The problem facing politicians is that there is no 'right' answer to dealing with Covid - only bad and worse answers. even countries with natural advantages - such as Australia and New Zealand - have paid a great cost for that advantage, and I fear they may now be on the fringes of greater suffering due to their delayed vax programs (Although I hope not).
At the other end of the scale, you have got Brazil's Bolsanaro madness, or the Trumpian denialism about everything Covid. Or Russia's sheer distortion and deception about the figures. Or China's denialism and diversions about everything Covid.
I'm just glad I'm not the one having to make the decisions...
Having said that (and putting my anti-Boris hat back on), I do think either Rory Stewart or Jeremy Hunt would have done a better job than Johnson, especially in the early days of the epidemic. It's slightly harder to see ow they would have done in the later stages, though.
Last night I watched the first episode of “1971:The Year That Music Changed Everything” on Apple+.
Bloody brilliant.
By the director of “Amy” and “Senna”.
These sorts of music documentaries can be quite cliched, but this is more ambitious and they’ve very cleverly interwoven the music and politics, with some great footage.
Based on a British book, and with a British director; sad in a way that it is for a US network and hence US-focused.
1971 was probably peak pop year (for albums; I’d put 1967 as peak for singles).
Yes it is very good, I'm about half way through it.
I've read a few books recently by the author of the book, David Hepworth. Uncommon People is very good, as are Nothing is Real which I read last week, which is a collection of his various writings and A Fabulous Creation, about the emergence of the LP as an art form, which I'm half way through. I'll probably end up reading 1971 even though I'll watch all the series.
He's got a lovely sense of humour and is good at puncturing all the pomposity around music and rock stars. If you're interested in rock music give 'em a whirl. He has the humility to quote Zappa: 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.'
I have to say that I'm extremely angry about the situation I'm going to be put in on the 19th of July.
The work from home advice will be lifted so I will have to go back to commuting into London
I won't be double jabbed until the end of August.
The mask mandate will end on public transport. I was on the train to London last week and about 70% of passengers weren't wearing masks. God knows what it will be like when it's not mandatory.
It really does feel like the government has accepted the inevitability of people in my age group catching COVID which after a year and a half of being very careful is hugely depressing.
Speak to your employer, at my work we've told anyone who hasn't been double jabbed to WFH until a fortnight after they've had their second jab.
Yes, same here. We don't actually want people at work who haven't been double jabbed. What sort of bandits do you work for? I doubt if they can even legally insist on putting you at risk.
But if they do insist, then one of these mobile centres who will jab anyone who turns up may be the answer.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Last night I watched the first episode of “1971:The Year That Music Changed Everything” on Apple+.
Bloody brilliant.
By the director of “Amy” and “Senna”.
These sorts of music documentaries can be quite cliched, but this is more ambitious and they’ve very cleverly interwoven the music and politics, with some great footage.
Based on a British book, and with a British director; sad in a way that it is for a US network and hence US-focused.
1971 was probably peak pop year (for albums; I’d put 1967 as peak for singles).
At the risk of sounding particularly old, the history of the second half of the twentieth century can be written with pop music, such was pop music's ubiquity in western culture. I love documentaries of this sort.
For me, the peak was 1977-1984.
Pop music hasn't gone away, but it has splintered. We can consume what we like now, and the cultural importance of the top 40 is much reduced. I don't want to go down a 'they don't write em like they used to' route - my view is that there is more good music around now than ever - but the cultural importance of any of it is much diminished, as we can all pick and choose the niches we want and remain utterly ignorant of the mainstream - if there is such a thing as mainstream any more.
I share your preference in period, but the splintering is good anyway, isn't it? Goodbye to all those tired exchanges - "You can't like X? Y is where it's at today!"/"No you're out of touch, it's moved on to Z!" With decades of different styles of music available at the touch of a button, we can all just play what we like and sample things we don't know.
I've always hoped the same would happen to national cultures (and the idea of cultural appropriation has never bothered me, unless it's an actual takeover). Why should Italians love singing, or the French like onions? Why shouldn't we all be individuals picking whatever cultures we like? I've a friend from Alabama who has married in Indian woman - he wears flowing robes, she dresses in jeans, neither of them are bothered by whatever anyone else thinks.
I think though that we choose retrospectively what was important in cultural movements. We lionise the Rolling Stones rather than Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and Titch. Similarly, The Human League rather than Shakin Stevens or Dollar.
When you are in the middle of it, it is hard to see what is culturally significant, and what is just fluff.
Just announced, from the BBC Sport site: England will name a new squad for their ODI series with Pakistan after three players and four staff members tested positive for Covid-19.
The team were due to begin the series with an ODI in Cardiff on Thursday.
But tests administered on Monday returned seven positive results and the rest of England's party will be required to self isolate as a result.
The ECB said Ben Stokes will return to captain a squad which will be named in the next few hours.
Last night I watched the first episode of “1971:The Year That Music Changed Everything” on Apple+.
Bloody brilliant.
By the director of “Amy” and “Senna”.
These sorts of music documentaries can be quite cliched, but this is more ambitious and they’ve very cleverly interwoven the music and politics, with some great footage.
Based on a British book, and with a British director; sad in a way that it is for a US network and hence US-focused.
1971 was probably peak pop year (for albums; I’d put 1967 as peak for singles).
At the risk of sounding particularly old, the history of the second half of the twentieth century can be written with pop music, such was pop music's ubiquity in western culture. I love documentaries of this sort.
For me, the peak was 1977-1984.
Pop music hasn't gone away, but it has splintered. We can consume what we like now, and the cultural importance of the top 40 is much reduced. I don't want to go down a 'they don't write em like they used to' route - my view is that there is more good music around now than ever - but the cultural importance of any of it is much diminished, as we can all pick and choose the niches we want and remain utterly ignorant of the mainstream - if there is such a thing as mainstream any more.
I share your preference in period, but the splintering is good anyway, isn't it? Goodbye to all those tired exchanges - "You can't like X? Y is where it's at today!"/"No you're out of touch, it's moved on to Z!" With decades of different styles of music available at the touch of a button, we can all just play what we like and sample things we don't know.
I've always hoped the same would happen to national cultures (and the idea of cultural appropriation has never bothered me, unless it's an actual takeover). Why should Italians love singing, or the French like onions? Why shouldn't we all be individuals picking whatever cultures we like? I've a friend from Alabama who has married in Indian woman - he wears flowing robes, she dresses in jeans, neither of them are bothered by whatever anyone else thinks.
I think though that we choose retrospectively what was important in cultural movements. We lionise the Rolling Stones rather than Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and Titch. Similarly, The Human League rather than Shakin Stevens or Dollar.
When you are in the middle of it, it is hard to see what is culturally significant, and what is just fluff.
My aunt went out with one of Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and Titch, but I never found out which one.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
Many people don't care about many things until it affects them, or theirs. For example, 'freedom of movement' isn't affecting many people at the moment. Come next summer, when travel may well be closer to normal, if there are long queues to get through at Palma Airport, things may be different.
I doubt there will be extra queues anywhere they (and we) will just accept EU/Brit passports as before.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
And Brexit has made those “incentives” even pricier.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
There is still talk of a Tesla factory here. Either in Somerset or Teeside.
I think Tesla's star may finally be in the descendant as the legacy OEMs are finally starting to do BEVs better from an engineering and production perspective. The VW ID4 has much simpler powertrain (less bearings, no oil pump or filter) compared to a Tesla 3.
Tesla Is much more than the cars now anyway. It is very much clean energy and battery storage.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they ditched car manufacture in the future.
Having seen and read a few things I think they have already ditched car manufacture. Yes the body panel gaps are so bad as to almost be funny. But under those are some absolute howlers - a pro-EV "look, we drive an EV van all over the UK repairing EVs" video was a cavalcade of Model 3s with shagged rear brakes from the same poor design.
The problem facing politicians is that there is no 'right' answer to dealing with Covid - only bad and worse answers. even countries with natural advantages - such as Australia and New Zealand - have paid a great cost for that advantage, and I fear they may now be on the fringes of greater suffering due to their delayed vax programs (Although I hope not).
At the other end of the scale, you have got Brazil's Bolsanaro madness, or the Trumpian denialism about everything Covid. Or Russia's sheer distortion and deception about the figures. Or China's denialism and diversions about everything Covid.
I'm just glad I'm not the one having to make the decisions...
Having said that (and putting my anti-Boris hat back on), I do think either Rory Stewart or Jeremy Hunt would have done a better job than Johnson, especially in the early days of the epidemic. It's slightly harder to see ow they would have done in the later stages, though.
Hunt is right, albeit rather tardy himself, on the growing maternity scandals, which go back decades.
"£350m is a drop in the ocean compared to the £1.4bn we spend on maternity lawsuits, we would save many times over the cost of additional staff if we can bring down the number of incidents and in doing so, save countless families from the most appalling tragedies" - @Jeremy_Hunt
Never mind the (not very big) subsidy pumped into Sunderland and Ellsmere Port for EV production. The government needs to be applying its new big state spend money approach to charging networks.
There are various competing private sector companies all building chargers. Which means a myriad of competing back office networks most of which are incompatible with each other. Whats more, a hands off approach means that so many charging locations seem to be owned by nobody, which means they are long term broken.
Combine that with some of the batshit stupid costs that are being asked for (69p per kWh for cars which largely do between 3 and 4 miles off that) and EVs are never going to take off without intervention.
Impose a common payment system with a subsidised if required ppkWh cap. Impose strict rules on maintenance, including the adoption of the broken orphan chargers. Make EV driving and charging hassle free. Otherwise you can tip whatever you like into the supply side, the demand won't be there.
They won't. It involves fiddly detail and doesn't deliver sexy headlines.
It could certainly improve, but it doesn't seem to bad around me. I just bought a Renault Zoe and my first charge was at an ubitricity point just round the corner on a residential road. £6.99 for about a 2/3 fill up at 25p per KwH. My home electricity is 17p so it wasn't that different. The rapid one on Lewisham way is a bit more, 30p per KwH, but not too bad. That would be £12 for approx 180 miles.
The gap between the First Minister’s rhetoric and her record of delivery is only going to grow when we enter the recovery phase. This will be when results matter the most and communications the least, when the public expects to see things going back to normal rather than hear more soundbite excuses for why they are not. This is the essence of Sturgeon’s credibility gap: when rhetoric is required, she delivers; when delivery is required, she has only rhetoric.
Mr. Topping, aye. The EU itself is untrustworthy. That was one of my problems with it. And UK politicians' promises on the EU were also untrustworthy. Labour reneging on a referendum pledge is one of the reasons I voted to leave, because I knew the odds on another vote were immeasurably long, and that in the meantime we'd be integrated more, and more, and leaving would become commensurately more difficult.
The trial period others have suggested is an interesting one, although it would encourage the EU to give us the worst possible deal on the basis it'd increase the chances of us returning (although British bloodymindedness might make that work the other way...).
A second referendum to confirm a specific deal was another potential option.
Whatever one's views of the vote, the UK negotiations were not impressive.
Edited extra bit: Mr. Pioneers, I remain (ahem) perplexed why pro-EU types decided to focus their energy on opposing leaving the EU totally, to no effect, rather than trying to steer things that way. Even to the extent of marching through lobbies alongside ardent anti-EU MPs.
Just announced, from the BBC Sport site: England will name a new squad for their ODI series with Pakistan after three players and four staff members tested positive for Covid-19.
The team were due to begin the series with an ODI in Cardiff on Thursday.
But tests administered on Monday returned seven positive results and the rest of England's party will be required to self isolate as a result.
The ECB said Ben Stokes will return to captain a squad which will be named in the next few hours.
This Delta variant is absolutely ripping through the country, isn't it? I know a few people who've got it in the past couple of weeks. A nurse I know who avoided it until now got it last week. Double jabbed, poorly for a couple of days but fine now. Like the worst flu ever, apparently.
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Well, that's only one doubling from where we are now, and in most of England schools are remaining open until the week after the Great Transfer Of Responsibility.
Tom Whipple's front page analysis in The Times nails the key issues. Vaccination means that we've gone from 10% of cases going to hospital to 2%. Which is obviously very good news. But 2% of a very large number is still a large number. And the trouble with growth functions is that if they overshoot, they overshoot a lot.
LOL talking about Amazon, Apple, etc creating universities, I just got an email from "Apply.army.mod.uk" which asked me if I had thought about joining the army.
I read it first as Apple.army.mod...." and thought - is nothing sacred any more? Then again perhaps it's the shake up HMF needs.
Never mind the (not very big) subsidy pumped into Sunderland and Ellsmere Port for EV production. The government needs to be applying its new big state spend money approach to charging networks.
There are various competing private sector companies all building chargers. Which means a myriad of competing back office networks most of which are incompatible with each other. Whats more, a hands off approach means that so many charging locations seem to be owned by nobody, which means they are long term broken.
Combine that with some of the batshit stupid costs that are being asked for (69p per kWh for cars which largely do between 3 and 4 miles off that) and EVs are never going to take off without intervention.
Impose a common payment system with a subsidised if required ppkWh cap. Impose strict rules on maintenance, including the adoption of the broken orphan chargers. Make EV driving and charging hassle free. Otherwise you can tip whatever you like into the supply side, the demand won't be there.
They won't. It involves fiddly detail and doesn't deliver sexy headlines.
The vast majority of the charging stations I see around here (Cambridgeshire) are almost always empty. (*) Compare that to most petrol filling station, which always seem to have at least one vehicle in most of the time.
This makes me wonder if the problem is that there is not yet the demand: and as the costs of building the charging stations (plus maintenance costs, staffing costs, etc, yet alone the electricity itself) means that the costs have to be at a high level?
It therefore becomes a chicken-and-egg situation: a lack of public charging facilities and their high costs makes EVs less enticing, and a lack of EVs makes the public charging facilities sparse and expensive?
Besides, IMV the biggest issue with EVs and charging is not the public charging infrastructure, but the private. EVs currently appeal to richer people, who generally have larger houses and driveways. Those who do not will have significant issues with EVs. I'd much rather the government invest in that problem.
(*) Although I may see them at the 'wrong' times; they may be busier at other times of the day.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
Many people don't care about many things until it affects them, or theirs. For example, 'freedom of movement' isn't affecting many people at the moment. Come next summer, when travel may well be closer to normal, if there are long queues to get through at Palma Airport, things may be different.
Yes. WHY HAVE THE EU IMPOSED THESE RULES ON US???
They haven't. They were the existing rules. Which we insisted be applied.
I have to say that I'm extremely angry about the situation I'm going to be put in on the 19th of July.
The work from home advice will be lifted so I will have to go back to commuting into London
I won't be double jabbed until the end of August.
The mask mandate will end on public transport. I was on the train to London last week and about 70% of passengers weren't wearing masks. God knows what it will be like when it's not mandatory.
It really does feel like the government has accepted the inevitability of people in my age group catching COVID which after a year and a half of being very careful is hugely depressing.
I think it's reasonable for individuals to delay a return to commuting until they're double-dosed + two weeks (or is it three?).
It's what I will be insisting on if asked to return earlier.
The government is ending the instruction to tell you to work from home. That doesn't mean you can't continue to do so for a period.
LOL talking about Amazon, Apple, etc creating universities, I just got an email from "Apply.army.mod.uk" which asked me if I had thought about joining the army.
I read it first as Apple.army.mod...." and thought - is nothing sacred any more? Then again perhaps it's the shake up HMF needs.
You just know the Apple iTank and Apple iAssaultRifle are just going to be the best in the world, and worth every penny.
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Well, that's only one doubling from where we are now, and in most of England schools are remaining open until the week after the Great Transfer Of Responsibility.
Tom Whipple's front page analysis in The Times nails the key issues. Vaccination means that we've gone from 10% of cases going to hospital to 2%. Which is obviously very good news. But 2% of a very large number is still a large number. And the trouble with growth functions is that if they overshoot, they overshoot a lot.
School holidays should help, of course.
But back to school won't. Given that schoolchildren are easily get-at-able while in school we should have used the last two months of the school year to vaccinate all secondary school children.
The problem facing politicians is that there is no 'right' answer to dealing with Covid - only bad and worse answers. even countries with natural advantages - such as Australia and New Zealand - have paid a great cost for that advantage, and I fear they may now be on the fringes of greater suffering due to their delayed vax programs (Although I hope not).
At the other end of the scale, you have got Brazil's Bolsanaro madness, or the Trumpian denialism about everything Covid. Or Russia's sheer distortion and deception about the figures. Or China's denialism and diversions about everything Covid.
I'm just glad I'm not the one having to make the decisions...
Having said that (and putting my anti-Boris hat back on), I do think either Rory Stewart or Jeremy Hunt would have done a better job than Johnson, especially in the early days of the epidemic. It's slightly harder to see ow they would have done in the later stages, though.
Hunt is right, albeit rather tardy himself, on the growing maternity scandals, which go back decades.
"£350m is a drop in the ocean compared to the £1.4bn we spend on maternity lawsuits, we would save many times over the cost of additional staff if we can bring down the number of incidents and in doing so, save countless families from the most appalling tragedies" - @Jeremy_Hunt
Do you think it's a question of resource? As someone who knows someone who's been through this, in their case it simply came down to a really bad decision (to let the pregnancy go on too long).
I have to say that I'm extremely angry about the situation I'm going to be put in on the 19th of July.
The work from home advice will be lifted so I will have to go back to commuting into London
I won't be double jabbed until the end of August.
The mask mandate will end on public transport. I was on the train to London last week and about 70% of passengers weren't wearing masks. God knows what it will be like when it's not mandatory.
It really does feel like the government has accepted the inevitability of people in my age group catching COVID which after a year and a half of being very careful is hugely depressing.
I think it's reasonable for individuals to delay a return to commuting until they're double-dosed + two weeks (or is it three?).
It's what I will be insisting on if asked to return earlier.
The government is ending the instruction to tell you to work from home. That doesn't mean you can't continue to do so for a period.
Indeed. I doubt there's any burning reason to be back in office on the daily commute on 20th July if one has successfully WFH for months.
Batley and Spen suggested that Tory arrogance is returning. Expectations were allowed to build too high too quickly after the Hartlepool win in a seat that was never natural territory. The party also failed to take Chesham and Amersham seriously.
One seasoned Tory activist who campaigned in all three by-elections: “we are forgetting who our voters are. We are fundamentally misunderstanding the issues; on rural matters, on bins, on things that have brought the vote home over the last 120 years.”
LOL talking about Amazon, Apple, etc creating universities, I just got an email from "Apply.army.mod.uk" which asked me if I had thought about joining the army.
I read it first as Apple.army.mod...." and thought - is nothing sacred any more? Then again perhaps it's the shake up HMF needs.
You just know the Apple iTank and Apple iAssaultRifle are just going to be the best in the world, and worth every penny.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
The problem facing politicians is that there is no 'right' answer to dealing with Covid - only bad and worse answers. even countries with natural advantages - such as Australia and New Zealand - have paid a great cost for that advantage, and I fear they may now be on the fringes of greater suffering due to their delayed vax programs (Although I hope not).
At the other end of the scale, you have got Brazil's Bolsanaro madness, or the Trumpian denialism about everything Covid. Or Russia's sheer distortion and deception about the figures. Or China's denialism and diversions about everything Covid.
I'm just glad I'm not the one having to make the decisions...
Having said that (and putting my anti-Boris hat back on), I do think either Rory Stewart or Jeremy Hunt would have done a better job than Johnson, especially in the early days of the epidemic. It's slightly harder to see ow they would have done in the later stages, though.
Hunt is right, albeit rather tardy himself, on the growing maternity scandals, which go back decades.
"£350m is a drop in the ocean compared to the £1.4bn we spend on maternity lawsuits, we would save many times over the cost of additional staff if we can bring down the number of incidents and in doing so, save countless families from the most appalling tragedies" - @Jeremy_Hunt
Do you think it's a question of resource? As someone who knows someone who's been through this, in their case it simply came down to a really bad decision (to let the pregnancy go on too long).
Was that from the GP?
I would be interested in @Foxy's view but are eg GPs measured against any kind of efficiency, how many of my patients survive-type metric?
My own experience with my aged mother gave me the distinct impression (GPs, docs in hospital, just about everyone) that if they got the diagnosis wrong (they did) so what. A 90-yr old woman has had her go and hence no one will come after me if she dies or is deemed beyond help.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
Many people don't care about many things until it affects them, or theirs. For example, 'freedom of movement' isn't affecting many people at the moment. Come next summer, when travel may well be closer to normal, if there are long queues to get through at Palma Airport, things may be different.
Yes. WHY HAVE THE EU IMPOSED THESE RULES ON US???
They haven't. They were the existing rules. Which we insisted be applied.
Are you moonlighting as a headline writer for the Express?
That's what will happen though.
One of the things that concerns me is the future treatment of my Thai daughter-in-law when she's able to visit again.Currently the grandchildren have both Thai & UK passports, so they're OK.
The gap between the First Minister’s rhetoric and her record of delivery is only going to grow when we enter the recovery phase. This will be when results matter the most and communications the least, when the public expects to see things going back to normal rather than hear more soundbite excuses for why they are not. This is the essence of Sturgeon’s credibility gap: when rhetoric is required, she delivers; when delivery is required, she has only rhetoric.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
No, I don’t think we did “try”.
The key moment was after the financial crisis, but neither Cameron nor Osborne were especially interested, and the Tory party at large had stopped thinking anything about the EU except as a bogeyman “other”,
We've had labour govenment's too you know. The drift in the EU is ever closer union, whereas the UK wanted more of a trading bloc. Hence now we are drifting towards the Pacific...
Excellent leaver's apostrophe. It really is the second most reliable statistical indicator of Leave/Remain proclivity after BMI.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Scotland cases is interesting - seem to have peaked. Obvs need more data, but interesting. We 'may' not be that far from the peak in England, but of course we may not...
Vaccines do not appear to increase the likelihood of mutations in individual cases - indeed quite the opposite.
COVID-19 vaccines dampen genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2: Unvaccinated patients exhibit more antigenic mutational variance https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v1 Variants of SARS-CoV-2 are evolving under a combination of immune selective pressure in infected hosts and natural genetic drift, raising a global alarm regarding the durability of COVID-19 vaccines. Here, we conducted longitudinal analysis over 1.8 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes from 183 countries or territories to capture vaccination-associated viral evolutionary patterns. To augment this macroscale analysis, we performed viral genome sequencing in 23 vaccine breakthrough COVID-19 patients and 30 unvaccinated COVID-19 patients for whom we also conducted machine-augmented curation of the electronic health records (EHRs). Strikingly, we find the diversity of the SARS-CoV-2 lineages is declining at the country-level with increased rate of mass vaccination (n = 25 countries, mean correlation coefficient = -0.72, S.D. = 0.20). Given that the COVID-19 vaccines leverage B-cell and T-cell epitopes, analysis of mutation rates shows neutralizing B-cell epitopes to be particularly more mutated than comparable amino acid clusters (4.3-fold, p < 0.001). Prospective validation of these macroscale evolutionary patterns using clinically annotated SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequences confirms that vaccine breakthrough patients indeed harbor viruses with significantly lower diversity in known B cell epitopes compared to unvaccinated COVID-19 patients (2.3-fold, 95% C.I. 1.4-3.7). Incidentally, in these study cohorts, vaccinated breakthrough patients also displayed fewer COVID-associated complications and pre-existing conditions relative to unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. This study presents the first known evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are fundamentally restricting the evolutionary and antigenic escape pathways accessible to SARS-CoV-2. The societal benefit of mass vaccination may consequently go far beyond the widely reported mitigation of SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and amelioration of community transmission, to include stemming of rampant viral evolution.
A ban on farm feed made of animal remains introduced during the BSE crisis is to be lifted in the EU to allow cheap pig protein to be fed to chickens over fears that European farmers are being undercut by lower standards elsewhere.
The use of processed animal protein (PAP) from mammals in the feed of cattle and sheep was banned by the EU in 1994 as the full horrors of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, emerged.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
No, I don’t think we did “try”.
The key moment was after the financial crisis, but neither Cameron nor Osborne were especially interested, and the Tory party at large had stopped thinking anything about the EU except as a bogeyman “other”,
Nobody did which is why ultimately Britain made the right choice.
Even Blair and Brown when push came to shove treated Europe as other. They never even tried to have a referendum to join the Euro, spending political capital on going to war alongside the Americans instead, despite all Blair's pretensions of taking Britain into the centre of Europe.
Britain was never philosophically interested in ever closer union and ultimately a federal single European nation state. The EU is. So ultimately we were the wrong fit for the project, Britain being in the EU is like someone who wants an ample supply of chocolate cakes joining Weightwatchers, it just didn't work.
Never mind the (not very big) subsidy pumped into Sunderland and Ellsmere Port for EV production. The government needs to be applying its new big state spend money approach to charging networks.
There are various competing private sector companies all building chargers. Which means a myriad of competing back office networks most of which are incompatible with each other. Whats more, a hands off approach means that so many charging locations seem to be owned by nobody, which means they are long term broken.
Combine that with some of the batshit stupid costs that are being asked for (69p per kWh for cars which largely do between 3 and 4 miles off that) and EVs are never going to take off without intervention.
Impose a common payment system with a subsidised if required ppkWh cap. Impose strict rules on maintenance, including the adoption of the broken orphan chargers. Make EV driving and charging hassle free. Otherwise you can tip whatever you like into the supply side, the demand won't be there.
They won't. It involves fiddly detail and doesn't deliver sexy headlines.
The vast majority of the charging stations I see around here (Cambridgeshire) are almost always empty. (*) Compare that to most petrol filling station, which always seem to have at least one vehicle in most of the time.
This makes me wonder if the problem is that there is not yet the demand: and as the costs of building the charging stations (plus maintenance costs, staffing costs, etc, yet alone the electricity itself) means that the costs have to be at a high level?
It therefore becomes a chicken-and-egg situation: a lack of public charging facilities and their high costs makes EVs less enticing, and a lack of EVs makes the public charging facilities sparse and expensive?
Besides, IMV the biggest issue with EVs and charging is not the public charging infrastructure, but the private. EVs currently appeal to richer people, who generally have larger houses and driveways. Those who do not will have significant issues with EVs. I'd much rather the government invest in that problem.
(*) Although I may see them at the 'wrong' times; they may be busier at other times of the day.
There is considerable investment in charging infrastructure going on. Quite a bit of it is, from talking to people actually laying cables etc, preparatory. That is the infrastructure to support future charging stations.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Darts is a sport as there is an outcome independent of opinion. Not sure of crossfit? How do you win?
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
No, I don’t think we did “try”.
The key moment was after the financial crisis, but neither Cameron nor Osborne were especially interested, and the Tory party at large had stopped thinking anything about the EU except as a bogeyman “other”,
We've had labour govenment's too you know. The drift in the EU is ever closer union, whereas the UK wanted more of a trading bloc. Hence now we are drifting towards the Pacific...
Oh, both parties are to blame. I mean, everyone is to blame.
As someone pointed out upthread, we had twenty-five years, at least, when the EU was portrayed as a hostile power.
Despite the fact we were actually in the EU - ie it was part of “us” and in terms of macro strategy (single market, eastern enlargement, prioritising anglo-french defence cooperation within NATO) we were winning the arguments.
We are not drifting toward the Pacific. That is a nonsense. Or if we are, everyone is, as the fulcrum of growth and power moves Eastwards.
Geographically we remain in Europe and will need to find a coherent European policy beyond “yah boo sux”. (So will the EU with respect to the U.K.).
We have a post Brexit trade deal now with the EU, we can now also seek more trade deals with the rising economies in the Asia Pacific region.
Beyond that our relationship with the EU will depend on who is in power, as now largely when the Tories are in, more closely aligned to the single market and customs union regulations wise if and when Labour and the LDs get in
On topic: 'gamble'? It's all a gamble. Keeping restrictions is a gamble with the economy, mental health, missed screening/detection of cancers, risking opening up in the autumn instead when there are other seasonal health pressures and when the children are cooped up in classrooms with 30 people. There's no perfect choice, but I think this is the least bad.
Pleased you think this. It's not a gamble, it's sticking to the plan. The posturing if Starmer and Sturgeon yesterday turned my stomach.
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Scotland cases is interesting - seem to have peaked. Obvs need more data, but interesting. We 'may' not be that far from the peak in England, but of course we may not...
With the Euros, end of term, social distancing having pretty much broken down already and unending crap weather I struggle to see how any "reopening" on the 19th will make that big a difference to R. Are people really all going to start flocking to the tube or clubs to breathe in the warm viral air?
Just announced, from the BBC Sport site: England will name a new squad for their ODI series with Pakistan after three players and four staff members tested positive for Covid-19.
The team were due to begin the series with an ODI in Cardiff on Thursday.
But tests administered on Monday returned seven positive results and the rest of England's party will be required to self isolate as a result.
The ECB said Ben Stokes will return to captain a squad which will be named in the next few hours.
Interesting, and will be a test of just how deep our pool of one day talent is.
The gap between the First Minister’s rhetoric and her record of delivery is only going to grow when we enter the recovery phase. This will be when results matter the most and communications the least, when the public expects to see things going back to normal rather than hear more soundbite excuses for why they are not. This is the essence of Sturgeon’s credibility gap: when rhetoric is required, she delivers; when delivery is required, she has only rhetoric.
How very dare you - Sturgeon has done nothing, absolutely nothing wrong during this crisis.
Independence would have prevented the virus from crossing into Scottish terrority.
I think we established previously that there were only 30-odd border crossings. I don't know what the manpower requirements would be for a 24-hour guard to repel the hordes of infected English, but should be doable.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
A wave of nostalgia now triggered by that second image, which is a game I hadn't thought about for some time - does anyone else remember the card game 'Round Europe'? From 1957, apparently. I loved that imagery. And that is my idea of Europe, still. Also interesting to look again at the map - you couldn't go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and Athens was a bloody nuisance to get to.
The problem facing politicians is that there is no 'right' answer to dealing with Covid - only bad and worse answers. even countries with natural advantages - such as Australia and New Zealand - have paid a great cost for that advantage, and I fear they may now be on the fringes of greater suffering due to their delayed vax programs (Although I hope not).
At the other end of the scale, you have got Brazil's Bolsanaro madness, or the Trumpian denialism about everything Covid. Or Russia's sheer distortion and deception about the figures. Or China's denialism and diversions about everything Covid.
I'm just glad I'm not the one having to make the decisions...
Having said that (and putting my anti-Boris hat back on), I do think either Rory Stewart or Jeremy Hunt would have done a better job than Johnson, especially in the early days of the epidemic. It's slightly harder to see ow they would have done in the later stages, though.
Hunt is right, albeit rather tardy himself, on the growing maternity scandals, which go back decades.
"£350m is a drop in the ocean compared to the £1.4bn we spend on maternity lawsuits, we would save many times over the cost of additional staff if we can bring down the number of incidents and in doing so, save countless families from the most appalling tragedies" - @Jeremy_Hunt
Do you think it's a question of resource? As someone who knows someone who's been through this, in their case it simply came down to a really bad decision (to let the pregnancy go on too long).
Was that from the GP?
I would be interested in @Foxy's view but are eg GPs measured against any kind of efficiency, how many of my patients survive-type metric?
My own experience with my aged mother gave me the distinct impression (GPs, docs in hospital, just about everyone) that if they got the diagnosis wrong (they did) so what. A 90-yr old woman has had her go and hence no one will come after me if she dies or is deemed beyond help.
When I was concerned with these things we measured all sorts of things, but not, unless my memory is at fault, death rates. Otherwise Shipman....... GP's are financially encouraged to attend courses, but measuring or even assessing, the effect of CPD is very, very difficult.
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Scotland cases is interesting - seem to have peaked. Obvs need more data, but interesting. We 'may' not be that far from the peak in England, but of course we may not...
The schools broke up on 1 July in Scotland. I wonder if that is one reason.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I think that covers pretty much everything
There was definitely an argument that the definition of a sport was you could be killed while playing it.
Which meant F1 was a sport but football probably wasn't..
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I think that covers pretty much everything
You forgot hitting a target with your opponent (judo).
A ban on farm feed made of animal remains introduced during the BSE crisis is to be lifted in the EU to allow cheap pig protein to be fed to chickens over fears that European farmers are being undercut by lower standards elsewhere.
The use of processed animal protein (PAP) from mammals in the feed of cattle and sheep was banned by the EU in 1994 as the full horrors of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, emerged.
Never mind the (not very big) subsidy pumped into Sunderland and Ellsmere Port for EV production. The government needs to be applying its new big state spend money approach to charging networks.
There are various competing private sector companies all building chargers. Which means a myriad of competing back office networks most of which are incompatible with each other. Whats more, a hands off approach means that so many charging locations seem to be owned by nobody, which means they are long term broken.
Combine that with some of the batshit stupid costs that are being asked for (69p per kWh for cars which largely do between 3 and 4 miles off that) and EVs are never going to take off without intervention.
Impose a common payment system with a subsidised if required ppkWh cap. Impose strict rules on maintenance, including the adoption of the broken orphan chargers. Make EV driving and charging hassle free. Otherwise you can tip whatever you like into the supply side, the demand won't be there.
They won't. It involves fiddly detail and doesn't deliver sexy headlines.
We probably need something like an Ofvolt to sort it out.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
A wave of nostalgia now triggered by that second image, which is a game I hadn't thought about for some time - does anyone else remember the card game 'Round Europe'? From 1957, apparently. I loved that imagery. And that is my idea of Europe, still. Also interesting to look again at the map - you couldn't go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and Athens was a bloody nuisance to get to.
Hmm, that map anticipates German reunification (but in a way which doesn't affect the actual gameplay).
Last night I watched the first episode of “1971:The Year That Music Changed Everything” on Apple+.
Bloody brilliant.
By the director of “Amy” and “Senna”.
These sorts of music documentaries can be quite cliched, but this is more ambitious and they’ve very cleverly interwoven the music and politics, with some great footage.
Based on a British book, and with a British director; sad in a way that it is for a US network and hence US-focused.
1971 was probably peak pop year (for albums; I’d put 1967 as peak for singles).
At the risk of sounding particularly old, the history of the second half of the twentieth century can be written with pop music, such was pop music's ubiquity in western culture. I love documentaries of this sort.
For me, the peak was 1977-1984.
Pop music hasn't gone away, but it has splintered. We can consume what we like now, and the cultural importance of the top 40 is much reduced. I don't want to go down a 'they don't write em like they used to' route - my view is that there is more good music around now than ever - but the cultural importance of any of it is much diminished, as we can all pick and choose the niches we want and remain utterly ignorant of the mainstream - if there is such a thing as mainstream any more.
I share your preference in period, but the splintering is good anyway, isn't it? Goodbye to all those tired exchanges - "You can't like X? Y is where it's at today!"/"No you're out of touch, it's moved on to Z!" With decades of different styles of music available at the touch of a button, we can all just play what we like and sample things we don't know.
I've always hoped the same would happen to national cultures (and the idea of cultural appropriation has never bothered me, unless it's an actual takeover). Why should Italians love singing, or the French like onions? Why shouldn't we all be individuals picking whatever cultures we like? I've a friend from Alabama who has married in Indian woman - he wears flowing robes, she dresses in jeans, neither of them are bothered by whatever anyone else thinks.
I think though that we choose retrospectively what was important in cultural movements. We lionise the Rolling Stones rather than Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick and Titch. Similarly, The Human League rather than Shakin Stevens or Dollar.
When you are in the middle of it, it is hard to see what is culturally significant, and what is just fluff.
This is the role of the critic.
I feel it was probably obvious at the time though that Dozy Beaky et al were more for what we might now call the Brexit demographic.
The problem facing politicians is that there is no 'right' answer to dealing with Covid - only bad and worse answers. even countries with natural advantages - such as Australia and New Zealand - have paid a great cost for that advantage, and I fear they may now be on the fringes of greater suffering due to their delayed vax programs (Although I hope not).
At the other end of the scale, you have got Brazil's Bolsanaro madness, or the Trumpian denialism about everything Covid. Or Russia's sheer distortion and deception about the figures. Or China's denialism and diversions about everything Covid.
I'm just glad I'm not the one having to make the decisions...
Having said that (and putting my anti-Boris hat back on), I do think either Rory Stewart or Jeremy Hunt would have done a better job than Johnson, especially in the early days of the epidemic. It's slightly harder to see ow they would have done in the later stages, though.
Hunt is right, albeit rather tardy himself, on the growing maternity scandals, which go back decades.
"£350m is a drop in the ocean compared to the £1.4bn we spend on maternity lawsuits, we would save many times over the cost of additional staff if we can bring down the number of incidents and in doing so, save countless families from the most appalling tragedies" - @Jeremy_Hunt
Do you think it's a question of resource? As someone who knows someone who's been through this, in their case it simply came down to a really bad decision (to let the pregnancy go on too long).
Was that from the GP?
I would be interested in @Foxy's view but are eg GPs measured against any kind of efficiency, how many of my patients survive-type metric?
My own experience with my aged mother gave me the distinct impression (GPs, docs in hospital, just about everyone) that if they got the diagnosis wrong (they did) so what. A 90-yr old woman has had her go and hence no one will come after me if she dies or is deemed beyond help.
I don't know who makes the decision on when to induce a pregnancy, but my sister (not the person involved) reckons that you didn't need to be a doctor to work out that letting that pregnancy go on as long as they did was a bad idea. But then my friend was told that they were just "really really unlucky" and what happened to them happens maybe a dozen times a year in the UK. I was sceptical about that.
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Scotland cases is interesting - seem to have peaked. Obvs need more data, but interesting. We 'may' not be that far from the peak in England, but of course we may not...
The schools broke up on 1 July in Scotland. I wonder if that is one reason.
Surely that would be too soon to have impacted on positive tests though?
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
A wave of nostalgia now triggered by that second image, which is a game I hadn't thought about for some time - does anyone else remember the card game 'Round Europe'? From 1957, apparently. I loved that imagery. And that is my idea of Europe, still. Also interesting to look again at the map - you couldn't go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and Athens was a bloody nuisance to get to.
Ha! I still have a 40 year old copy of the Great Game of Britain, complete with BR style counters.
All the games I have based in Europe seem to involve invasion.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
A wave of nostalgia now triggered by that second image, which is a game I hadn't thought about for some time - does anyone else remember the card game 'Round Europe'? From 1957, apparently. I loved that imagery. And that is my idea of Europe, still. Also interesting to look again at the map - you couldn't go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and Athens was a bloody nuisance to get to.
Hmm, that map anticipates German reunification (but in a way which doesn't affect the actual gameplay).
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Scotland cases is interesting - seem to have peaked. Obvs need more data, but interesting. We 'may' not be that far from the peak in England, but of course we may not...
The schools broke up on 1 July in Scotland. I wonder if that is one reason.
One thing not mentioned so far. In all the places where COVID has "run wild", long before everyone gets it, it dies back. The stories of places with 65% antibodies from infection turn out to be untrue.
RCS, of this parish, has the theory that this is caused by a kind of "voluntary lockdown" - everyone gets scared and self isolates.
I am not so sure. Each time this happens, COVID dies back and people return to a more normal life. But COVID doesn't immediately return.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
The Austin Healey 3000 is easy enough but what the fuck is that on the left? Vauxhall Velox?
There was definitely an argument that the definition of a sport was you could be killed while playing it.
Which meant F1 was a sport but football probably wasn't..
Ask the Danish skipper about that...
I knew that comment was coming - the comment was based on the fact sport can kill you for reasons outside your control / own health - in a way that games don't
New Luntz poll shows huge divide between Tory and Labour voters on the UK
52% of Labour voters think the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation compared to just 19% of Tory voters and 37% of voters as as whole.
Yes it is very good, I'm about half way through it.
I've read a few books recently by the author of the book, David Hepworth. Uncommon People is very good, as are Nothing is Real which I read last week, which is a collection of his various writings and A Fabulous Creation, about the emergence of the LP as an art form, which I'm half way through. I'll probably end up reading 1971 even though I'll watch all the series.
He's got a lovely sense of humour and is good at puncturing all the pomposity around music and rock stars. If you're interested in rock music give 'em a whirl. He has the humility to quote Zappa: 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.'
I second the recommendation, I've read a few of Hepworth's books and they have all been interesting and amusing.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I think that covers pretty much everything
There was definitely an argument that the definition of a sport was you could be killed while playing it.
Which meant F1 was a sport but football probably wasn't..
The quote was Hemingway. “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Well, that's only one doubling from where we are now, and in most of England schools are remaining open until the week after the Great Transfer Of Responsibility.
Tom Whipple's front page analysis in The Times nails the key issues. Vaccination means that we've gone from 10% of cases going to hospital to 2%. Which is obviously very good news. But 2% of a very large number is still a large number. And the trouble with growth functions is that if they overshoot, they overshoot a lot.
School holidays should help, of course.
But back to school won't. Given that schoolchildren are easily get-at-able while in school we should have used the last two months of the school year to vaccinate all secondary school children.
That's about 6 million kids aged 11-18, so 12 million more doses to rustle up.
But that takes us back to the central mystery. If the vaccines are so good (which they are) and the vaccine programme is doing well, then the only problem is that the winning post is a bit beyond "vaccinate all adults". We have to go into school age people to make Covid live-withable.
So we make kids immune by vaccination (on current supplies can do hundreds of thousands a day, we understand the side effects, we know who has been done) or by infection (100k kids a day will be serious brown trousers, side effects less well known but probably worse, can't really track).
Why are we not keeping on with restrictions until the vaccination is actually complete (as in, cases are steady or falling) instead of when we've arbitrarily declared completion?
New Luntz poll shows huge divide between Tory and Labour voters on the UK
52% of Labour voters think the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation compared to just 19% of Tory voters and 37% of voters as as whole.
New Luntz poll shows huge divide between Tory and Labour voters on the UK
52% of Labour voters think the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation compared to just 19% of Tory voters and 37% of voters as as whole.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I think that covers pretty much everything
There was definitely an argument that the definition of a sport was you could be killed while playing it.
Which meant F1 was a sport but football probably wasn't..
The quote was Hemingway. “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
Thanks my googlefu skills completely failed me when trying to find that quote.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
A wave of nostalgia now triggered by that second image, which is a game I hadn't thought about for some time - does anyone else remember the card game 'Round Europe'? From 1957, apparently. I loved that imagery. And that is my idea of Europe, still. Also interesting to look again at the map - you couldn't go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and Athens was a bloody nuisance to get to.
Hmm, that map anticipates German reunification (but in a way which doesn't affect the actual gameplay).
Yes, and also the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Fascinating to see how basic graphics used to be.
Default assumption is m = mile ... and its treatment of the Isles of Ireland and Britain also predates 1921! But it oibviously can't be a pre-1945 map fished out of file.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Isn't that hunting, fishing and shooting ?
I know people talk about hunting, shooting and fishing but that wasn't the quote I imagine I remember!
Last night I watched the first episode of “1971:The Year That Music Changed Everything” on Apple+.
Bloody brilliant.
By the director of “Amy” and “Senna”.
These sorts of music documentaries can be quite cliched, but this is more ambitious and they’ve very cleverly interwoven the music and politics, with some great footage.
Based on a British book, and with a British director; sad in a way that it is for a US network and hence US-focused.
1971 was probably peak pop year (for albums; I’d put 1967 as peak for singles).
At the risk of sounding particularly old, the history of the second half of the twentieth century can be written with pop music, such was pop music's ubiquity in western culture. I love documentaries of this sort.
For me, the peak was 1977-1984.
Pop music hasn't gone away, but it has splintered. We can consume what we like now, and the cultural importance of the top 40 is much reduced. I don't want to go down a 'they don't write em like they used to' route - my view is that there is more good music around now than ever - but the cultural importance of any of it is much diminished, as we can all pick and choose the niches we want and remain utterly ignorant of the mainstream - if there is such a thing as mainstream any more.
I share your preference in period, but the splintering is good anyway, isn't it? Goodbye to all those tired exchanges - "You can't like X? Y is where it's at today!"/"No you're out of touch, it's moved on to Z!" With decades of different styles of music available at the touch of a button, we can all just play what we like and sample things we don't know.
I've always hoped the same would happen to national cultures (and the idea of cultural appropriation has never bothered me, unless it's an actual takeover). Why should Italians love singing, or the French like onions? Why shouldn't we all be individuals picking whatever cultures we like? I've a friend from Alabama who has married in Indian woman - he wears flowing robes, she dresses in jeans, neither of them are bothered by whatever anyone else thinks.
I sort of agree. Splintering is good. By the time I was a teenager I wasn't restricted to what Radio 1 gave me (or Luxembourg, for the grown ups), I could choose what I wanted. Which is great. But at the same time it's a gradual slide to having less and less culturally in common. The same is true with television too. There's something to be said for all having the same cultural reference points.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
No, I don’t think we did “try”.
The key moment was after the financial crisis, but neither Cameron nor Osborne were especially interested, and the Tory party at large had stopped thinking anything about the EU except as a bogeyman “other”,
Nobody did which is why ultimately Britain made the right choice.
Even Blair and Brown when push came to shove treated Europe as other. They never even tried to have a referendum to join the Euro, spending political capital on going to war alongside the Americans instead, despite all Blair's pretensions of taking Britain into the centre of Europe.
Britain was never philosophically interested in ever closer union and ultimately a federal single European nation state. The EU is. So ultimately we were the wrong fit for the project, Britain being in the EU is like someone who wants an ample supply of chocolate cakes joining Weightwatchers, it just didn't work.
There was a thread on Twitter the other day in response to one of the GB News presenters rattling on about how all we ever wanted was to be a member of a trading bloc and didn’t want the political union.
I can’t be arsed to find the thread, but the writer showed reams and reams of newspaper articles about the project from it’s earliest days, through the referendum when we joined, contemporary interviews with politicians, etc, etc, etc, and it has always been clear, totally unambiguous, even when we joined, that ever closer union was the goal.
For anyone to say that this ever closer union was something we weren’t aware of, that the perfidious EU was trying to foist it upon us after we joined a simple trading bloc, is wrong.
New Luntz poll shows huge divide between Tory and Labour voters on the UK
52% of Labour voters think the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation compared to just 19% of Tory voters and 37% of voters as as whole.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Darts is a sport as there is an outcome independent of opinion. Not sure of crossfit? How do you win?
Today I learnt: 40% of adults aged 20+ in the US are obese, a figure that has almost doubled in 30 years. That's on the BMI>30 definition, or 17+ stone for height 5'11". That should be considered a major public health issue, even if it weren't for the fact that the obese are at a 113% greater risk of hospitalisation if they contract SARSCoV2.
I can assure you that Emma Raducanu's match was scheduled to be last on court 1 purely for the tv ratings. They do this with British players to catch the 6pm - 8pm (and now that they have the two roofs, later) slots. As you know, under local regs they can play under the lights until 11pm sharp.
Many of the ladies singles were scheduled first on courts e.g. Elena Rybakina (21) was played at 11 am. Three other ladies matches went through first thing on Centre and No.1.
The BBC's eyes lit up and they shunted all the BBC1 programmes off to BBC2 and brought Emma's match onto BBC1.
It was a god-awful decision to schedule a young inexperienced girl like that.
I've been listening to the debate on this. McEnroe made out with some reasonable-sounding comments. Gets excoriated by various personalities on The Opinion aka The Newspapers. This morning tennis experts seem to be saying the same as McEnroe.
Checking, Raducanu has been on the full LTA support system for a long time, has her own quite eminent support team (eg Nigel Spears for the last 3 years), and has been winning tournaments internationally since 2018.
Not really inexperienced.
In tennis almost half the draw is inexperienced in terms of playing in front of main court Grand Slam crowds. The tournaments Raducanu won would have had tiny crowds in comparison, perhaps hundreds for the final and tens for the early rounds, mostly coaches and other players. The only way to get experience is to do it and 18 is fine.
GB have a 12 year old realistic medal hope in the Olympics, and that does feel wrong, however good she is.
In skateboarding, which by my definition of sport, is not a sport (see also synchronised swimming, diving, gymnastics - basically anything which needs a judge to determine the outcome)
Interesting definition makes darts a sport but not the rings in men's gymnastics - it also makes crossfit a sport
Didn't someone say (google fails me) that there were only three sports - hunting, (could be) boxing, and something else. Everything else is a game.
Interesting. You could certainly classify sports in various types:
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent - Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place - Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat - Hitting a target with a thing - Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I think that covers pretty much everything
There was definitely an argument that the definition of a sport was you could be killed while playing it.
Which meant F1 was a sport but football probably wasn't..
Interesting - that is getting closer to my unknown quote.
I don’t find labour’s (Ashworth on r4) arguments particularly convincing.
I think the tories are taking the country with them.
It seems Labour want some of the remaining restrictions to continue but not most of them. Given that current restrictions aren't stopping Delta from spreading I have no idea what Labour think hanging onto a handful of restrictions will achieve. Maybe delay the wave a few weeks, but why? Will it make much difference to vaccination? No. Will it prevent a further wave? No. Will it save many lives? No.
Delta is spreading fast, so if you are concerned about that you ought to be arguing for stronger restrictions, probably much stronger, not to whittle them down to a few that will have negligible effect.
Yet on the other hand it did raise my eyebrows a bit when the press conference stated that they expect 50 000 cases per day by July 19th, before anything happens. This would imply that cases would go up further afterwards, in a proper 4th wave.
Personally, I would relax most restrictions, apart from keeping masks on public transport, and give businesses the choice as to whether to have masks etc rather than the customers.
Scotland cases is interesting - seem to have peaked. Obvs need more data, but interesting. We 'may' not be that far from the peak in England, but of course we may not...
The schools broke up on 1 July in Scotland. I wonder if that is one reason.
Surely that would be too soon to have impacted on positive tests though?
At least some bits of Scotland broke up earlier than that- more like June 24. Hence the wry laughter when Scottish schools were encouraged to celebrate One Britain Day on June 25.
Priti Patel is to reveal proposals allowing for the building of purpose built reception centres for asylum seekers who have "knowingly" arrived in the UK without permission.
Six in ten Britons (60%) recently told us they thought this was a fair policy
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
No, I don’t think we did “try”.
The key moment was after the financial crisis, but neither Cameron nor Osborne were especially interested, and the Tory party at large had stopped thinking anything about the EU except as a bogeyman “other”,
Nobody did which is why ultimately Britain made the right choice.
Even Blair and Brown when push came to shove treated Europe as other. They never even tried to have a referendum to join the Euro, spending political capital on going to war alongside the Americans instead, despite all Blair's pretensions of taking Britain into the centre of Europe.
Britain was never philosophically interested in ever closer union and ultimately a federal single European nation state. The EU is. So ultimately we were the wrong fit for the project, Britain being in the EU is like someone who wants an ample supply of chocolate cakes joining Weightwatchers, it just didn't work.
There was a thread on Twitter the other day in response to one of the GB News presenters rattling on about how all we ever wanted was to be a member of a trading bloc and didn’t want the political union.
I can’t be arsed to find the thread, but the writer showed reams and reams of newspaper articles about the project from it’s earliest days, through the referendum when we joined, contemporary interviews with politicians, etc, etc, etc, and it has always been clear, totally unambiguous, even when we joined, that ever closer union was the goal.
For anyone to say that this ever closer union was something we weren’t aware of, that the perfidious EU was trying to foist it upon us after we joined a simple trading bloc, is wrong.
It is literally the first line of the Treaty of Rome or whatever is the EU's seminal document.
Unusually, I actually watched some news yesterday. Even more oddly, it was of the press conference the PM held. Didn't watch much but the questions from Vicki Young (BBC, why not wait until the whole adult population is vaccinated before opening) and Beth Rigby (Sky, I forget the wording precisely but it left me quite angry and surprised she was being so accusatory and doom-mongering) were a helpful reminder that I'm missing almost nothing by not watching the news regularly any more.
On Rigby this article confirms her and Sky's pro zero covid anti HMG stance
Or is it merely pointing out a few things that show the government is taking a big gamble?
Saying things government loyalists do not want to hear is not the same as being anti-government.
SKY has loved 18 months of Covid, rehashing Government pressers and having a long list of gobby inumerates to easily fill their time. They seem to be concerned that the next 18 months might not be so easy...
Ed Conway's analyses seem ok to me.
The analysis on here has been massively better than anything on our TVs. It has also been significantly better than any of the press. All arguments made, way ahead of any other outlets, with some serious insight from people who Know Their Shit.
pb.com should be rightly proud of how well it has moved us through the various stages of the pandemic.
Mr. Topping, aye. The EU itself is untrustworthy. That was one of my problems with it. And UK politicians' promises on the EU were also untrustworthy. Labour reneging on a referendum pledge is one of the reasons I voted to leave, because I knew the odds on another vote were immeasurably long, and that in the meantime we'd be integrated more, and more, and leaving would become commensurately more difficult.
The trial period others have suggested is an interesting one, although it would encourage the EU to give us the worst possible deal on the basis it'd increase the chances of us returning (although British bloodymindedness might make that work the other way...).
A second referendum to confirm a specific deal was another potential option.
Whatever one's views of the vote, the UK negotiations were not impressive.
Edited extra bit: Mr. Pioneers, I remain (ahem) perplexed why pro-EU types decided to focus their energy on opposing leaving the EU totally, to no effect, rather than trying to steer things that way. Even to the extent of marching through lobbies alongside ardent anti-EU MPs.
As I keep pointing out the EU is a distinct and legally separate entity to the EEA. Members of the EEA only are not members of the EU no matter how hard the foaming-dog-fever end of Brexiteers insist they are.
The variant factory argument is the latest example of a new form of British exceptionalism that seems to have taken hold among certain people.
We all know about the traditional British (or English) exceptionalism: we're the best, and variations on that theme. This new one is a negative exceptionalism. Britain is not just another diverse but flawed country that has successes and failures. It is THE worst at fighting Covid; we have the most extremist immigration rules; our government is the most corrupt, indeed the only corrupt government; the few million who catch Covid here are going to launch evil variants on the world, not the - checks notes - several billion unvaccinated who may catch it worldwide. Even happened in the football before we started winning. There seemed to be no room for anything other than England winning the tournament, or being an abject failure laughed at by the world.
Could do with more acceptance that Britain is a middling country that has generally been quite successful but has a number of weaknesses just like its many peers, and that ultimately it is populated by a thing called human beings.
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/israel-and-south-korea-to-exchange-vaccines-672981 Israel signed a deal with South Korea on Tuesday for the immediate transfer of 700,000 doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine from its warehouse to the Asian country. In exchange, South Korea will return the same amount of vaccines to Israel from a future order, around September or October of this year. These are some of the around 1 million unused doses that Israel purchased from Pfizer last year and that stand to expire at the end of the month, after a deal to transfer the vaccines to the Palestinian Authority fell through..
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
No, I don’t think we did “try”.
The key moment was after the financial crisis, but neither Cameron nor Osborne were especially interested, and the Tory party at large had stopped thinking anything about the EU except as a bogeyman “other”,
Nobody did which is why ultimately Britain made the right choice.
Even Blair and Brown when push came to shove treated Europe as other. They never even tried to have a referendum to join the Euro, spending political capital on going to war alongside the Americans instead, despite all Blair's pretensions of taking Britain into the centre of Europe.
Britain was never philosophically interested in ever closer union and ultimately a federal single European nation state. The EU is. So ultimately we were the wrong fit for the project, Britain being in the EU is like someone who wants an ample supply of chocolate cakes joining Weightwatchers, it just didn't work.
There was a thread on Twitter the other day in response to one of the GB News presenters rattling on about how all we ever wanted was to be a member of a trading bloc and didn’t want the political union.
I can’t be arsed to find the thread, but the writer showed reams and reams of newspaper articles about the project from it’s earliest days, through the referendum when we joined, contemporary interviews with politicians, etc, etc, etc, and it has always been clear, totally unambiguous, even when we joined, that ever closer union was the goal.
For anyone to say that this ever closer union was something we weren’t aware of, that the perfidious EU was trying to foist it upon us after we joined a simple trading bloc, is wrong.
I am not sure “ever closer union” was explicitly on offer but certainly it was always communicated as more than just an economic agreement.
This was understood in 1973, but successive leaders did not bring the British public along with them as the EC evolved into the EU.
Maastricht was a watershed.
Anyway, what’s interesting about this topic is the sense that Blair or Brown etc were to “blame” for our leaving the EU.
Surely, if leaving the EU is so wonderful, no “blame” is to be identified.
I think that at heart, most Brexiters do understand Brexit as a loss - albeit one they hope can be minimised or managed, and in any case “immigration”.
It is now settled wisdom among the PB Brexiters that immigrants were driving down wages - against the actual academic studies - and when I pointed this out the other day the venom was incredible.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
A wave of nostalgia now triggered by that second image, which is a game I hadn't thought about for some time - does anyone else remember the card game 'Round Europe'? From 1957, apparently. I loved that imagery. And that is my idea of Europe, still. Also interesting to look again at the map - you couldn't go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and Athens was a bloody nuisance to get to.
Ha! I still have a 40 year old copy of the Great Game of Britain, complete with BR style counters.
All the games I have based in Europe seem to involve invasion.
I loved GGoB. My copy is battered and bruised, but still extant. Most perfect board game ever created. Though the electric side worked much better than the steam side, in my opinion.
New Luntz poll shows huge divide between Tory and Labour voters on the UK
52% of Labour voters think the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation compared to just 19% of Tory voters and 37% of voters as as whole.
Labour voters are closer to the population average despite being outnumbered by Tories (other things being equal, the larger group should be closer to the average for the whole population). So Labour voters are more representative of the country as a whole, which is split on this subject. But Tory voters are more monolithic in their views, which is why it is fertile ground for them - it's a subject that unites their supporters while dividing their opponents. I am guessing it's mostly an age thing. Older voters see the change from the horrific overt racism of the 70s and 80s, and think things aren't so bad now. Younger voters see the existing inequalities, and want change. Younger voters are also more likely to be drawn from groups that actually experience racism, too. As is often the case with polling, people are answering different questions in their mind.
The government is being forced to subsidise car manufacturers to keep them open post-Brexit.
We all know this.
Car manufacturing was always going to become less profitable post Brexit. Add them to the list along with fishers etc, who are also in receipt of various bungs.
Let’s save £350m a week and spend it on no-longer productive business instead!
Not quite - the Government is subsidising car manufacturers at a time of total structural change in that industry.
When everything is up in the air you need to offer subsidies to keep both the existing companies and encourage new ones.
I suspect Tesla is regretting building their factory in Germany.
Funny how there’s always non-Brexit reasons.
This is an industry where subsidies have always exists - no-one has built or modernised a car factory in decades without incentives to do so.
The govt has always subsidised car manufacturers. Yet, all of a sudden, it’s an issue to diehard remainers. Labour bailed out British Leyland in the seventies. Money was given to Nissan, Honda and Toyota to come here in the eighties. Money has been given to Ford, BMW, Vauxhall, Nissan, JLR and others As far back as I can remember to Help them build new models locally. Yet suddenly it’s an issue to some people as if it has never happened before.
Funny how it’s happening all at once, though, innit.
Yeah because the industry is moving from petrol and diesel to electrical powertrains en masse. I guess if you want to hack a Brexit narrative in it then a lot of that is because of VW and their dodgy diesels which has forced the whole industry to dump diesel 10 years earlier than expected.
I hadn’t realised (or had forgotten), but the gilet jaune movement - analogous in some ways to Brexitism - was sparked by a hamfisted attempt by Macron to raise steep taxes on diesel.
Honestly mate, you need to move on from Brexit. I mean you're a kiwi right, I don't even know why you care so much?
As a quasi-outsider I can see perhaps more clearly how deranged it is. Besides, like any historical phenomenon it is open to endless interpretations.
You might as well ask why people don’t move on from the French Revolution.
It is daft. We lost a lot through it. In years to come people will realise how valuable freedom of movement was. However it is done and Blair is correct in saying we need to make it work if we aim to rejoin as we need to do so in a strong position.
Blair is correct. Although I don’t think we should rejoin. At least not to “this” EU.
In fact I think we need to make a “better” EU. That would have been much easier inside the institution, but it would also have required some independence of thought and coherence of policy-making by successive governments.
The sole benefit that Brexit provides is the pressure - PERHAPS - to avoid complacency in our economic and geopolitical settlement.
We have tried before to remake the EU in what the UK thought it should be, but I think it clear that that was not the vision of many of the other European leaders. So we left. We will miss many of the good things - ease of access to the markets, freedom of travel and so on. Other things less so, but we have made our bed and now must lie in it. Like with Covid its best to ignore the shrill on both sides of the debate (zero-covid vs let it rip), and try to build a new path. Something we often miss on PB is that many people just don't care. For them its done. They rarely think about politics. The audience on Question Time is not the population of the UK, its a very special subset.
No, I don’t think we did “try”.
The key moment was after the financial crisis, but neither Cameron nor Osborne were especially interested, and the Tory party at large had stopped thinking anything about the EU except as a bogeyman “other”,
Nobody did which is why ultimately Britain made the right choice.
Even Blair and Brown when push came to shove treated Europe as other. They never even tried to have a referendum to join the Euro, spending political capital on going to war alongside the Americans instead, despite all Blair's pretensions of taking Britain into the centre of Europe.
Britain was never philosophically interested in ever closer union and ultimately a federal single European nation state. The EU is. So ultimately we were the wrong fit for the project, Britain being in the EU is like someone who wants an ample supply of chocolate cakes joining Weightwatchers, it just didn't work.
There was a thread on Twitter the other day in response to one of the GB News presenters rattling on about how all we ever wanted was to be a member of a trading bloc and didn’t want the political union.
I can’t be arsed to find the thread, but the writer showed reams and reams of newspaper articles about the project from it’s earliest days, through the referendum when we joined, contemporary interviews with politicians, etc, etc, etc, and it has always been clear, totally unambiguous, even when we joined, that ever closer union was the goal.
For anyone to say that this ever closer union was something we weren’t aware of, that the perfidious EU was trying to foist it upon us after we joined a simple trading bloc, is wrong.
It is literally the first line of the Treaty of Rome or whatever is the EU's seminal document.
Yes. I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the principle has always been open, was debated extensively when we joined, was explicit. It wasn't unexpected, we weren't sold a lie when we joined.
It’s struck me these last few days: how deeply fortunate we are to be European.
Fly for ~2 hours from london and you can be in Seville, Lisbon, Venice, the alps, the Cyclades, the Nordic fjords - or Berlin, Barcelona, Biarritz, the Basque Country. The Balearics.
The Hebrides, Brittany, the Black Forest; Naples and northumberland, Amsterdam and county Kerry, Paris and penzance.
What a wealth. And it is our backyard and our backstory, our patrimony and our inheritance. A place where no one starves and health care is humane. The most beautiful, cultured, civilised place on earth by an enormous distance. Covid-19, with its terrible restrictions on travel, really rams that home. If you have to be restricted to anywhere, you’d want it to be Europe
The Remain campaign really did a terrible job
I agree. The advertising campaign got it terribly wrong. It should have been an appeal to the heart. The cultural and romantic aspects of Europe were simply ignored and instead we were served an unintelligible diet of cost analyses. A game for any number of players played without rules.
I don't see why that would have helped. Paris or Venice or Barcelona are just as nice whether we're in the EU or not. And there are plenty of places outside the EU (for my money Istanbul, Luzern, Rio) which are just as nice, but which we don't subsidise with billions a year.
It's a harder to travel now between the EU and UK, regardless of covid I mean. It's very much harder to stay for an extended period.
I can see Leon's point that parts of Europe are lovely and it's pretty benign, which I think was the essence of his argument.
For me? Europe is a bit tame. I like to travel to places that are a little more exotic, especially out east.
And apart from the Canary Islands and Madeira, European winters are cold which I hate. Give me Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Pacific islands, any day.
It is of course true that it is much harder now to lounge around Europe forever, but I think over-emphasising that goal might have appealed to wealthy, upper-middle-class cosmopolitan Remainers. But I doubt it would have moved the needle much in middle England, and may even have put lots of people off.
I agree about long-haul travel - I tend to prefer it too and indeed am off on such a trip tomorrow.
Oh wow. Can I ask where you are headed? How wonderful.
There are quite of lot of northerners to be found on the sun loungers of southern Europe ...
Mexico City actually, then up into the United States as I have some business there. Back in September. Hopefully by then the US will be green list.
Going back to @Roger 's point - I agree appealing to a Europe of the heart was the better approach. (I remember Roger attempting to do this, although slightly disingenuously, as I remember it - pointing out that Venice was nicer than Grimsby: you might also point out that York is nicer than Liege.)
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
The Austin Healey 3000 is easy enough but what the fuck is that on the left? Vauxhall Velox?
Unusually, I actually watched some news yesterday. Even more oddly, it was of the press conference the PM held. Didn't watch much but the questions from Vicki Young (BBC, why not wait until the whole adult population is vaccinated before opening) and Beth Rigby (Sky, I forget the wording precisely but it left me quite angry and surprised she was being so accusatory and doom-mongering) were a helpful reminder that I'm missing almost nothing by not watching the news regularly any more.
On Rigby this article confirms her and Sky's pro zero covid anti HMG stance
Or is it merely pointing out a few things that show the government is taking a big gamble?
Saying things government loyalists do not want to hear is not the same as being anti-government.
SKY has loved 18 months of Covid, rehashing Government pressers and having a long list of gobby inumerates to easily fill their time. They seem to be concerned that the next 18 months might not be so easy...
Ed Conway's analyses seem ok to me.
The analysis on here has been massively better than anything on our TVs. It has also been significantly better than any of the press. All arguments made, way ahead of any other outlets, with some serious insight from people who Know Their Shit.
pb.com should be rightly proud of how well it has moved us through the various stages of the pandemic.
Can't argue with that. Definitely been some insightful debates on the appalling modelling being used.
Comments
At the other end of the scale, you have got Brazil's Bolsanaro madness, or the Trumpian denialism about everything Covid. Or Russia's sheer distortion and deception about the figures. Or China's denialism and diversions about everything Covid.
I'm just glad I'm not the one having to make the decisions...
Having said that (and putting my anti-Boris hat back on), I do think either Rory Stewart or Jeremy Hunt would have done a better job than Johnson, especially in the early days of the epidemic. It's slightly harder to see ow they would have done in the later stages, though.
I've read a few books recently by the author of the book, David Hepworth. Uncommon People is very good, as are Nothing is Real which I read last week, which is a collection of his various writings and A Fabulous Creation, about the emergence of the LP as an art form, which I'm half way through. I'll probably end up reading 1971 even though I'll watch all the series.
He's got a lovely sense of humour and is good at puncturing all the pomposity around music and rock stars. If you're interested in rock music give 'em a whirl. He has the humility to quote Zappa: 'Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.'
But if they do insist, then one of these mobile centres who will jab anyone who turns up may be the answer.
When you are in the middle of it, it is hard to see what is culturally significant, and what is just fluff.
Just announced, from the BBC Sport site:
England will name a new squad for their ODI series with Pakistan after three players and four staff members tested positive for Covid-19.
The team were due to begin the series with an ODI in Cardiff on Thursday.
But tests administered on Monday returned seven positive results and the rest of England's party will be required to self isolate as a result.
The ECB said Ben Stokes will return to captain a squad which will be named in the next few hours.
"£350m is a drop in the ocean compared to the £1.4bn we spend on maternity lawsuits, we would save many times over the cost of additional staff if we can bring down the number of incidents and in doing so, save countless families from the most appalling tragedies" - @Jeremy_Hunt
https://twitter.com/ShaunLintern/status/1412302113430986753?s=19
https://stephendaisley.substack.com/p/sturgeon-has-no-credibility-on-covid
The trial period others have suggested is an interesting one, although it would encourage the EU to give us the worst possible deal on the basis it'd increase the chances of us returning (although British bloodymindedness might make that work the other way...).
A second referendum to confirm a specific deal was another potential option.
Whatever one's views of the vote, the UK negotiations were not impressive.
Edited extra bit: Mr. Pioneers, I remain (ahem) perplexed why pro-EU types decided to focus their energy on opposing leaving the EU totally, to no effect, rather than trying to steer things that way. Even to the extent of marching through lobbies alongside ardent anti-EU MPs.
Tom Whipple's front page analysis in The Times nails the key issues. Vaccination means that we've gone from 10% of cases going to hospital to 2%. Which is obviously very good news. But 2% of a very large number is still a large number. And the trouble with growth functions is that if they overshoot, they overshoot a lot.
School holidays should help, of course.
I read it first as Apple.army.mod...." and thought - is nothing sacred any more? Then again perhaps it's the shake up HMF needs.
This makes me wonder if the problem is that there is not yet the demand: and as the costs of building the charging stations (plus maintenance costs, staffing costs, etc, yet alone the electricity itself) means that the costs have to be at a high level?
It therefore becomes a chicken-and-egg situation: a lack of public charging facilities and their high costs makes EVs less enticing, and a lack of EVs makes the public charging facilities sparse and expensive?
Besides, IMV the biggest issue with EVs and charging is not the public charging infrastructure, but the private. EVs currently appeal to richer people, who generally have larger houses and driveways. Those who do not will have significant issues with EVs. I'd much rather the government invest in that problem.
(*) Although I may see them at the 'wrong' times; they may be busier at other times of the day.
They haven't. They were the existing rules. Which we insisted be applied.
It's what I will be insisting on if asked to return earlier.
The government is ending the instruction to tell you to work from home. That doesn't mean you can't continue to do so for a period.
And Kate Hoey the principles of democratic consent...
https://www.ft.com/content/20f9aa51-d06b-42f6-a460-db41c91efd9e
One seasoned Tory activist who campaigned in all three by-elections: “we are forgetting who our voters are. We are fundamentally misunderstanding the issues; on rural matters, on bins, on things that have brought the vote home over the last 120 years.”
https://www.ft.com/content/20f9aa51-d06b-42f6-a460-db41c91efd9e
But just as I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Britain of my youth before we splintered apart into our constituent nations, I have a nostalgic yearning for the imagined Europe of my youth, when the continent was optimistic and stylish.
Both, on further thought, are driven by games:
Though re-examining this it turns out that my idealised Europe is actually one that predates the EU.
I would be interested in @Foxy's view but are eg GPs measured against any kind of efficiency, how many of my patients survive-type metric?
My own experience with my aged mother gave me the distinct impression (GPs, docs in hospital, just about everyone) that if they got the diagnosis wrong (they did) so what. A 90-yr old woman has had her go and hence no one will come after me if she dies or is deemed beyond help.
That's what will happen though.
One of the things that concerns me is the future treatment of my Thai daughter-in-law when she's able to visit again.Currently the grandchildren have both Thai & UK passports, so they're OK.
Independence would have prevented the virus from crossing into Scottish terrority.
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent
- Going from A to B faster than your opponent, with the help of animal or contraption
- Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place
- Moving a ball so it misses your opponent and ends up in a place, with the help of animal or contraption/bat
- Hitting a target with a thing
- Hitting a target with a thing, but the target is your opponent
I think that covers pretty much everything
COVID-19 vaccines dampen genomic diversity of SARS-CoV-2: Unvaccinated patients exhibit more antigenic mutational variance
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.01.21259833v1
Variants of SARS-CoV-2 are evolving under a combination of immune selective pressure in infected hosts and natural genetic drift, raising a global alarm regarding the durability of COVID-19 vaccines. Here, we conducted longitudinal analysis over 1.8 million SARS-CoV-2 genomes from 183 countries or territories to capture vaccination-associated viral evolutionary patterns. To augment this macroscale analysis, we performed viral genome sequencing in 23 vaccine breakthrough COVID-19 patients and 30 unvaccinated COVID-19 patients for whom we also conducted machine-augmented curation of the electronic health records (EHRs). Strikingly, we find the diversity of the SARS-CoV-2 lineages is declining at the country-level with increased rate of mass vaccination (n = 25 countries, mean correlation coefficient = -0.72, S.D. = 0.20). Given that the COVID-19 vaccines leverage B-cell and T-cell epitopes, analysis of mutation rates shows neutralizing B-cell epitopes to be particularly more mutated than comparable amino acid clusters (4.3-fold, p < 0.001). Prospective validation of these macroscale evolutionary patterns using clinically annotated SARS-CoV-2 whole genome sequences confirms that vaccine breakthrough patients indeed harbor viruses with significantly lower diversity in known B cell epitopes compared to unvaccinated COVID-19 patients (2.3-fold, 95% C.I. 1.4-3.7). Incidentally, in these study cohorts, vaccinated breakthrough patients also displayed fewer COVID-associated complications and pre-existing conditions relative to unvaccinated COVID-19 patients. This study presents the first known evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are fundamentally restricting the evolutionary and antigenic escape pathways accessible to SARS-CoV-2. The societal benefit of mass vaccination may consequently go far beyond the widely reported mitigation of SARS-CoV-2 infection risk and amelioration of community transmission, to include stemming of rampant viral evolution.
A ban on farm feed made of animal remains introduced during the BSE crisis is to be lifted in the EU to allow cheap pig protein to be fed to chickens over fears that European farmers are being undercut by lower standards elsewhere.
The use of processed animal protein (PAP) from mammals in the feed of cattle and sheep was banned by the EU in 1994 as the full horrors of BSE, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, emerged.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jun/22/eu-to-lift-its-ban-on-feeding-animal-remains-to-domestic-livestock
Even Blair and Brown when push came to shove treated Europe as other. They never even tried to have a referendum to join the Euro, spending political capital on going to war alongside the Americans instead, despite all Blair's pretensions of taking Britain into the centre of Europe.
Britain was never philosophically interested in ever closer union and ultimately a federal single European nation state. The EU is. So ultimately we were the wrong fit for the project, Britain being in the EU is like someone who wants an ample supply of chocolate cakes joining Weightwatchers, it just didn't work.
Beyond that our relationship with the EU will depend on who is in power, as now largely when the Tories are in, more closely aligned to the single market and customs union regulations wise if and when Labour and the LDs get in
Also interesting to look again at the map - you couldn't go anywhere in the Eastern Bloc, and Athens was a bloody nuisance to get to.
Otherwise Shipman.......
GP's are financially encouraged to attend courses, but measuring or even assessing, the effect of CPD is very, very difficult.
Which meant F1 was a sport but football probably wasn't..
https://twitter.com/haveigotnews/status/1412043128090025986
I feel it was probably obvious at the time though that Dozy Beaky et al were more for what we might now call the Brexit demographic.
All the games I have based in Europe seem to involve invasion.
Fascinating to see how basic graphics used to be.
RCS, of this parish, has the theory that this is caused by a kind of "voluntary lockdown" - everyone gets scared and self isolates.
I am not so sure. Each time this happens, COVID dies back and people return to a more normal life. But COVID doesn't immediately return.
52% of Labour voters think the UK is an institutionally racist and discriminatory nation compared to just 19% of Tory voters and 37% of voters as as whole.
81% of Tory voters think the UK is a nation of equality and freedom compared to just 48% of Labour voters and 63% of voters overall
https://twitter.com/GoodwinMJ/status/1412323775803179013?s=20
“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.”
But that takes us back to the central mystery. If the vaccines are so good (which they are) and the vaccine programme is doing well, then the only problem is that the winning post is a bit beyond "vaccinate all adults". We have to go into school age people to make Covid live-withable.
So we make kids immune by vaccination (on current supplies can do hundreds of thousands a day, we understand the side effects, we know who has been done) or by infection (100k kids a day will be serious brown trousers, side effects less well known but probably worse, can't really track).
Why are we not keeping on with restrictions until the vaccination is actually complete (as in, cases are steady or falling) instead of when we've arbitrarily declared completion?
I can’t be arsed to find the thread, but the writer showed reams and reams of newspaper articles about the project from it’s earliest days, through the referendum when we joined, contemporary interviews with politicians, etc, etc, etc, and it has always been clear, totally unambiguous, even when we joined, that ever closer union was the goal.
For anyone to say that this ever closer union was something we weren’t aware of, that the perfidious EU was trying to foist it upon us after we joined a simple trading bloc, is wrong.
Abysmal push polling.
So the timing looks about right.
Six in ten Britons (60%) recently told us they thought this was a fair policy
https://twitter.com/YouGov/status/1412334244844691458?s=20
pb.com should be rightly proud of how well it has moved us through the various stages of the pandemic.
We all know about the traditional British (or English) exceptionalism: we're the best, and variations on that theme. This new one is a negative exceptionalism. Britain is not just another diverse but flawed country that has successes and failures. It is THE worst at fighting Covid; we have the most extremist immigration rules; our government is the most corrupt, indeed the only corrupt government; the few million who catch Covid here are going to launch evil variants on the world, not the - checks notes - several billion unvaccinated who may catch it worldwide. Even happened in the football before we started winning. There seemed to be no room for anything other than England winning the tournament, or being an abject failure laughed at by the world.
Could do with more acceptance that Britain is a middling country that has generally been quite successful but has a number of weaknesses just like its many peers, and that ultimately it is populated by a thing called human beings.
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/israel-and-south-korea-to-exchange-vaccines-672981
Israel signed a deal with South Korea on Tuesday for the immediate transfer of 700,000 doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine from its warehouse to the Asian country.
In exchange, South Korea will return the same amount of vaccines to Israel from a future order, around September or October of this year.
These are some of the around 1 million unused doses that Israel purchased from Pfizer last year and that stand to expire at the end of the month, after a deal to transfer the vaccines to the Palestinian Authority fell through..
This was understood in 1973, but successive leaders did not bring the British public along with them as the EC evolved into the EU.
Maastricht was a watershed.
Anyway, what’s interesting about this topic is the sense that Blair or Brown etc were to “blame” for our leaving the EU.
Surely, if leaving the EU is so wonderful, no “blame” is to be identified.
I think that at heart, most Brexiters do understand Brexit as a loss - albeit one they hope can be minimised or managed, and in any case “immigration”.
It is now settled wisdom among the PB Brexiters that immigrants were driving down wages - against the actual academic studies - and when I pointed this out the other day the venom was incredible.
🔵Con 41 (-1)
🔴Lab 35 (+2)
🟠LDM 8 (-1)
🟢Grn 4 (-1)
🟡SNP 3 (-1)
⚪️Other 9 (+1)
2-4 July
(Changes from 25-27 June) https://twitter.com/SavantaComRes/status/1412338585240588289/photo/1
I am guessing it's mostly an age thing. Older voters see the change from the horrific overt racism of the 70s and 80s, and think things aren't so bad now. Younger voters see the existing inequalities, and want change. Younger voters are also more likely to be drawn from groups that actually experience racism, too. As is often the case with polling, people are answering different questions in their mind.
https://www.retroclassiccar.com/1960-vauxhall-cresta-3-3-litre-3-speed-column-change/
The name 'Cresta' would certainly have the right resonances.