Sajid has shown good judgment in three areas so far:
1. Signalling an irreversible end to restrictions.
2. Refusing to appoint Dido Harding to run the NHS (an idea so bad it seems like a joke)
3. Letting it be known he is against the overly-hasty introduction of NHS reorganisation so that he can point the finger at Boris when the shit starts hitting the fan.
West, who is a member of the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, which advises Sage, said: “The most serious problem is that if you have a situation where not everyone has been even offered the vaccine then you’ve already got clearly a huge unfairness.
Yes I know some can't have it etc, but 90 odd percentage of people have. And second doses won't be long now for people who want that.
Trouble is that we aren't at 90 percent of people yet.
According to ourworldindata.org, we're at about 67% of people for first dose and 50% fully dosed. That's good (and most of those who haven't been jabbed are young and mostly at very low personal risk), but it's still a lot of people who have yet to be offered a vaccination.
And there's not a huge amount to be done about any of that now until the second Pfizer order comes on-stream (at the end of August?)
That is total population, not adults. Adults its 86% / 63%. We will get to 80%+ total in the near future. Every adult (excluding the rare cases of medical issues) have been offered first jab and its max 8 weeks for 2nd dose. They are also talking about altering the rules for school kids, regardless of vaccination status.
So in a few weeks we really just be talking about refuseniks. If they feel its "unfair", well they can do something about it.
Children are people, too. And perfectly capable of getting infected and getting sick and passing it on to others. Viruses don't look at dates of birth, after all.
We are impressively damn close to herd immunity by vaccination. But we're clearly not there yet. And the 40 million Pfizer doses in the first order (so 20 million people) aren't quite enough to get us there either... hence the interest in doing a vaccine time swap with Israel.
Emma Raducanu - half Romanian, half Chinese - is one of those immigrants PBers love to complain about.
No, I don’t mean *her*, they protest.
I think you need to work harder on your trolling, unless you genuinely believe people who want to restrict levels of immigration (and its not a subject I care about, the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned) actually want to have zero immigration at all. Otherwise your trolling attempt doesn't work, since it has to bear some relation to what people actually complain about.
I don't think anyone cares about the background of their sport stars though, even if they snuck in illegally - so just see all migrants, legal and otherwise, as potential olympians and don't risk sending anyone home.
Two or three times a week we have a little masturbatory sub-thread on how awful immigration has been over the last few years, reducing skill levels, repressing wages and increasing house prices.
Said conversations are never able to cite any actual evidence for their claim.
Ms Raducanu is a fetching riposte to such drivel.
Immigration is a fantastic thing and has brought us so many talented people. My challenge whenever people put forward a 1st generation immigrant like her as British is to check if they would be happy for her to come to this country now.
She arrived aged 2, born abroad to forrin parents. Aren't they now the exact kind of people that the angry folk want to keep out?
Most immigration discussion is unenlightened because it's so reductive.
Two things can be true at the same time: there are millions of talented people in the world who'd no doubt all make a meaningful contribution to the UK but at the same time the rate and type of admissions also needs to be controlled.
Her parents are rich financiers, so she would get in under current rules. It is the likes of Mo Farah that would be barred.
I'm not familiar with all of Mo Farah's family background but no doubt there are many Kenyan and Somalian talented runners as well as sportsmen and women who'd like to emigrate but would currently struggle to do so. There are probably lots of talented Korean computer scientists and Azerbaijani entrepreneurs who'd like to do so too.
A line has to be drawn somewhere. That will never seem fair to those who fall on just the wrong side of it but it's essential to maintaining stability and cohesion.
One thing about successful children of immigrants (for example Sajid Javid, or Sadiq Khan) is that their parents arrived poor and unskilled, or like Boris Johnson, Michael Portillo, or Dominic Raab as refugees fleeing political persecution. They probably wouldn't get in so easily today.
Is that a good thing? Or did they prevent an indigenous Briton from getting their opportunity?
This is the key point I have made a few times. Its fine to point to sons and daughters of migrants and say "thats the kind of controlled migration that Britain needs". Its just that applying the kind of migration that Britain needs on the examples means their parents aren't allowed here in the first place.
Which is why we have Cabinet Ministers like Javid saying "I'm the son of a bus driver" whilst creating a policy that bars bus drivers from migrating to the UK.
As an antidote to sport, this evening's European polling focuses on another non-EU member - Norway, which votes on 13 September.
The Latest IPSOS poll (changes from the 2017 election):
Labour Party: 24% (-3) Conservative Party: 21% (-4) Centre Party: 19% (+9) Progress Party: 7% (-8) Socialist Left Party: 7% (+1) Red Party: 6% (+3.5) Green Party: 5% (+2) Liberal Party: 3% (-1) Christian People's Party: 3% (-1.5)
The governing coalition of Conservative, Liberal and Christian People's Party is down 6.5% on 2017. The obvious alternative Government is Labour plus Centre plus Socialist Left which would command a majority on these numbers.
That was the coalition of the Stoltenberg era from 2005-2013 which was replaced by the centre-right coalition led by Erna Solberg which has governed Norway since the 2013 GE.
West, who is a member of the Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behaviours, which advises Sage, said: “The most serious problem is that if you have a situation where not everyone has been even offered the vaccine then you’ve already got clearly a huge unfairness.
Yes I know some can't have it etc, but 90 odd percentage of people have. And second doses won't be long now for people who want that.
Trouble is that we aren't at 90 percent of people yet.
According to ourworldindata.org, we're at about 67% of people for first dose and 50% fully dosed. That's good (and most of those who haven't been jabbed are young and mostly at very low personal risk), but it's still a lot of people who have yet to be offered a vaccination.
And there's not a huge amount to be done about any of that now until the second Pfizer order comes on-stream (at the end of August?)
That is total population, not adults. Adults its 86% / 63%. We will get to 80%+ total in the near future. Every adult (excluding the rare cases of medical issues) have been offered first jab and its max 8 weeks for 2nd dose. They are also talking about altering the rules for school kids, regardless of vaccination status.
So in a few weeks we really just be talking about refuseniks. If they feel its "unfair", well they can do something about it.
Children are people, too. And perfectly capable of getting infected and getting sick and passing it on to others. Viruses don't look at dates of birth, after all.
We are impressively damn close to herd immunity by vaccination. But we're clearly not there yet. And the 40 million Pfizer doses in the first order (so 20 million people) aren't quite enough to get us there either... hence the interest in doing a vaccine time swap with Israel.
This is a non-sequitur to the question of whether it is “unfair” to exclude vaccinated adults from the requirement to self isolate as a result of close contact with an infected individual. There are different plans afoot to get rid of the ridiculous situation of huge numbers of schoolchildren having to self isolate and damage their education.
I see the anti-migrant posters really don’t like it up em.
It was the sheer scale of it (10%!) the lack of democratic consent and meaningful mitigation (house building, retraining, schools/infrastructure investment etc) that was the problem for me.
Up until a few years ago, I didn’t see it as much of a problem. I was wrong.
Controlled immigration should have been a good thing. Our uncontrolled approach between 2004-2016 was a bit of a disaster.
I used to post stuff like you. I now see it as a mistake. It’s an attempt to remove immigration from the political debate. That’s wrong. Immigration is a profoundly political question that should be openly discussed.
I don't know, maybe telling Leave voters that we might have a pretty immigrant with a Romanian sounding name reach the second week of Wimbledon would have made them forget about the pressure on their wages, job security, social harmony, school places, hospital waiting lists and so on
Immigration - me and you both know - was key to Leave winning and there are 2 aspects to it. They overlap but are different. You buy into both.
The money side. The perception that tons of people "coming over ere" were depressing wages at the bottom end, creating housing shortages, stressing public services.
The identity side. Dislike of difference in appearance and attitudes. This sentiment - if the person feeling it wishes to endow it with some detached gravitas - is often expressed as "Multiculturalism doesn't work."
It's also about the control side. Free movement within a supranational entity is only sustainable if it either doesn't lead to any net movement of people because there is equal economic opportunity everywhere, or if people subscribe to a shared identity strongly enough that they disagree with restricting the movement of people on principle, even if it does lead to large net migration.
Thank goodness you will never have to resort to a “substandard squat” and be accused - against the economic evidence - of driving down wages.
With privilege comes responsibility
Whereas you just carp from the sidelines
Your responsibility is probably to make verifiable claims rather than use language of racial prejudice.
Me, I *am* a migrant. I’m sticking up for my people.
You're not having one of your good days today.
Shades of the working class/working age debacle
There are some similarities.
Brexiters REALLY hate being reminded they were on the same side as the economically inactive and the anti-immigrant types.
They should have the confidence to do & say what they think without worrying about being found guilty by association of some lefty thought crime by bitter Remainers
George W Bush said “Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.”
You do sometimes seem to fall into this trap: your posts seem often to be railing against somewhat imagined bitter Remoaners that roam the lands.
By and large, your political opponents are not immoral*, they're just people that have slightly different priorities than you.
I think we would all benefit from assuming the best of out political opponents, and that they are coming from a good place of wanting to make the world (and the UK) a better place. Now, maybe they only see the good things from immigration - but that doesn't make them evil, that merely means that you need to help them see that there are two sides to every story.
* Except George Galloway
I was talking to, and being goaded by, a bitter remoaner!
I'm not sure I agree with that. People use fiction as an outlet in many ways, and sometimes it will be to push a view that is abhorrent, or just with a sort of morbid enjoyment of fictional (albeit based on things that really happen) horrible things, of bad people doing bad things, or arguing some things are good which, most of us, think is bad. Fiction aimed at children upwards can involve the brutal and disproportionate revenge ot those who transgressed the heroes in what is objectively wrong, but vicariously enjoyed by the author and audience. Diana Gabbaldon from the Outlander series must, on some level, enjoy writing about rape for example given how often it happens or nearly happens, albeit it's hardly approving.
A cavalier or even approving attitude toward torture and killing is incredibly common in fiction of all sorts of mediums, and whilst I know you are talking about a specific kind of situation, I think 'special place in hell' is a bit strong for somthing that is very common, even if it is considered wrong.
A weird case a few years ago was some people getting squeamish about a torture scene in GTA5, a series where casual murder (and accidental vehicular homicide) is as common as breathing, presumably due to the manner of depiction (on a general point video game violence is not 'real' violence anymore than most TV and film violence is not real - it's done in a way that is in no way realistic, which we can all recognise, hence why it does not have that much effect).
I enjoy writing fanfiction, set in worlds at war. Torture is an inevitable part of that, and something that the "good guys" are bound to practice, unless you want to write them as boy scouts, who are not interesting characters. There's a narrow line where you have to keep people true to the values of their world, without glorifying its worst aspects.
Yes, I see what you mean. I suppose the type that gets to me is glorification of torture that is currently going on the real world, because it validates it. It's not political either - I'd feel the same about a story of Cubans gleefully torturing a CIA agent as I would about the reverse. I can't get worked up about GTA for the reason you say.
Comments
1. Signalling an irreversible end to restrictions.
2. Refusing to appoint Dido Harding to run the NHS (an idea so bad it seems like a joke)
3. Letting it be known he is against the overly-hasty introduction of NHS reorganisation so that he can point the finger at Boris when the shit starts hitting the fan.
We are impressively damn close to herd immunity by vaccination. But we're clearly not there yet. And the 40 million Pfizer doses in the first order (so 20 million people) aren't quite enough to get us there either... hence the interest in doing a vaccine time swap with Israel.
Which is why we have Cabinet Ministers like Javid saying "I'm the son of a bus driver" whilst creating a policy that bars bus drivers from migrating to the UK.
As an antidote to sport, this evening's European polling focuses on another non-EU member - Norway, which votes on 13 September.
The Latest IPSOS poll (changes from the 2017 election):
Labour Party: 24% (-3)
Conservative Party: 21% (-4)
Centre Party: 19% (+9)
Progress Party: 7% (-8)
Socialist Left Party: 7% (+1)
Red Party: 6% (+3.5)
Green Party: 5% (+2)
Liberal Party: 3% (-1)
Christian People's Party: 3% (-1.5)
The governing coalition of Conservative, Liberal and Christian People's Party is down 6.5% on 2017. The obvious alternative Government is Labour plus Centre plus Socialist Left which would command a majority on these numbers.
That was the coalition of the Stoltenberg era from 2005-2013 which was replaced by the centre-right coalition led by Erna Solberg which has governed Norway since the 2013 GE.
NEW THREAD
Yes, I see what you mean. I suppose the type that gets to me is glorification of torture that is currently going on the real world, because it validates it. It's not political either - I'd feel the same about a story of Cubans gleefully torturing a CIA agent as I would about the reverse. I can't get worked up about GTA for the reason you say.