by forgiving them the Imperial War Debt. An interesting precedent.
Just so. Realpolitik suggests to me that in the event of Scottish Indy a temporary Faslane enclave is more likely than Shetland or Dumfries & Galloway seceding.
Modern deep freezes are rubbish, the ‘triumph’ of the NI protocol only lasted a few months before deFrosting.
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
+1
It's only a few months since we were enjoying having got our vaccination programme underway faster than most, and looking forward to the eventual deliverance that this head start would give us.
Now many seem determined that we enjoy the extra months relatively free of any medical risk that we have won by enjoying another spell of lockdown.
Having cancelled by spring travel plans for a second year running, I'm going abroad in September so long as it is remotely feasible.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
The crux of the problem that @Cocky_cockney raises is that this government is functionally incompetent. I have been banging the drum for ages that "we won, we're popular, it doesn't matter" isn't good enough. Lies, corruption, incompetence, strategy based on newspaper headlines - this isn't how good government is done.
Since the start it has been blindingly obvious this clowncar government don't know how to communicate. Guidance that is contradicted one minister on the radio to the next that contradicts the law. A new 5 stage plan launched at 3.5. Regional tiers supposedly all the same but the rules are different in each place affected.
So it isn't a surprise that we're here. If you are double vaccinated then why do you need to isolate for 10 days and take 3 tests to come back from countries who have less pox than we do? Its illogical and stupid. They declared that 6 people in a choir couldn't meet covid secure in a venue to sing, but bands can play with the audience singing along. Who makes this shit up?
Fundamentally they do it and they get away with it because @Philip_Thompson and @Cocky_cockney etc rightly tear chunks of the government but vote for it anyway. They think you are stupid and tret you accordingly.
On linkedIn I currently see a thread from knowledgeable people complaining about another further coming HMRC attack on self employment.
The simple fact is that with the Tories on 40% percentage of the vote they can (sadly) do what they want.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
Excellent post
The EU shooting itself in the foot is becoming quite a narrative
@MaxPB I had my 2nd jab on Saturday just gone and the centre was absolutely dead. I assumed it would be packed like when I had my 1st.
I had exactly the same experience, my first jab was like queueing for a Take That concert, the second was like visiting a library.
I really don't think there is any problem with supply.
As I think I posted a couple of weeks ago, when I went for my 2nd at the GP's it was very quiet. This was odd as GP is only doing vulnerables on his lists and everyone who went at same time as me 12 weeks ago was given an appt for 2nd jab exactly 12 weeks later. We were told to come at the exact same time as the first. At my first jab it was very busy, with car park full, queuing for maybe 15 mins or so, etc.
This time, almost empty and straight in.
So did my fellow 2nd jab cohort not turn up? Or had they already gone elsewhere?
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
It's because we have a government and public administration body addicted to the power they get with lockdowns. They don't want to give it up and they know June 21st is irreversible. Once all legal restrictions are gone, there's no getting them back.
We're actually having an almost identical experience to Israel, where cases went up for a short period during the latter stages of the vaccine programme as people naturally become less cautious. It didn't feed through to additional hospitalisations there and it won't here. All of this guff about the delta variant or other such inanities is bullshit. Vaccines are highly efficacious, we have fully vaccinated 50% of adults and almost all of groups 1-9. Where exactly are the hospitalisations and deaths going to come from? Those groups account for 90% of hospitalisations and 95% of deaths adding group 10 to fully vaccinated in about 2 weeks will bring those numbers up to 96% and 99%.
@MaxPB I had my 2nd jab on Saturday just gone and the centre was absolutely dead. I assumed it would be packed like when I had my 1st.
I had exactly the same experience, my first jab was like queueing for a Take That concert, the second was like visiting a library.
I really don't think there is any problem with supply.
That doesn't follow. The centre could have been half-empty because they're currently short on supply and so only had enough doses to offer just a trickle of appointments. As it happens, when I had my first dose on 4th May when we definitely were supply-constrained the place I went was also very empty.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
Of course the very slow rate of vaccination is not willfulness by the government. What has happened is that after a period where we almost took it for granted that they would roll a 6 every time on vaccinations they have come up with a couple of 1s in that large volumes of vaccine that they expected to have has not arrived. I suppose statistically this was likely to happen at some point but the timing is seriously disappointing and I find it bizarre that we can have front pages like those in the thread header with so little discussion of it.
Supply is higher than the rate of vaccination currently. We've now tipped into demand issues as 30-39 year olds are busier and more difficult to book into the available daytime slots. The government should really just open up to all 18+ ASAP so capacity utilisation hits close to 100% again. A friend of mine has booked her first dose for next weekend as it was the first evening/weekend slot available. She did this last week.
It's really frustrating because we could potentially double the first dose rate with more evening appointment availablity but the government is just ignoring this need and trying to cram busy under 40s into the 6pm-8pm and reduced weekend capacity appointments.
Agreed. My twentysomething son was one of thousands who queued (in vain) for the surplus doses briefly on offer a couple of day's back. If they opened vaccination to all, take up would spike rapidly.
I suspect a large number of doses have been held back, in case there was a need to do a raft of Bolton-type mass vaccinations, if the Indian variant did break out all over. If - as looks likely - there will be no great wave, then I suspect we might have a rapid advance through the twenties as this reserve gets freed up.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
I was reading yesterday that Tesco have given up on the challenge of making their existing supply chain work for NI. Currently you supply products into GB national distribution centres who consolidate loads to go to the outlying regional DCs in northern Scotland, RoI and NI. That is no longer an option for NI, so they're now passing the impossible problem to suppliers - we have to ship to NI for them.
As with "just buy our food somewhere else" this won't work in the real world as consumers won't pay a lot more for less choice of lower quality stuff. In NI they will cease being supplied from GB and be supplied instead from RoI - cue violence from unionists British goods become an expensive rarity. And for GB? If we could source all the food we need from not the EU at the same price it would already have happened.
Final Q - when the UK signs a deal that doesn't work, isn't acceptable and immediately gets torn up by us, how does that help our negotiation stance with regards to deals with the rest of the world? You can't trust us to agree a deal as we've just shown that not only do we not know what we're signing, we simply rip it up and blame the other side.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
The recent hospitalisations are older people who rejected the vaccine. I remember seeing that the average case age is now something like 29 but the average hospital patient is still over 70. Remember that under 50s with underlying conditions are in groups 4 and 6, that takes the sting out of COVID for young people almost completely as those groups are close to be fully vaccinated.
The Govt seem to now be hanging a major part of their argument on “caution” due to the “Nepalese” variant something about which they freely admit they have no data, no evidence on transmissibility, harmfulness, or vaccine effectiveness. So as a precaution they are assuming “worst case” on all 3. If Govt decisions like this are now based completely on “known unknowns” then they might as well tell people that there is no point in planning for foreign travel ever again.
Because they are basically saying that it doesn’t matter whether vaccines are effective against all variants upon which they have data. There will always be others out there ready to be elevated to a level of “concern” at a moments notice.
They have been criticised for not putting India on the red list when that was exactly how much we knew about the Delta variant. The fact that the Nepal version is Delta+K147N must give rise to concern as it is potentially an escape mutation.
Unfortunately the Government was unclear when advising people whether they should book holidays "only if you are willing to lose the money" should have been the line. Which is why I've booked nothing and am waiting for both the UK position to stabilise and also for rules to be lifted in target countries.
Real question:
I thought that the Nepal version had been shown not to exist the other day, or did I miss something?
Doesn’t really matter if it exists or not. Or whether it was really from Nepal (one case in Nepal genome sequenced I believe). The Govt have it as an excuse, appropriately labelled with a country that was in the news as “having it bad”, and everything else follows from there...
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
Good morning everybody.
If 'the NI protocol was never acceptable', why did we agree to it, and indeed, why did our PM sign up to it. Did he not know what he was doing? Come to that, why did Lord Frost recommend he sign it?
My wife returned from a visit to our (small) local supermarket a couple of days ago and told me there were quite a few spaces on the shelves.
We signed up to it because we wanted a deal with the EU with transitional provisions and there was no deal available without it. I think we expected to be able to find something better before the transitional arrangements expired but we haven't.
As for Lord Frost he looked at the deal overall and decided it was in the UK interest. He was probably right but it looks less clear cut now than it did then.
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
Yes, I hadn't realised the difficulties with the border going on into the mid-twenties, nor that we got the Irish Free State to agree the current border by forgiving them the Imperial War Debt. An interesting precedent.
Just so. Realpolitik suggests to me that in the event of Scottish Indy a temporary Faslane enclave is more likely than Shetland or Dumfries & Galloway seceding.
Modern deep freezes are rubbish, the ‘triumph’ of the NI protocol only lasted a few months before deFrosting.
There were a couple of British military bases left in the IFS until the late thirties, I think. Would have been very useful in the Battle of the Atlantic.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
Wow.
You are normally a fount of good sense.
The number of people in hospital with Covid 19 is at record lows. While hospitalisations are a smidgen off the absolute lows (110 vs 90), this is probably a weekday vs weekend effect. The ratio of those in hospital to those admitted has also just hit a new low, indicating people are spending less and less time in hospital.
The data is absolutely clear: whether in Delta hotspots (like Bolton or Bedford) or nationally, hospital admissions continue to be at a very low level.
@MaxPB I had my 2nd jab on Saturday just gone and the centre was absolutely dead. I assumed it would be packed like when I had my 1st.
I had exactly the same experience, my first jab was like queueing for a Take That concert, the second was like visiting a library.
I really don't think there is any problem with supply.
As I think I posted a couple of weeks ago, when I went for my 2nd at the GP's it was very quiet. This was odd as GP is only doing vulnerables on his lists and everyone who went at same time as me 12 weeks ago was given an appt for 2nd jab exactly 12 weeks later. We were told to come at the exact same time as the first. At my first jab it was very busy, with car park full, queuing for maybe 15 mins or so, etc.
This time, almost empty and straight in.
So did my fellow 2nd jab cohort not turn up? Or had they already gone elsewhere?
Apparently there are a fair number of no-shows at the centres now. Put off by scares? Forgetful? Or just enjoying the sun? Who knows?
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
Sure, but those places are mainly not allowing unrestricted travel.
The US allows US citizens and Green Card holders to travel to it from anywhere without vaccinations, and without quarantine. And an unvaccinated Brit could go for a two week holiday to Mexico, and the head to the US without issues.
So, when you say "those places are mainly not allowing unrestricted travel", which places are you talking about?
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
The first point is that any rise in hospitalisations is from a very low base.l, so stabilising at a slightly higher (but still low base) is not indication of a problem. Also I would like a bit more exploring if what “hospitalisations” actually means. Is it “presentations”? Or “admissions”? And does it actually indicate serious illness, or just a bit of precaution and home in the morning/a couple of days.
People go to hospital all the time. That a few people having COVID is part of the mix isn’t a reason to link vaccination with easing of restrictions, if the existing vaccinations given does the vast majority of the job.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
Good morning everybody.
If 'the NI protocol was never acceptable', why did we agree to it, and indeed, why did our PM sign up to it. Did he not know what he was doing? Come to that, why did Lord Frost recommend he sign it?
My wife returned from a visit to our (small) local supermarket a couple of days ago and told me there were quite a few spaces on the shelves.
We signed up to it because we wanted a deal with the EU with transitional provisions and there was no deal available without it. I think we expected to be able to find something better before the transitional arrangements expired but we haven't.
As for Lord Frost he looked at the deal overall and decided it was in the UK interest. He was probably right but it looks less clear cut now than it did then.
AKA 'marry in haste, repent at leisure'!
Johnson doesn't do that. He marries at leisure and repents in haste.
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
This is an utter nonsense. I'm fuming.
Chill out.. good health is better than a serious risk of catching covid. A sense of perspective is needed. A double vaccination is no guarantee of immunity.
That's the second person to tell me to chill. TSE told me yesterday to 'calm down dear' which tells me a lot about him.
You are the one needing a sense of perspective. I have received two of the amazing vaccinations and I DON'T CARE if I now risk getting covid. Why? Because I am fit and healthy and with both jabs I'm not going to die of covid. There are 15 to 20 more likely ways in which I could die. I am perfectly well aware that there is no guarantee of immunity. So what? I have criss-crossed the globe all my life, with a host of dangers and many vaccinations to attempt to keep me safe. I've lived through several other pandemics, more deadly than covid. I know full well that none of the vaccinations were guarantees of immunity just as getting in a car, crossing the road, flying on a plane, or eating my toast are not guarantees of my safety.
THAT is the perspective we all now need. Once you are double jabbed you should live your life and cast out this dreadful, disastrous, hideous fear mongering which has reduced people to wobbling wrecks.
So don't tell me to chill. This tory voter is right fucked off and Boris Johnson can stick his government up his arse.
I shan't vote for them ever again.
Asymmetric transmission imposes risks on others. There are large numbers of unvaccinated who have not yet been offered vaccination
Also you could do what my wife has done & just go anyway. Just build the self isolation and cost into your plans and cut your cloth accordingly
As ever though it will not impact the rich, ordinary people will not be able to afford all the tests and additional non paid days off work etc.
Life was ever thus.
But if people really want 2 weeks abroad they can just take the quarantine time out of their remaining holiday time (admittedly that doesn’t work for gig workers but thats a much bigger abuse that needs to be fixed)
I'm sure that will be OK for a few folk, but most will be wondering what on earth was the point of the green light category.
And I'm pretty sure the travel industry is not quite so sanguine.
My winter break in Madeira was booked as a bargain when it was in the Red category, then it was Green, and now Amber. I expect it will be Green again by December.
Two of my colleagues were off for a week in Portugal on Monday, now cancelled. They are not sure what to do now. Another had Easyjet cancel his flight to Croatia at a week's notice. I think this quite common as airlines realise half full planes are not viable for business.
It's the Red Funnel for me...
I hope you have better luck than this week, when Red Funnel has been awash with cancellations due to a technical problem and Wightlink due to a police incident at the terminal.
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
The Govt seem to now be hanging a major part of their argument on “caution” due to the “Nepalese” variant something about which they freely admit they have no data, no evidence on transmissibility, harmfulness, or vaccine effectiveness. So as a precaution they are assuming “worst case” on all 3. If Govt decisions like this are now based completely on “known unknowns” then they might as well tell people that there is no point in planning for foreign travel ever again.
Because they are basically saying that it doesn’t matter whether vaccines are effective against all variants upon which they have data. There will always be others out there ready to be elevated to a level of “concern” at a moments notice.
They have been criticised for not putting India on the red list when that was exactly how much we knew about the Delta variant. The fact that the Nepal version is Delta+K147N must give rise to concern as it is potentially an escape mutation.
Unfortunately the Government was unclear when advising people whether they should book holidays "only if you are willing to lose the money" should have been the line. Which is why I've booked nothing and am waiting for both the UK position to stabilise and also for rules to be lifted in target countries.
Real question:
I thought that the Nepal version had been shown not to exist the other day, or did I miss something?
Doesn’t really matter if it exists or not. Or whether it was really from Nepal (one case in Nepal genome sequenced I believe). The Govt have it as an excuse, appropriately labelled with a country that was in the news as “having it bad”, and everything else follows from there...
I'm afraid I find that to be a stupid comment.
Of course it matters.
If it didn’t there would be another variant to take its place.
LOL at those front pages, a totally out of touch media who think that the most important thing in a global pandemic is spending a week on a beach somewhere. How’s about removing domestic restrictions first, so the vaccination success can be built on by getting the economy moving?
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
With any other government if they twatted about with people's lives and with business and with jobs there would be Hell To Pay. This lot? I absolutely won't put it past them doing the full unlock on time and in full, spinning that "we had to fight really hard to do this for you" and blame the scientists for being worrysome botherers.
At which point Cocky and Philip and the red wall show their displeasure by voting Tory.
Final Q - when the UK signs a deal that doesn't work, isn't acceptable and immediately gets torn up by us, how does that help our negotiation stance with regards to deals with the rest of the world? You can't trust us to agree a deal as we've just shown that not only do we not know what we're signing, we simply rip it up and blame the other side.
Such perfidy only applies to dealings with Europeans. The UK would never act in such a way with Australia, New Zealand or any of the honorary white people like Japan in the CPTPP.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
With any other government if they twatted about with people's lives and with business and with jobs there would be Hell To Pay. This lot? I absolutely won't put it past them doing the full unlock on time and in full, spinning that "we had to fight really hard to do this for you" and blame the scientists for being worrysome botherers.
At which point Cocky and Philip and the red wall show their displeasure by voting Tory.
tbf who else do you vote for? Reform? The Daily Mail?
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
So the Oven Ready Deal was sold on a false promise. Welcome to the world of Brexit where our word is no longer our bond, it is worth nothing.
It was dishonest but chicken lickens were running around hysterically saying that if we didn't get a deal with the EU the sky would fall in and we would all starve or something. I prefer the Swiss approach: this just isn't worth it.
The advantage of a Swiss solution is that it's full of holes.
"The vast majority of adults have now been vaccinated and it becomes hard to make the case for the continuation of strict travel controls. They got the plaudits for the vaccine roll-out and the danger is they could see the opposite over this.
What many will find hard to understand is why those who have been fully vaccinated will have to be subject to long airport queues and compulsory quarantine on their return from holiday destinations. Surely proof of vaccination should be enough?"
I'm absolutely livid about this. I voted Conservatives (twice) and Green (once) last month. I am mindful right now never to give the Conservatives my support ever again. That's how angry this has made me.
The whole point of double vaccination is that we should have back our freedom. Yes, there will be case rises and some deaths but not on the previous scale and we have to take that hit. The wider damage socially, economically, emotionally, psychologically and physically is incalculable.
This is an utter nonsense. I'm fuming.
Chill out.. good health is better than a serious risk of catching covid. A sense of perspective is needed. A double vaccination is no guarantee of immunity.
That's the second person to tell me to chill. TSE told me yesterday to 'calm down dear' which tells me a lot about him.
You are the one needing a sense of perspective. I have received two of the amazing vaccinations and I DON'T CARE if I now risk getting covid. Why? Because I am fit and healthy and with both jabs I'm not going to die of covid. There are 15 to 20 more likely ways in which I could die. I am perfectly well aware that there is no guarantee of immunity. So what? I have criss-crossed the globe all my life, with a host of dangers and many vaccinations to attempt to keep me safe. I've lived through several other pandemics, more deadly than covid. I know full well that none of the vaccinations were guarantees of immunity just as getting in a car, crossing the road, flying on a plane, or eating my toast are not guarantees of my safety.
THAT is the perspective we all now need. Once you are double jabbed you should live your life and cast out this dreadful, disastrous, hideous fear mongering which has reduced people to wobbling wrecks.
So don't tell me to chill. This tory voter is right fucked off and Boris Johnson can stick his government up his arse.
I shan't vote for them ever again.
Asymmetric transmission imposes risks on others. There are large numbers of unvaccinated who have not yet been offered vaccination
Also you could do what my wife has done & just go anyway. Just build the self isolation and cost into your plans and cut your cloth accordingly
As ever though it will not impact the rich, ordinary people will not be able to afford all the tests and additional non paid days off work etc.
Life was ever thus.
But if people really want 2 weeks abroad they can just take the quarantine time out of their remaining holiday time (admittedly that doesn’t work for gig workers but thats a much bigger abuse that needs to be fixed)
I'm sure that will be OK for a few folk, but most will be wondering what on earth was the point of the green light category.
And I'm pretty sure the travel industry is not quite so sanguine.
My winter break in Madeira was booked as a bargain when it was in the Red category, then it was Green, and now Amber. I expect it will be Green again by December.
Two of my colleagues were off for a week in Portugal on Monday, now cancelled. They are not sure what to do now. Another had Easyjet cancel his flight to Croatia at a week's notice. I think this quite common as airlines realise half full planes are not viable for business.
It's the Red Funnel for me...
I hope you have better luck than this week, when Red Funnel has been awash with cancellations due to a technical problem and Wightlink due to a police incident at the terminal.
Yes, Mrs Foxy was caught in the Red Falcon failure on Tuesday, but only delayed about an hour.
Of course the very slow rate of vaccination is not willfulness by the government. What has happened is that after a period where we almost took it for granted that they would roll a 6 every time on vaccinations they have come up with a couple of 1s in that large volumes of vaccine that they expected to have has not arrived. I suppose statistically this was likely to happen at some point but the timing is seriously disappointing and I find it bizarre that we can have front pages like those in the thread header with so little discussion of it.
Supply is higher than the rate of vaccination currently. We've now tipped into demand issues as 30-39 year olds are busier and more difficult to book into the available daytime slots. The government should really just open up to all 18+ ASAP so capacity utilisation hits close to 100% again. A friend of mine has booked her first dose for next weekend as it was the first evening/weekend slot available. She did this last week.
It's really frustrating because we could potentially double the first dose rate with more evening appointment availablity but the government is just ignoring this need and trying to cram busy under 40s into the 6pm-8pm and reduced weekend capacity appointments.
What bollox, they cannot be so busy that if they want a vaccine they can make time during the day or go at the weekend. What you really mean is that they are selfish morons and want it on tap to suit them and their pathetic social lives..
LOL at those front pages, a totally out of touch media who think that the most important thing in a global pandemic is spending a week on a beach somewhere. How’s about removing domestic restrictions first, so the vaccination success can be built on by getting the economy moving?
There is no pandemic anymore in the UK, in Israel or the US. There's increasingly not even a pandemic in the EU.
Everyone except the UK government seems to have realised this.
The number of people in hospital with Covid 19 is at record lows. While hospitalisations are a smidgen off the absolute lows (110 vs 90), this is probably a weekday vs weekend effect. The ratio of those in hospital to those admitted has also just hit a new low, indicating people are spending less and less time in hospital.
The data is absolutely clear: whether in Delta hotspots (like Bolton or Bedford) or nationally, hospital admissions continue to be at a very low level.
Both hospitalisations and deaths are nudging upwards (I wouldn't call 22% a smidgen, really), but there's plenty of evidence that vaccinations are working. So it makes sense rationally to delay full reopening until vaccination has advanced further - we're talking about weeks, not months. It's only the political focus on dates, not data, that is driving the push for the 21st - without that, of course we'd wait a bit longer.
But political problems have political solutions. Details can be delayed - getting drinks from the bar, large-scale events - while most restrictions are lifted. We don't need an orgasmic Big Bang abolition of all restrictions on the same day to make people feel that progress is continuing. The polling is clear - people continue to want a bit more caution, and if Johnson combines that with continuing progress towards full reopening, he'll have clear majority support.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
It’s Frost’s protocol that he is now saying won’t work. That’s either gross incompetence or gross deceit.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. I think you should allow for the distinct possibility that it's both.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
Wow.
You are normally a fount of good sense.
The number of people in hospital with Covid 19 is at record lows. While hospitalisations are a smidgen off the absolute lows (110 vs 90), this is probably a weekday vs weekend effect. The ratio of those in hospital to those admitted has also just hit a new low, indicating people are spending less and less time in hospital.
The data is absolutely clear: whether in Delta hotspots (like Bolton or Bedford) or nationally, hospital admissions continue to be at a very low level.
The latest data from the government shows that there were 869 admissions in the last 7 days, an increase of 17.1%. The actual increase is 127 which is not huge but that is still a lot of admissions which will put pressure on the NHS if it continues, especially since they now have an enormous backlog to tackle.
This increase has been running at 20%+ for the best part of a fortnight but there are hints that it is slowing down. If it stayed at this level we could probably cope but it would slow down how we deal with the backlog. If if increased further then we have a problem. The best way of stopping it get worse is to vaccinate as many as possible as quickly as possible.
Its frustrating that we do not have accurate data for how many of these people have been vaccinated. Anecdotal evidence that I have heard is almost none of them.
Of course the very slow rate of vaccination is not willfulness by the government. What has happened is that after a period where we almost took it for granted that they would roll a 6 every time on vaccinations they have come up with a couple of 1s in that large volumes of vaccine that they expected to have has not arrived. I suppose statistically this was likely to happen at some point but the timing is seriously disappointing and I find it bizarre that we can have front pages like those in the thread header with so little discussion of it.
Supply is higher than the rate of vaccination currently. We've now tipped into demand issues as 30-39 year olds are busier and more difficult to book into the available daytime slots. The government should really just open up to all 18+ ASAP so capacity utilisation hits close to 100% again. A friend of mine has booked her first dose for next weekend as it was the first evening/weekend slot available. She did this last week.
It's really frustrating because we could potentially double the first dose rate with more evening appointment availablity but the government is just ignoring this need and trying to cram busy under 40s into the 6pm-8pm and reduced weekend capacity appointments.
What bollox, they cannot be so busy that if they want a vaccine they can make time during the day or go at the weekend. What you really mean is that they are selfish morons and want it on tap to suit them and their pathetic social lives..
Old man, speaks like an old man. Big surprise. Idiot.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
Wow.
You are normally a fount of good sense.
The number of people in hospital with Covid 19 is at record lows. While hospitalisations are a smidgen off the absolute lows (110 vs 90), this is probably a weekday vs weekend effect. The ratio of those in hospital to those admitted has also just hit a new low, indicating people are spending less and less time in hospital.
The data is absolutely clear: whether in Delta hotspots (like Bolton or Bedford) or nationally, hospital admissions continue to be at a very low level.
And this is my objection to the media's obsession with Independent Sage as their 'go to experts' and how they daily scare the public, demanding longer lockdowns on the outright disingenuous use of percentages and not the real numbers of hospitalisations, age groups, vaccination status, and severity of their condition
Time has come to condemn Independant Sage and their absurd agenda
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
Yep. Anyone who thinks continuing with plans for June 21st is consistent with acting with “extreme caution” isn’t thinking straight. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the comment from Johnson down about “nothing in the data to prevent June 21st” is a deliberate strategy to suddenly notice something in the data on June 13th...
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
It’s Frost’s protocol that he is now saying won’t work. That’s either gross incompetence or gross deceit.
I don't think that's entirely accurate. I think you should allow for the distinct possibility that it's both.
You could bet your shirt on it being both.
I'll cheerfully bet the one I'm wearing now, because it's old, tatty and covered in paint (a skirting board needed doing).
I am interested in what is planned for June 21st. Are people really expecting everything to end in terms of Social Distancing and masks etc? Certainly there are no plans for my hospital to do this. I just expect the final restrictions on businesses to end.
The crux of the problem that @Cocky_cockney raises is that this government is functionally incompetent. I have been banging the drum for ages that "we won, we're popular, it doesn't matter" isn't good enough. Lies, corruption, incompetence, strategy based on newspaper headlines - this isn't how good government is done.
Since the start it has been blindingly obvious this clowncar government don't know how to communicate. Guidance that is contradicted one minister on the radio to the next that contradicts the law. A new 5 stage plan launched at 3.5. Regional tiers supposedly all the same but the rules are different in each place affected.
So it isn't a surprise that we're here. If you are double vaccinated then why do you need to isolate for 10 days and take 3 tests to come back from countries who have less pox than we do? Its illogical and stupid. They declared that 6 people in a choir couldn't meet covid secure in a venue to sing, but bands can play with the audience singing along. Who makes this shit up?
Fundamentally they do it and they get away with it because @Philip_Thompson and @Cocky_cockney etc rightly tear chunks of the government but vote for it anyway. They think you are stupid and tret you accordingly.
On linkedIn I currently see a thread from knowledgeable people complaining about another further coming HMRC attack on self employment.
The simple fact is that with the Tories on 40% percentage of the vote they can (sadly) do what they want.
As discussed last night, the Tories don’t need to govern for working people / the economically active.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
Wow.
You are normally a fount of good sense.
The number of people in hospital with Covid 19 is at record lows. While hospitalisations are a smidgen off the absolute lows (110 vs 90), this is probably a weekday vs weekend effect. The ratio of those in hospital to those admitted has also just hit a new low, indicating people are spending less and less time in hospital.
The data is absolutely clear: whether in Delta hotspots (like Bolton or Bedford) or nationally, hospital admissions continue to be at a very low level.
The latest data from the government shows that there were 869 admissions in the last 7 days, an increase of 17.1%. The actual increase is 127 which is not huge but that is still a lot of admissions which will put pressure on the NHS if it continues, especially since they now have an enormous backlog to tackle.
This increase has been running at 20%+ for the best part of a fortnight but there are hints that it is slowing down. If it stayed at this level we could probably cope but it would slow down how we deal with the backlog. If if increased further then we have a problem. The best way of stopping it get worse is to vaccinate as many as possible as quickly as possible.
Its frustrating that we do not have accurate data for how many of these people have been vaccinated. Anecdotal evidence that I have heard is almost none of them.
The moving average troughed on May 27 and is up 17% since then. However, the actual number in hospital fell during this period, indicating that people were probably being hospitalised for precautionary reasons and then were released.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
The EU has almost entirely stopped using AZ. Their tracker of vaccines recieved shows an almost complete stop of AZ arrivals from May 22 (down to just 2m/week from 10m).
Edit to add: Looking at last week, the EU is now 80% Pfizer (17m), 10% Moderna (3m), 10% J&J + AZ (3m).
Not using them, but still suing AZ and effectively demanding supplies be diverted from people who need them.
So the media and Mike Smithson having spent the last year complaining that the government is too slow to take unpopular action are now complaining that the government is too fast to take unpopular action.
Looks like Lord Frost is indeed buggering up on the protocol and the EU are considering retaliation measures.
The reality was that the NI protocol was never acceptable and was never going to work. It was accepted to get the deal over the line but I seriously question if we ever meant it or whether we expected the "temporary" derogations to go on indefinitely.
I therefore do not think that Frost has "buggered up" the protocol, he has simply said that it will not work and is not acceptable to us. That puts us in breach but finding a response to that by the EU that does not amount to self harm will be tricky.
The EU has run a surplus of the thick end of £90bn of surplus in goods with the UK for a long time. That is starting to change fairly fast and the more restrictions they put on the faster it will change. If, as was being alleged yesterday, they allow "red tape" to increase the cost of food supplied by them we will simply buy our food somewhere else. The EU is currently losing far more trade than we are. Do they really want to make that even worse?
I was reading yesterday that Tesco have given up on the challenge of making their existing supply chain work for NI. Currently you supply products into GB national distribution centres who consolidate loads to go to the outlying regional DCs in northern Scotland, RoI and NI. That is no longer an option for NI, so they're now passing the impossible problem to suppliers - we have to ship to NI for them.
As with "just buy our food somewhere else" this won't work in the real world as consumers won't pay a lot more for less choice of lower quality stuff. In NI they will cease being supplied from GB and be supplied instead from RoI - cue violence from unionists British goods become an expensive rarity. And for GB? If we could source all the food we need from not the EU at the same price it would already have happened.
Final Q - when the UK signs a deal that doesn't work, isn't acceptable and immediately gets torn up by us, how does that help our negotiation stance with regards to deals with the rest of the world? You can't trust us to agree a deal as we've just shown that not only do we not know what we're signing, we simply rip it up and blame the other side.
Personally I would not have signed a deal with the NI protocol. But I understand why they did. If we hadn't there would be no supply problems to NI from GB at all.
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
Yep. Anyone who thinks continuing with plans for June 21st is consistent with acting with “extreme caution” isn’t thinking straight. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the comment from Johnson down about “nothing in the data to prevent June 21st” is a deliberate strategy to suddenly notice something in the data on June 13th...
“And with the greatest of reluctance...”
Like when you have to break up with your partner. You naturally put it off right up until the last minute because, let's face it, we are cowards.
Johnson especially. He can't face telling us so will wait until he has to tell us. And then it will be it's not you, it's me - being extremely cautious.
Although you would have thought Johnson of all people would have got this breaking up with partners down to a tee.
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
Yes, I hadn't realised the difficulties with the border going on into the mid-twenties, nor that we got the Irish Free State to agree the current border by forgiving them the Imperial War Debt. An interesting precedent.
Although as I recall they still had to pay pensions for those civil servants based in Ireland.
*Looks round expectantly for ballistic turnip incoming from Ayrshire*
More seriously, that was a good deal for the Irish Free State, because otherwise they would have ended up either with yet another war - which they really could have done without - or humiliation over the Boundary Commission (which to be blunt, hadn't covered itself in glory with its suggestions). No debt, no boundary commission, no war. When Cosgrave said he wanted 'a huge nought' he got three for the price of one. Man was a genius. We could do with somebody of his quality right now.
The losers were the Nationalists of Londonderry, Tyrone and Fermanagh, plus the Unionists of Donegal. Unfortunately, they ended up being pawns in a power play.
And they have been ever since.
You prove me right yet again ydoethur, that will upset the frothers on here. Good old triple lock, my two pensions are up , no NI to pay, sunny uplands are here and once independent England will have to pay my pension. What more could you ask for ( we even have sunshine as well just now).
LOL at those front pages, a totally out of touch media who think that the most important thing in a global pandemic is spending a week on a beach somewhere. How’s about removing domestic restrictions first, so the vaccination success can be built on by getting the economy moving?
If this was out of the blue then you would have a point. It isn't though. The clowncar seem obsessed about the desire of the proles to go to Benidorm and for the right sort to be able to do global business trip unimpeded. Last summer we had Ester McVile embarassing herself extolling the virtues of "staycations" https://twitter.com/EstherMcVey1/status/1289185662483087361 - that won't do for this year hence the clowncar telling the papers that people will be allowed to travel because thats what the Boris vaccine is for.
In reality foreign travel should remain heavily restricted. Business or family only, no jollies. In practice thats what it is, but with endless shite about BOOK NOW because they don't want to bail out the travel industry any more.
They really missed the ball. A pandemic plus Brexit - what a glorious opportunity to have pushed the virtues of holidaying in Britain. Which would have meant all the tough border restrictions the clowncar seem incapable of doing in practice despite the "take back control" guff and that psychotic Patel doing her "arrest a darky" photoshoot. But it could have been done.
Cummings was right wasn't he? Functional incompetence.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
It doesn't matter, we have enough AZ to cover the remaining second doses. We're not using it for first doses. Better for it to be used somewhere else in the world (probably Australia and Canada as per the previous exports) than sit in a fridge in the UK where it's not really needed.
We have the supply, we're now facing logistics issues of matching busy under 40s with appointments at the right time of day or on the weekend or in the right part of where they live (near their place of work rather than home).
For the first time the rigid rollout which has helped us is now becoming a hindrance. Time to just open up to all 18+ and get vaccine centres opening from 11am to 11pm. The order in which 18-29 years olds are vaccinated isn't a huge deal, getting as many done as possible in the next 7 days is.
I totally agree that it is absolutely urgent that we maximise vaccination. It is almost too late for the 21st now.
But vaccines are not now the key to opening up. They are only the key to opening up because the Govt have self determined it to be so. The unvaccinated categories are not people at serious widespread risk of the virus. If the relative risks to public health from the virus last March were the same as they are now we would have never have put in place more than cursory restrictions at most if at all.
The incidence of serious illness and death is much lower amongst the under 40s but it is not non existent. That is why hospitalisations have, until recently, been increasing at 20%+ a week. These are almost exclusively people who have not been vaccinated either because they have chosen not to be or because it has not been available to them. If we are to hold hospitalisations at a level we can tolerate we need to increase vaccination. This has been a race and we are, sadly, losing it so far as the 21st is concerned.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
Wow.
You are normally a fount of good sense.
The number of people in hospital with Covid 19 is at record lows. While hospitalisations are a smidgen off the absolute lows (110 vs 90), this is probably a weekday vs weekend effect. The ratio of those in hospital to those admitted has also just hit a new low, indicating people are spending less and less time in hospital.
The data is absolutely clear: whether in Delta hotspots (like Bolton or Bedford) or nationally, hospital admissions continue to be at a very low level.
The latest data from the government shows that there were 869 admissions in the last 7 days, an increase of 17.1%. The actual increase is 127 which is not huge but that is still a lot of admissions which will put pressure on the NHS if it continues, especially since they now have an enormous backlog to tackle.
This increase has been running at 20%+ for the best part of a fortnight but there are hints that it is slowing down. If it stayed at this level we could probably cope but it would slow down how we deal with the backlog. If if increased further then we have a problem. The best way of stopping it get worse is to vaccinate as many as possible as quickly as possible.
Its frustrating that we do not have accurate data for how many of these people have been vaccinated. Anecdotal evidence that I have heard is almost none of them.
Almost all of that rise comes from Scotland. England is still bumping along at about 80-100 per day. Wales and NI haven't seen much change either. Places like Bolton which had case rates of 400/100k last week have seen tiny increases in the absolute numbers in local NHS trusts. Honestly, what happens in Scotland really doesn't bother me. If Nicola wants to extend lockdown there until 2022 that's ultimately not my problem.
Government supporters will be along soon to blame the media for running stories about new variants while calling for restrictions to be eased, or scientists or independent SAGE. Basically anyone except the government.
They will blame holiday makers themselves as well.
There are 2 linked problems here. Firstly, the majority of holiday makers are quite young and will therefore not be vaccinated at all or at best will too recently have had a single dose. Secondly, we are once again not getting the benefits of our vaccination program.
The link is the lack of pace in our vaccination drive over the last month. It has been immensely disappointing and we are paying the price both domestically with increasing cases and hospitalisations and internationally in that our travel has again been restricted.
The meme that the government has done brilliantly with the roll out of the vaccines is strong and has so far helped the government but I am surprised that people have accepted the current rate of vaccination without more fuss. Only 448k yesterday. Its pathetic and threatens both the 21st June release and holidays. If, as we should have been, we were vaccinating at twice that rate these problems would solve themselves.
I wonder whether AZ is quietly diverting some of its vaccines elsewhere to be honest
Possibly, although my wife had her second AZ on Tuesday. Has the bullying and hysterical nonsense by the EU worked? That would be annoying.
The EU has almost entirely stopped using AZ. Their tracker of vaccines recieved shows an almost complete stop of AZ arrivals from May 22 (down to just 2m/week from 10m).
Edit to add: Looking at last week, the EU is now 80% Pfizer (17m), 10% Moderna (3m), 10% J&J + AZ (3m).
Not using them, but still suing AZ and effectively demanding supplies be diverted from people who need them.
That tracker shows both usage of and doses received. Doses received have collapsed. The EU is not grabbing AZ doses from other countries right now. (Although they may have done so in the past.)
And everyone knows that the EU's court case will go nowhere, and was done solely to deflect blame from their disastrous vaccine procurement.
Anyone been watching the vg Road to Partition on BBC2? I knew some of the events but it was striking how close to a Balkan style situation Ireland was in 1916-22: murder, assassination, massacres, rebellion, civil war, ethnic cleansing, state killing. As one historian put it (I paraphrase), partition was not a solution rather it put the problem in a deep freeze, and sooner or later problems have to come out of the deep freeze.
Yes, I hadn't realised the difficulties with the border going on into the mid-twenties, nor that we got the Irish Free State to agree the current border by forgiving them the Imperial War Debt. An interesting precedent.
Although as I recall they still had to pay pensions for those civil servants based in Ireland.
*Looks round expectantly for ballistic turnip incoming from Ayrshire*
More seriously, that was a good deal for the Irish Free State, because otherwise they would have ended up either with yet another war - which they really could have done without - or humiliation over the Boundary Commission (which to be blunt, hadn't covered itself in glory with its suggestions). No debt, no boundary commission, no war. When Cosgrave said he wanted 'a huge nought' he got three for the price of one. Man was a genius. We could do with somebody of his quality right now.
The losers were the Nationalists of Londonderry, Tyrone and Fermanagh, plus the Unionists of Donegal. Unfortunately, they ended up being pawns in a power play.
And they have been ever since.
You prove me right yet again ydoethur, that will upset the frothers on here. Good old triple lock, my two pensions are up , no NI to pay, sunny uplands are here and once independent England will have to pay my pension. What more could you ask for ( we even have sunshine as well just now).
No Malc - I'm saying *Ireland* had to pay the pensions for Civil Servants based there...
Slightly O/T but my wife has had a much more negative reaction to her second dose of vaccine than she did to her first. She has been seriously off her feet for the last 3 days, sick, achy and very, very tired. Almost no response at all to her first dose. I didn't expect this.
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
Yep. Anyone who thinks continuing with plans for June 21st is consistent with acting with “extreme caution” isn’t thinking straight. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the comment from Johnson down about “nothing in the data to prevent June 21st” is a deliberate strategy to suddenly notice something in the data on June 13th...
“And with the greatest of reluctance...”
Although you would have thought Johnson of all people would have got this breaking up with partners down to a tee.
I think all the evidence is that his break ups are famously acrimonious. The next one could be real popcorn time.
So the media and Mike Smithson having spent the last year complaining that the government is too slow to take unpopular action are now complaining that the government is too fast to take unpopular action.
No, it's being too slow to adjust to a changing environment, yet again.
So the media and Mike Smithson having spent the last year complaining that the government is too slow to take unpopular action are now complaining that the government is too fast to take unpopular action.
The government was too slow to apply restrictions a year ago, and are too slow to remove restrictions right now.
It's classic cognitive dissonance, and being slow to assimilate new information.
LOL at those front pages, a totally out of touch media who think that the most important thing in a global pandemic is spending a week on a beach somewhere. How’s about removing domestic restrictions first, so the vaccination success can be built on by getting the economy moving?
If this was out of the blue then you would have a point. It isn't though. The clowncar seem obsessed about the desire of the proles to go to Benidorm and for the right sort to be able to do global business trip unimpeded. Last summer we had Ester McVile embarassing herself extolling the virtues of "staycations" https://twitter.com/EstherMcVey1/status/1289185662483087361 - that won't do for this year hence the clowncar telling the papers that people will be allowed to travel because thats what the Boris vaccine is for.
In reality foreign travel should remain heavily restricted. Business or family only, no jollies. In practice thats what it is, but with endless shite about BOOK NOW because they don't want to bail out the travel industry any more.
They really missed the ball. A pandemic plus Brexit - what a glorious opportunity to have pushed the virtues of holidaying in Britain. Which would have meant all the tough border restrictions the clowncar seem incapable of doing in practice despite the "take back control" guff and that psychotic Patel doing her "arrest a darky" photoshoot. But it could have been done.
Cummings was right wasn't he? Functional incompetence.
Well, he should certainly know what that looks like...
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
With any other government if they twatted about with people's lives and with business and with jobs there would be Hell To Pay. This lot? I absolutely won't put it past them doing the full unlock on time and in full, spinning that "we had to fight really hard to do this for you" and blame the scientists for being worrysome botherers.
At which point Cocky and Philip and the red wall show their displeasure by voting Tory.
tbf who else do you vote for? Reform? The Daily Mail?
There is always Galloway's exciting new Strasserite project.
The crux of the problem that @Cocky_cockney raises is that this government is functionally incompetent. I have been banging the drum for ages that "we won, we're popular, it doesn't matter" isn't good enough. Lies, corruption, incompetence, strategy based on newspaper headlines - this isn't how good government is done.
Since the start it has been blindingly obvious this clowncar government don't know how to communicate. Guidance that is contradicted one minister on the radio to the next that contradicts the law. A new 5 stage plan launched at 3.5. Regional tiers supposedly all the same but the rules are different in each place affected.
So it isn't a surprise that we're here. If you are double vaccinated then why do you need to isolate for 10 days and take 3 tests to come back from countries who have less pox than we do? Its illogical and stupid. They declared that 6 people in a choir couldn't meet covid secure in a venue to sing, but bands can play with the audience singing along. Who makes this shit up?
Fundamentally they do it and they get away with it because @Philip_Thompson and @Cocky_cockney etc rightly tear chunks of the government but vote for it anyway. They think you are stupid and tret you accordingly.
On linkedIn I currently see a thread from knowledgeable people complaining about another further coming HMRC attack on self employment.
The simple fact is that with the Tories on 40% percentage of the vote they can (sadly) do what they want.
As discussed last night, the Tories don’t need to govern for working people / the economically active.
The grey vote trumps all.
And as discussed last night that's complete claptrap.
The Tories win those aged 39+ not those aged 65+
If Labour won all years up to 65 then they'd win the election.
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
Yep. Anyone who thinks continuing with plans for June 21st is consistent with acting with “extreme caution” isn’t thinking straight. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the comment from Johnson down about “nothing in the data to prevent June 21st” is a deliberate strategy to suddenly notice something in the data on June 13th...
“And with the greatest of reluctance...”
Although you would have thought Johnson of all people would have got this breaking up with partners down to a tee.
I think all the evidence is that his break ups are famously acrimonious. The next one could be real popcorn time.
Indeed yes. Which one gets the house? The incumbent Prime Minister, or Boris Johnson?
Slightly O/T but my wife has had a much more negative reaction to her second dose of vaccine than she did to her first. She has been seriously off her feet for the last 3 days, sick, achy and very, very tired. Almost no response at all to her first dose. I didn't expect this.
That's because her immune system is working. And it's always the second dose that gets you.
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
With any other government if they twatted about with people's lives and with business and with jobs there would be Hell To Pay. This lot? I absolutely won't put it past them doing the full unlock on time and in full, spinning that "we had to fight really hard to do this for you" and blame the scientists for being worrysome botherers.
At which point Cocky and Philip and the red wall show their displeasure by voting Tory.
tbf who else do you vote for? Reform? The Daily Mail?
There is always Galloway's exciting new Strasserite project.
You know who else had a party that was based on nationalism, socialism and the workers...
So the government is establishing that it is being "extremely cautious" (Jenrick, R4 today) in putting Portugal on the amber list.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
With any other government if they twatted about with people's lives and with business and with jobs there would be Hell To Pay. This lot? I absolutely won't put it past them doing the full unlock on time and in full, spinning that "we had to fight really hard to do this for you" and blame the scientists for being worrysome botherers.
At which point Cocky and Philip and the red wall show their displeasure by voting Tory.
tbf who else do you vote for? Reform? The Daily Mail?
Other parties are available. As is spoiling your vote or abstaining. It takes a special kind of person to spew bile and vitriol against a shit government who have done egregiously bad things to them who then vote for them anyway.
If nothing else - as Cummings said - when your choice is Shit or Shitter then the entire political machine has failed. All the more reason to vote against it. Vote Reform. Green. LD. Heavy Woollen Independents. Whoever - vote your displeasure. And when the big two start losing in heavy numbers to small parties fringe parties and loony independents, perhaps the political machine might think that it needs to behave.
Comments
And thinking back to Cheltenham last year, Johnson is a very slow learner.
Edit to add:
Looking at last week, the EU is now 80% Pfizer (17m), 10% Moderna (3m), 10% J&J + AZ (3m).
And I'm pretty sure the travel industry is not quite so sanguine.
We are wasting the benefits of our vaccination programme, it seems to me .... and allowing a mentality to develop which puts the elimination of any health risk on a par with our freedom to live life fully. This last is unacceptable. The point of good health is to be able to live not the other way around. The point of life is not to have good health - and yet this seems to be the approach of some commentators and politicians. It is disappointing and worrying.
It is massively instructing - you can lock people down forever and then gradually introduce surveillance to enforce compliance. This is the english path to totalitarianism.
If 'the NI protocol was never acceptable', why did we agree to it, and indeed, why did our PM sign up to it.
Did he not know what he was doing?
Come to that, why did Lord Frost recommend he sign it?
My wife returned from a visit to our (small) local supermarket a couple of days ago and told me there were quite a few spaces on the shelves.
Which, if you think about it, is anti-science.
*Looks round expectantly for ballistic turnip incoming from Ayrshire*
More seriously, that was a good deal for the Irish Free State, because otherwise they would have ended up either with yet another war - which they really could have done without - or humiliation over the Boundary Commission (which to be blunt, hadn't covered itself in glory with its suggestions). No debt, no boundary commission, no war. When Cosgrave said he wanted 'a huge nought' he got three for the price of one. Man was a genius. We could do with somebody of his quality right now.
The losers were the Nationalists of Londonderry, Tyrone and Fermanagh, plus the Unionists of Donegal. Unfortunately, they ended up being pawns in a power play.
And they have been ever since.
Two of my colleagues were off for a week in Portugal on Monday, now cancelled. They are not sure what to do now. Another had Easyjet cancel his flight to Croatia at a week's notice. I think this quite common as airlines realise half full planes are not viable for business.
It's the Red Funnel for me...
Since the start it has been blindingly obvious this clowncar government don't know how to communicate. Guidance that is contradicted one minister on the radio to the next that contradicts the law. A new 5 stage plan launched at 3.5. Regional tiers supposedly all the same but the rules are different in each place affected.
So it isn't a surprise that we're here. If you are double vaccinated then why do you need to isolate for 10 days and take 3 tests to come back from countries who have less pox than we do? Its illogical and stupid. They declared that 6 people in a choir couldn't meet covid secure in a venue to sing, but bands can play with the audience singing along. Who makes this shit up?
Fundamentally they do it and they get away with it because @Philip_Thompson and @Cocky_cockney etc rightly tear chunks of the government but vote for it anyway. They think you are stupid and tret you accordingly.
My twentysomething son was one of thousands who queued (in vain) for the surplus doses briefly on offer a couple of day's back.
If they opened vaccination to all, take up would spike rapidly.
I really don't think there is any problem with supply.
In Israel, CV19 is completely defeated. Despite reopening to (vaccinated) tourists and their children, total cases are a dozen a day. They are maybe six weeks ahead of us in terms of vaccination numbers.
In the US, which is still well behind the UK in terms of doses administered per person, and which is flattening out, there is not the slightest suggestion restrictions will continue. And hospitalisations and deaths continue to collapse. Nobody seems the slightest bit concerned about young people and antivaxxers getting Covid.
Across the EU, restrictions are being dismantled, with one or two countries (like Denmark) having essentially removed all measures. There too there is now a decoupling: the numbers in hospital with CV19 are falling, even as case loads (mostly among the young and not even single jabbed) have risen.
No-one outside the UK (and genuine hotspots like South America and India) is thinking about doing anything other than returning to normal.
As for Lord Frost he looked at the deal overall and decided it was in the UK interest. He was probably right but it looks less clear cut now than it did then.
That's what's driving the conversations on here.
If they saw sense and locked every member of Indie Sage in the nearest convenient psychiatric hospital for six months we'd all be talking about how much we're looking forward to normality next week.
The simple fact is that with the Tories on 40% percentage of the vote they can (sadly) do what they want.
Modern deep freezes are rubbish, the ‘triumph’ of the NI protocol only lasted a few months before deFrosting.
It's only a few months since we were enjoying having got our vaccination programme underway faster than most, and looking forward to the eventual deliverance that this head start would give us.
Now many seem determined that we enjoy the extra months relatively free of any medical risk that we have won by enjoying another spell of lockdown.
Having cancelled by spring travel plans for a second year running, I'm going abroad in September so long as it is remotely feasible.
There is some evidence, in the last couple of days, that hospitalisations may be stabilising. We need to do better than that.
The EU shooting itself in the foot is becoming quite a narrative
This time, almost empty and straight in.
So did my fellow 2nd jab cohort not turn up? Or had they already gone elsewhere?
We're actually having an almost identical experience to Israel, where cases went up for a short period during the latter stages of the vaccine programme as people naturally become less cautious. It didn't feed through to additional hospitalisations there and it won't here. All of this guff about the delta variant or other such inanities is bullshit. Vaccines are highly efficacious, we have fully vaccinated 50% of adults and almost all of groups 1-9. Where exactly are the hospitalisations and deaths going to come from? Those groups account for 90% of hospitalisations and 95% of deaths adding group 10 to fully vaccinated in about 2 weeks will bring those numbers up to 96% and 99%.
As with "just buy our food somewhere else" this won't work in the real world as consumers won't pay a lot more for less choice of lower quality stuff. In NI they will cease being supplied from GB and be supplied instead from RoI - cue violence from unionists British goods become an expensive rarity. And for GB? If we could source all the food we need from not the EU at the same price it would already have happened.
Final Q - when the UK signs a deal that doesn't work, isn't acceptable and immediately gets torn up by us, how does that help our negotiation stance with regards to deals with the rest of the world? You can't trust us to agree a deal as we've just shown that not only do we not know what we're signing, we simply rip it up and blame the other side.
Of course it matters.
You are normally a fount of good sense.
The number of people in hospital with Covid 19 is at record lows. While hospitalisations are a smidgen off the absolute lows (110 vs 90), this is probably a weekday vs weekend effect. The ratio of those in hospital to those admitted has also just hit a new low, indicating people are spending less and less time in hospital.
The data is absolutely clear: whether in Delta hotspots (like Bolton or Bedford) or nationally, hospital admissions continue to be at a very low level.
So, when you say "those places are mainly not allowing unrestricted travel", which places are you talking about?
People go to hospital all the time. That a few people having COVID is part of the mix isn’t a reason to link vaccination with easing of restrictions, if the existing vaccinations given does the vast majority of the job.
Although he couldn't confirm one case of the "Nepal" mutation they are stopping travel to Portugal "just in case". Not anywhere else currently on the green list, just Portugal. Why not everywhere else?
As such, no action is now off the table.
If the nation (and PB especially) is ready to accept "extreme caution" and "just in case" then it will welcome with open arms an extension to lockdown on June 21st and much more besides.
Why? Because ratings. So we are getting what we want. Rejoice.
At which point Cocky and Philip and the red wall show their displeasure by voting Tory.
Everyone except the UK government seems to have realised this.
But political problems have political solutions. Details can be delayed - getting drinks from the bar, large-scale events - while most restrictions are lifted. We don't need an orgasmic Big Bang abolition of all restrictions on the same day to make people feel that progress is continuing. The polling is clear - people continue to want a bit more caution, and if Johnson combines that with continuing progress towards full reopening, he'll have clear majority support.
This increase has been running at 20%+ for the best part of a fortnight but there are hints that it is slowing down. If it stayed at this level we could probably cope but it would slow down how we deal with the backlog. If if increased further then we have a problem. The best way of stopping it get worse is to vaccinate as many as possible as quickly as possible.
Its frustrating that we do not have accurate data for how many of these people have been vaccinated. Anecdotal evidence that I have heard is almost none of them.
Time has come to condemn Independant Sage and their absurd agenda
Put them back in their box
“And with the greatest of reluctance...”
The grey vote trumps all.
Johnson especially. He can't face telling us so will wait until he has to tell us. And then it will be it's not you, it's me - being extremely cautious.
Although you would have thought Johnson of all people would have got this breaking up with partners down to a tee.
In reality foreign travel should remain heavily restricted. Business or family only, no jollies. In practice thats what it is, but with endless shite about BOOK NOW because they don't want to bail out the travel industry any more.
They really missed the ball. A pandemic plus Brexit - what a glorious opportunity to have pushed the virtues of holidaying in Britain. Which would have meant all the tough border restrictions the clowncar seem incapable of doing in practice despite the "take back control" guff and that psychotic Patel doing her "arrest a darky" photoshoot. But it could have been done.
Cummings was right wasn't he? Functional incompetence.
Absolute shites
And everyone knows that the EU's court case will go nowhere, and was done solely to deflect blame from their disastrous vaccine procurement.
It's classic cognitive dissonance, and being slow to assimilate new information.
The Tories win those aged 39+ not those aged 65+
If Labour won all years up to 65 then they'd win the election.
If nothing else - as Cummings said - when your choice is Shit or Shitter then the entire political machine has failed. All the more reason to vote against it. Vote Reform. Green. LD. Heavy Woollen Independents. Whoever - vote your displeasure. And when the big two start losing in heavy numbers to small parties fringe parties and loony independents, perhaps the political machine might think that it needs to behave.