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.
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.
Yes, that is literally what I am proposing. I have no problem with the private sector being involved, but they cannot be relied on to deliver the unified network we need (as they are literally working to do the opposite).
OfVolt (sounds like one of the unluckier Handmaids) would insist that any charger can be accessed the same way, that they remain maintained and in service not abandoned, that charges remain viable.
In short they need to ensure that if we are going to outlaw the sale of non-EV vehicles that the network to charge EVs is as easy and plentiful as petrol filling stations are.
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.
Here's the thread, it's worth a read.
Dear Mr @SimonMcCoyTV , I noticed the other day that you claimed “What we joined was a trading bloc”, and this is a damaging line to take for the country. Please let me explain.
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
That is a good list. A good 21st century list.
I agree. I also agree that darts is more of a sport than gymnastics, for the reasons set out above. That's not to decry the skill and even spectacle of gymnastics. But simply being skilful and spectacular doesn't make something a sport.
“Issues with border control” say the party that let thousands of football fans without match tickets file onto trains bound for London then welcomed them back like nothing had happened
OfVolt (sounds like one of the unluckier Handmaids) would insist that any charger can be accessed the same way, that they remain maintained and in service not abandoned, that charges remain viable.
That's a sub-plot in another Black Mirror episode...
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.
63% of UK voters overall think the UK is a nation of equality and freedom, compared to just 48% of Labour voters.
Only 37% of UK voters overall think the UK is institutionally racist and divisive compared to 52% of Labour voters so am not sure how you work that one out.
It does show that to win an overall majority Labour will need to become more culturally conservative and less woke even if it has more support for some of its economic policies
Robert Dingwall Flag of Scotland Flag of European Union Reunite @rwjdingwall · 40m As a member of government advisory bodies, I have always felt it would be incompatible with that status not to wear a face covering where legally required to. However, I shall cease to do so from 19 July when these requirements lapse. (1/10)
So Labour's talking point objections to boris opening up seems to be 3 fold.
Not enough support for better ventilation...fine, but how much longer would we have to delay opening up before many more buildings have better ventilation? Next year?
More payments for isolation....well given only 20% actually complete isolation properly, while for some it is about money, hosing more money at this, won't magically get that figure really really high as for many it is about attitude...so that won't solve covid spread either.
Masks on public transport...i think this is fair enough criticism, but if you are going to be allowing pubs, gyms, restaurants etc, dropping social distance limits and gathering numbers (most spread is via friend / family interactions), how much difference does this make to stop spread? Are Labour saying we have to keep all these other restrictions?
And Ashworth rather dishonestly has moved goalposts talking about only 50% of PEOPLE vaccinated.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Police officers involved in the stopping, searching and handcuffing of the British sprinter Bianca Williams and her partner are now under investigation for gross misconduct over alleged racism and dishonesty, the Guardian has learned.
Williams and Ricardo dos Santos were stopped on 4 July last year in north-west London by officers from the Metropolitan police’s Territorial Support Group.
They were searched on suspicion of having drugs and weapons, with none found, while their three-month-old son was in the back seat.
The investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct began into lower-level misconduct claims against five officers.
But in an intensification of the proceedings, the formal investigation has now become more serious after new evidence was unearthed by investigators.
Three Met officers have been notified by the IOPC they are under investigation for gross misconduct. If proven, the maximum penalty is dismissal.
Police officers involved in the stopping, searching and handcuffing of the British sprinter Bianca Williams and her partner are now under investigation for gross misconduct over alleged racism and dishonesty, the Guardian has learned.
Williams and Ricardo dos Santos were stopped on 4 July last year in north-west London by officers from the Metropolitan police’s Territorial Support Group.
They were searched on suspicion of having drugs and weapons, with none found, while their three-month-old son was in the back seat.
The investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct began into lower-level misconduct claims against five officers.
But in an intensification of the proceedings, the formal investigation has now become more serious after new evidence was unearthed by investigators.
Three Met officers have been notified by the IOPC they are under investigation for gross misconduct. If proven, the maximum penalty is dismissal.
simply being skilful and spectacular doesn't make something a sport.
If you can do it better than someone else, it does...
...but not if you need a judge to measure it.
Ice dancing is the particular example here. Definitely not a sport. Not measurable. Very clever but too subjective to be a sport. There is a sliding scale after that - diving, for example, is surprisingly measurable. But not as measurable as the 100m sprint.
Mine are extreme opinions on this, but not particularly strongly held ones.
Prof Francois Balloux @BallouxFrancois · 42m A difficulty in the #COVID19 discussion lies in many failing to acknowledge trade-offs in any pandemic mitigation measure. This is rarely explicitly stated. One exception is the 'zerocovid' CAG group whose first mission statement states "There is no trade-off".
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?
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.
So the timing looks about right.
Ah yes, One Britain day. Lets all celebrate our Britishness by singing a song that thinks Northern Ireland doesn't exist and on a date where Scottish schools have already gone home.
So glad these patriotic Tories truly understand their country.
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?
So Labour's talking point objections to boris opening up seems to be 3 fold.
Not enough support for better ventilation...fine, but how much longer would we have to delay opening up before many more buildings have better ventilation? Next year?
More payments for isolation....well given only 20% actually complete isolation properly, while for some it is about money, hosing more money at this, won't magically get that figure really really high as for many it is about attitude...so that won't solve covid spread either.
Masks on public transport...i think this is fair enough criticism, but if you are going to be allowing pubs, gyms, restaurants etc, dropping social distance limits and gathering numbers (most spread is via friend / family interactions), how much difference does this make to stop spread? Are Labour saying we have to keep all these other restrictions?
And Ashworth rather dishonestly has moved goalposts talking about only 50% of PEOPLE vaccinated.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
The masks on public transport one comes from the fact you have 200 people say from 200 different offices heading to 200 different homes.
If it only takes 5 minutes to catch covid, that's an awful lot of possible connections where it could be spread.
As I commented on this last night, public transport is about the last place that masks should be removed from but it seems that Boris doesn't want to upset anyone.
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
diving, for example, is surprisingly measurable. But not as measurable as the 100m sprint.
What is interesting about the 100m sprint is you can easily tell who won any particular race, but there is an argument that you can't compare times from different races.
They control for wind speed, but not temperature, altitude or track surface, all of which could affect the times
Health Secretary Sajid Javid says: "We can't live in a world where all we are thinking about is COVID".
It's a shame that his predecessor was literally building that world and until he resigned was putting in steel reinforcement for it. It's going to be a very, very long road now to get any sense of normality as a nation. You can already see the nation has been divided down the same idiotic lines as always where one side thinks the other is evil and vice versa. Honestly, my wife was accused by her mother of supporting killing old people last night because she was happy that Boris named an end day in England. It's completely ridiculous.
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.
Games as propaganda have a long history of course, and many of these were propaganda to some extent.
Interesting to ask whether today's yoof will have a different view of the world thanks to video gaming. GTA and the like aren't exactly 'selling' locations or a particular view of politics. At least, not the ones I see played.
So Labour's talking point objections to boris opening up seems to be 3 fold.
Not enough support for better ventilation...fine, but how much longer would we have to delay opening up before many more buildings have better ventilation? Next year?
More payments for isolation....well given only 20% actually complete isolation properly, while for some it is about money, hosing more money at this, won't magically get that figure really really high as for many it is about attitude...so that won't solve covid spread either.
Masks on public transport...i think this is fair enough criticism, but if you are going to be allowing pubs, gyms, restaurants etc, dropping social distance limits and gathering numbers (most spread is via friend / family interactions), how much difference does this make to stop spread? Are Labour saying we have to keep all these other restrictions?
And Ashworth rather dishonestly has moved goalposts talking about only 50% of PEOPLE vaccinated.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
The masks on public transport one comes from the fact you have 200 people say from 200 different offices heading to 200 different homes.
If it only takes 5 minutes to catch covid, that's an awful lot of possible connections where it could be spread.
As I commented on this last night, public transport is about the last place that masks should be removed from...
Certainly I will keep wearing a mask until double vaccinated and probably after on public transport anyway, though for the double vaccinated it should be voluntary in my view
As always its the Labour number that is all over the place. Past 2 days of polls, Tory number is basically always the same, unmoved / down 1, Labour is anywhere from 31 to 35, with the gap anywhere from 6 to 10 points be because of it.
I thought the only reason we delayed opening up completely was the worry over the variant formerly known as Indian being less resistant to the vaccines, so we bought a bit more time? Deaths haven’t gone up much, intensive cares are not overwhelmed, so why are people, including those who moaned when the re opening was delayed, calling it a gamble now?
Because the UK, almost uniquely in the developed world, seems to have Zerocovidians at the very highest level of public discourse.
It's a real shame. It's OK to have even 50,000 cases of Covid a day *if* they are not leading to particularly heightened levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
Indeed, it would probably be more useful for the government to target hospitalisations and deaths rather than cases per se, because the reality is that people *aren't* getting really sick right now, because the most vulnerable have been vaccinated.
Yes
Sir Keir is saying it’s reckless, it should be done gradually etc, but that is what’s happening! We were meant to be fully open a month earlier, but the government were cautious. I don’t see why he is calling for even more caution on the back of the vaccines working as intended. It really is a case of being paralysed by fear. I live with an unvaccinated vulnerable person, we have to be careful, but that doesn’t mean the whole of society has to join us
He’s thinking about it politically
If it goes well Boris was “reckless but lucky”
If it doesn’t then he capitalises on all the downside
It’s vile
Calling for an incremental approach, which was government policy until the conservatives lost a couple of by-elections, is hardly vile.
Ashcroft was setting up to blame Boris personally for all future deaths
Johnson takes the credit where it is due on the vaccine, he also gets the blame when things go wrong. Welcome to politics, leadership and responsibility, Charles.
Yes and no.
The vaccine program was fully within the government's command. It set up the relevant groups, chose a portfolio of vaccines, procured them, and greased the wheels of industry. There have been issues, but on the whole they've done a very good job. The vaccine messaging has also been generally good, with a few small wobbles IMO.
Similarly (and this gets much less coverage), the excellent genomics work at COG-UK. Literally a world-beater.
The spread of the virus is much less under the government's control: the virus does what it 'wants'. The government can tell the public what to do, but absent a police state, it depends on the public's behaviour in following those rules. They are not helpless against the virus, but they have to be reactive - whereas the vaccine rollout has been much more under their control.
Too many people also ignore the negatives of lockdown: not just fiscally, but also mentally and physically to the population.
Of course, all this is right. But the government has made a decision to end all legal restrictions at a time when the virus is spreading at a rapid rate. All or nothing were not the only two options. The PM, though, has decided that they were. He must take responsibility for that. There is no-one else to blame.
It’s not all or nothing.
The restrictions have been gradually eased over the last few months, and the next/last easing has been delayed by a month already. ‘All’ was last spring, when we were only allowed out for an hour a day, and that has been incrementally reduced to ‘almost nothing’ now, followed by ‘nothing’ in a fortnight
Saying ‘all or nothing’ is just trying to dramatise the situation
I don't think it is. As far as I can see a majority of people think it would have been sensible to retain masks on public transport where you have no option but to be close to other people for lengthy periods. Retaining it would have had little or no economic downside and would have been prudent given the level of infections we have.
But no, Johnson wanted to be the "Big I Am" and declare "freedom day" and bask in the easy headlines.
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
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?
Chess?
Maybe needs an addendum about physical skill needed too?
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.
63% of UK voters overall think the UK is a nation of equality and freedom, compared to just 48% of Labour voters.
Only 37% of UK voters overall think the UK is institutionally racist and divisive compared to 52% of Labour voters so am not sure how you work that one out.
It does show that to win an overall majority Labour will need to become more culturally conservative and less woke even if it has more support for some of its economic policies
37% (whole population) is closer to 52% (Labour voters) than 19% (Tory voters). 37-19=18; 52-37=15; 18>15 was how I worked it out. Given quantum of Labour voters is smaller than Tory voters, you would expect the Tory number to be more similar to the average, not less. So Labour voters are more representative of the split in the country than Tories, despite being smaller in number. As Luntz himself said, Labour needs to be better at framing the discussion and explaining its position.
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.
63% of UK voters overall think the UK is a nation of equality and freedom, compared to just 48% of Labour voters.
Only 37% of UK voters overall think the UK is institutionally racist and divisive compared to 52% of Labour voters so am not sure how you work that one out.
It does show that to win an overall majority Labour will need to become more culturally conservative and less woke even if it has more support for some of its economic policies
I don't think the poll shows anything like that. It gave respondents a choice of two extreme positions, which I don't think reflect the real views of most voters.
Part of the project to bring the US culture wars over here - something that sensible conservatives decry.
nb Luntz is an operative, not a pollster as understood in the UK.
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.
The EU was open and honest about it.
It was the UK establishment which lied or were in denial about it.
I don't really like restrictions but table service in pubs seems a good one to me.
Probably works in some pubs but not others. The drinking dens that are packed on a friday not so much, the nice country pubs that are mainly food or a mix of food and some social drinking, probably yes.
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.
So the timing looks about right.
Interesting. Then perhaps the best thing we could do re suppressing cases would be to break up this week in England?
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.
Games as propaganda have a long history of course, and many of these were propaganda to some extent.
Interesting to ask whether today's yoof will have a different view of the world thanks to video gaming. GTA and the like aren't exactly 'selling' locations or a particular view of politics. At least, not the ones I see played.
Also - pre- and post-Beeching maps can be seen (though it looks as if the later editions were more explicitly set in the past).
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?
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
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.
Games as propaganda have a long history of course, and many of these were propaganda to some extent.
Interesting to ask whether today's yoof will have a different view of the world thanks to video gaming. GTA and the like aren't exactly 'selling' locations or a particular view of politics. At least, not the ones I see played.
Yes, my version had a steam version on one side - circa 1928, big four rail companies - in which destinations were all famous locations in the history of rail - York, Stockton, Llanffair PG, etc. - and an electric/diesel version on the other side, in which destinations were tourist locations - Blackpool, Windermere, Stratford-upon-Avon, Fort William etc.
diving, for example, is surprisingly measurable. But not as measurable as the 100m sprint.
What is interesting about the 100m sprint is you can easily tell who won any particular race, but there is an argument that you can't compare times from different races.
They control for wind speed, but not temperature, altitude or track surface, all of which could affect the times
Diving still has judges - its not obvious who was best.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid says: "We can't live in a world where all we are thinking about is COVID".
It's a shame that his predecessor was literally building that world and until he resigned was putting in steel reinforcement for it. It's going to be a very, very long road now to get any sense of normality as a nation. You can already see the nation has been divided down the same idiotic lines as always where one side thinks the other is evil and vice versa. Honestly, my wife was accused by her mother of supporting killing old people last night because she was happy that Boris named an end day in England. It's completely ridiculous.
I'm shocked at how many people seemingly never want this pandemic to end...
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?
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
Question - when you are claiming asylum what is the means to obtain permission before you arrive?
Also - thje question polled doesn't say WHERE the reception centres are. Epping, IoW, Guernsey, St Helena ...?
The classic location for removal centres is Madagascar isn't it? At least until the Generalplan Ost becomes more favourable. Patel should get Putin on the phone and see if there are any old gulags available.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
1) That wouldn't be unlocking. That would be retaining restrictions, long after the rationale for having restrictions has gone. 2) It would have been unworkable and unenforcable. Come round to my place for a party! Remember your face mask! 3) It will actually lead to worse health outcomes in the long run. If we are to unlock, we need to do so in the summer. 4) And there is more to health than covid.
Out of interest what are the estimated daily cases of flu / pneumonia and daily rate of hospitalitizations for it? I genuinely have no idea for context vs covid that will be 50-100k cases and ~500 hospitalisations in a couple of weeks.
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.
The EU was open and honest about it.
It was the UK establishment which lied or were in denial about it.
The contemporaneous articles and interviews, considering the debates that were going on at the time, don't support that assertion at all.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
I'm not really sure that unlocking as they are doing but maintaining social distancing and masks indoors are possible? Surely the social distancing is the biggest issue for hospitality? At best keep masks as mandated on public transport.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
I don't think that, in general, every bit of public health advice has to be made into law, rather than remaining as advice that we're asked to comply with.
So Labour's talking point objections to boris opening up seems to be 3 fold.
Not enough support for better ventilation...fine, but how much longer would we have to delay opening up before many more buildings have better ventilation? Next year?
More payments for isolation....well given only 20% actually complete isolation properly, while for some it is about money, hosing more money at this, won't magically get that figure really really high as for many it is about attitude...so that won't solve covid spread either.
Masks on public transport...i think this is fair enough criticism, but if you are going to be allowing pubs, gyms, restaurants etc, dropping social distance limits and gathering numbers (most spread is via friend / family interactions), how much difference does this make to stop spread? Are Labour saying we have to keep all these other restrictions?
And Ashworth rather dishonestly has moved goalposts talking about only 50% of PEOPLE vaccinated.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
The masks on public transport one comes from the fact you have 200 people say from 200 different offices heading to 200 different homes.
If it only takes 5 minutes to catch covid, that's an awful lot of possible connections where it could be spread.
As I commented on this last night, public transport is about the last place that masks should be removed from...
Certainly I will keep wearing a mask until double vaccinated and probably after on public transport anyway, though for the double vaccinated it should be voluntary in my view
I had my 2nd jab in March and I will continue to wear masks going to and from work on the bus. I am happy to volunteer to do so.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid says: "We can't live in a world where all we are thinking about is COVID".
It's a shame that his predecessor was literally building that world and until he resigned was putting in steel reinforcement for it. It's going to be a very, very long road now to get any sense of normality as a nation. You can already see the nation has been divided down the same idiotic lines as always where one side thinks the other is evil and vice versa. Honestly, my wife was accused by her mother of supporting killing old people last night because she was happy that Boris named an end day in England. It's completely ridiculous.
I'm shocked at how many people seem to never want this pandemic to end...
Yes, but I can see their viewpoint, even if I disagree with it. We're in a situation where we're doing okay atm: we're working from home, enjoying life and saving a lot of money. If it wasn't for our son and our concerns for him, we'd be in fine fettle.
If you're in that sort of situation, then this isn't too bad - especially if the alternative means a greater fear of getting the dreaded lurgy.
diving, for example, is surprisingly measurable. But not as measurable as the 100m sprint.
What is interesting about the 100m sprint is you can easily tell who won any particular race, but there is an argument that you can't compare times from different races.
They control for wind speed, but not temperature, altitude or track surface, all of which could affect the times
Diving still has judges - its not obvious who was best.
I think soon some innovative sport will use AI to judge a performance. Diving is a candidate as it is technical but judgemental .
It "makes sense" for people who have been fully vaccinated to be treated differently to those who are not, Health Secretary Sajid Javid has said.
Incoming screeching of how its discriminatory....and media finding edge cases of unfairness.
The entertaining part is listening to how people tip toe round the issue.
Incidentally - an update on the Seventh Day Adventist preacher who was preaching anti-vax, locally. He had a frank and full exchange of views with another preacher and has been ejected/walked off in a huff from that church.
So Labour's talking point objections to boris opening up seems to be 3 fold.
Not enough support for better ventilation...fine, but how much longer would we have to delay opening up before many more buildings have better ventilation? Next year?
More payments for isolation....well given only 20% actually complete isolation properly, while for some it is about money, hosing more money at this, won't magically get that figure really really high as for many it is about attitude...so that won't solve covid spread either.
Masks on public transport...i think this is fair enough criticism, but if you are going to be allowing pubs, gyms, restaurants etc, dropping social distance limits and gathering numbers (most spread is via friend / family interactions), how much difference does this make to stop spread? Are Labour saying we have to keep all these other restrictions?
And Ashworth rather dishonestly has moved goalposts talking about only 50% of PEOPLE vaccinated.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
The masks on public transport one comes from the fact you have 200 people say from 200 different offices heading to 200 different homes.
If it only takes 5 minutes to catch covid, that's an awful lot of possible connections where it could be spread.
As I commented on this last night, public transport is about the last place that masks should be removed from...
Certainly I will keep wearing a mask until double vaccinated and probably after on public transport anyway, though for the double vaccinated it should be voluntary in my view
I had my 2nd jab in March and I will continue to wear masks going to and from work on the bus. I am happy to volunteer to do so.
People seem to forget that the mask is to protect others, not to protect yourself.
Vaccination only provides *some*protection against Delta infection (it's main effect seems to be to reduce severity), so you should still wear your mask to protect others even after double jabbage.
Plus, who wants to spend 10 days off work if you get a mild or asymptomatic infection having been double jabbed?
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
1) That wouldn't be unlocking. That would be retaining restrictions, long after the rationale for having restrictions has gone. 2) It would have been unworkable and unenforcable. Come round to my place for a party! Remember your face mask! 3) It will actually lead to worse health outcomes in the long run. If we are to unlock, we need to do so in the summer. 4) And there is more to health than covid.
5) "Should" and "not required" are entirely compatible. And even Boris said you should consider wearing a mask on a crowded tube train, less so an empty mainline train.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid says: "We can't live in a world where all we are thinking about is COVID".
It's a shame that his predecessor was literally building that world and until he resigned was putting in steel reinforcement for it. It's going to be a very, very long road now to get any sense of normality as a nation. You can already see the nation has been divided down the same idiotic lines as always where one side thinks the other is evil and vice versa. Honestly, my wife was accused by her mother of supporting killing old people last night because she was happy that Boris named an end day in England. It's completely ridiculous.
I'm shocked at how many people seem to never want this pandemic to end...
Yes, but I can see their viewpoint, even if I disagree with it. We're in a situation where we're doing okay atm: we're working from home, enjoying life and saving a lot of money. If it wasn't for our son and our concerns for him, we'd be in fine fettle.
If you're in that sort of situation, then this isn't too bad - especially if the alternative means a greater fear of getting the dreaded lurgy.
Is there also some aspect of it being "interesting" rather than just another year? Horrible, but not boring?
And something to concentrate on instead of all the other problems we might have (personal or national)?
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
No they didn't. They were asked if/when they would continue to wear masks and said in crowded spaces, when people felt uncomfortable, and one other time.
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 was more perfidious Albion than perfidious EU.
The EU never kept a secret of the fact they wanted Ever Closer Union and the EU's evolution into being a Federal nation state has never been a secret.
But in the UK over the past 35 years, arguably from Delors speech to the TUC onwards, the EEC/EU and the UK have drifted apart.
Its ended up suiting both sides in the UK to rewrite history to claim that the EU is/was about economics rather than a nascent federation. For Eurosceptics it suited them to pretend we'd joined a trade bloc and it had changed - its true it had changed but that it would change was never a secret when we joined. For Europhiles it suited them to pretend the EU is still primarily a trade bloc, because they knew that the majority of Britons now don't want ever closer union and a federal Europe.
You can't pull the wool over people's eyes for long though. Europhiles needed to make an argument for Ever Closer Union, not pretend it didn't exist or that Dave had abolished it. They didn't, so they lost and deservedly so.
The definition of a sport is not just a pedantic question but can determine if funding is available.Sport England (grassroots funder as opposed to UK sport who are elite funders) for example fund archery but not darts . Yet archery and darts are pretty much the same in terms of physical exertion and the fundamental skill needed.
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.
63% of UK voters overall think the UK is a nation of equality and freedom, compared to just 48% of Labour voters.
Only 37% of UK voters overall think the UK is institutionally racist and divisive compared to 52% of Labour voters so am not sure how you work that one out.
It does show that to win an overall majority Labour will need to become more culturally conservative and less woke even if it has more support for some of its economic policies
This is exactly the exceptionalist binary nonsense I was talking about before. Britain is either an institutionally racist cesspit and scar on the face of humanity, or a shining beacon of social progress, innovation, justice and enlightenment to the world. No room for something in between.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
1) That wouldn't be unlocking. That would be retaining restrictions, long after the rationale for having restrictions has gone. 2) It would have been unworkable and unenforcable. Come round to my place for a party! Remember your face mask! 3) It will actually lead to worse health outcomes in the long run. If we are to unlock, we need to do so in the summer. 4) And there is more to health than covid.
Fine, but we are not locked down now. We can almost entirely go about our business with a few exceptions where capacity restrictions are needed. We can remove all of the outdoor ones, but the indoors ones are still needed.
Again, we are being told we can unlock now because the science says restrictions are not needed. Yet the CMO and the CSA both directly contradict this and state the case to maintain masks and distancing.
So you can make your argument and that's fine. It is the argument that we've binned the science and accepted Liar lying to us.
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 was more perfidious Albion than perfidious EU.
The EU never kept a secret of the fact they wanted Ever Closer Union and the EU's evolution into being a Federal nation state has never been a secret.
But in the UK over the past 35 years, arguably from Delors speech to the TUC onwards, the EEC/EU and the UK have drifted apart.
Its ended up suiting both sides in the UK to rewrite history to claim that the EU is/was about economics rather than a nascent federation. For Eurosceptics it suited them to pretend we'd joined a trade bloc and it had changed - its true it had changed but that it would change was never a secret when we joined. For Europhiles it suited them to pretend the EU is still primarily a trade bloc, because they knew that the majority of Britons now don't want ever closer union and a federal Europe.
You can't pull the wool over people's eyes for long though. Europhiles needed to make an argument for Ever Closer Union, not pretend it didn't exist or that Dave had abolished it. They didn't, so they lost and deservedly so.
I think it fair to say that before 1989 the prospect of economic and monetary union was a distant aspiration.
Following the fall of the Wall, and the rapid incorporation of Eastern Europe into the European "orbit", there was a massive acceleration.
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.
The quote is everywhere, but no references to a specific source.
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.”
Christ, I hate Hemingway. A boring, comically macho drunk. How can bullfighting be a sport, when only one party to the enterprise is participating by choice?
Health Secretary Sajid Javid says: "We can't live in a world where all we are thinking about is COVID".
It's a shame that his predecessor was literally building that world and until he resigned was putting in steel reinforcement for it. It's going to be a very, very long road now to get any sense of normality as a nation. You can already see the nation has been divided down the same idiotic lines as always where one side thinks the other is evil and vice versa. Honestly, my wife was accused by her mother of supporting killing old people last night because she was happy that Boris named an end day in England. It's completely ridiculous.
I'm shocked at how many people seemingly never want this pandemic to end...
Its amazing isn't it. The science is relatively simple - pox is going to mutate if we keep creating the conditions allowing it to do so. The existing mutations get increasingly agile and able to get around the vaccines. So obviously we should drop all restrictions, let it rip and "though some of you are going to die, that's a risk I am willing to take".
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..
What about killed while watching it? The brutal evidence suggests that football would be quite near the top.
So Labour's talking point objections to boris opening up seems to be 3 fold.
Not enough support for better ventilation...fine, but how much longer would we have to delay opening up before many more buildings have better ventilation? Next year?
More payments for isolation....well given only 20% actually complete isolation properly, while for some it is about money, hosing more money at this, won't magically get that figure really really high as for many it is about attitude...so that won't solve covid spread either.
Masks on public transport...i think this is fair enough criticism, but if you are going to be allowing pubs, gyms, restaurants etc, dropping social distance limits and gathering numbers (most spread is via friend / family interactions), how much difference does this make to stop spread? Are Labour saying we have to keep all these other restrictions?
And Ashworth rather dishonestly has moved goalposts talking about only 50% of PEOPLE vaccinated.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
The masks on public transport one comes from the fact you have 200 people say from 200 different offices heading to 200 different homes.
If it only takes 5 minutes to catch covid, that's an awful lot of possible connections where it could be spread.
As I commented on this last night, public transport is about the last place that masks should be removed from...
Certainly I will keep wearing a mask until double vaccinated and probably after on public transport anyway, though for the double vaccinated it should be voluntary in my view
I had my 2nd jab in March and I will continue to wear masks going to and from work on the bus. I am happy to volunteer to do so.
People seem to forget that the mask is to protect others, not to protect yourself.
Vaccination only provides *some*protection against Delta infection (it's main effect seems to be to reduce severity), so you should still wear your mask to protect others even after double jabbage.
Plus, who wants to spend 10 days off work if you get a mild or asymptomatic infection having been double jabbed?
Naah, thats all remoaner lies mate. We don't need masks or social distancing any more - didn't you listen to Whitty and Vallance last night? Just as Clown definitely fired Hancock, the scientists definitely said no need for restrictions yesterday.
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.
The EU was open and honest about it.
It was the UK establishment which lied or were in denial about it.
The contemporaneous articles and interviews, considering the debates that were going on at the time, don't support that assertion at all.
Contemporaneous to what time?
The UK establishment was willing to argue for ever closer union in 1975, arguing it was a good thing. So they won a landslide victory by two votes to one in the referendum.
But for one reason or another by 2016 the UK establishment, across the board, was unwilling to be open and honest and say ever closer union was a good thing. Instead they wanted to hide it away, pretend it didn't exist, pretend Dave's deal abolished it etc - and they lost as a result.
At some time between 1975 and 2016 the whole British establishment, across the board, lost any interest in Ever Closer Union. The EU didn't. So the EU refused to reform and rejected Dave's requests for meaningful reforms - and then the Europhiles lost the referendum because they had no positive vision to sell. By 2016 nobody contemporaneous was hitting the airwaves selling the virtues of Ever Closer Union.
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.
The EU was open and honest about it.
It was the UK establishment which lied or were in denial about it.
The contemporaneous articles and interviews, considering the debates that were going on at the time, don't support that assertion at all.
The debate didn't end in 1973 though.
The deceit / denial by the UK establishment grew steadily over the following decades.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
I don't think that, in general, every bit of public health advice has to be made into law, rather than remaining as advice that we're asked to comply with.
1. People don't follow advice, hence the need to compel them 2. The advice - as stated by cabinet ministers downwards - is to ditch the mask and distancing. Yes a few others suggest they may wear a mask at times. But what people are hearing is "we don't need them".
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.
The quote is everywhere, but no references to a specific source.
Excellent thanks for finding it - I suppose every sports group adapts it to their own purposes hence I had heard it referencing hunting which I suppose is a bastardisation of bullfighting.
Edit: I like the description, though, of a sport being something you can get killed doing.
Edit II: in which case hunting would take its rightful place, but not fishing or shooting.
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 was more perfidious Albion than perfidious EU.
The EU never kept a secret of the fact they wanted Ever Closer Union and the EU's evolution into being a Federal nation state has never been a secret.
But in the UK over the past 35 years, arguably from Delors speech to the TUC onwards, the EEC/EU and the UK have drifted apart.
Its ended up suiting both sides in the UK to rewrite history to claim that the EU is/was about economics rather than a nascent federation. For Eurosceptics it suited them to pretend we'd joined a trade bloc and it had changed - its true it had changed but that it would change was never a secret when we joined. For Europhiles it suited them to pretend the EU is still primarily a trade bloc, because they knew that the majority of Britons now don't want ever closer union and a federal Europe.
You can't pull the wool over people's eyes for long though. Europhiles needed to make an argument for Ever Closer Union, not pretend it didn't exist or that Dave had abolished it. They didn't, so they lost and deservedly so.
I think it fair to say that before 1989 the prospect of economic and monetary union was a distant aspiration.
Following the fall of the Wall, and the rapid incorporation of Eastern Europe into the European "orbit", there was a massive acceleration.
It may have seemed a distant aspiration but there was no secret it was an aspiration.
Which is the issue. The UK lost any desire to have it as an aspiration, the EU nations didn't suddenly gain the aspiration. Which is why its right that we left them to do their own thing, rather than us trying to be a wrench in the system bringing the whole project down with us.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid says: "We can't live in a world where all we are thinking about is COVID".
It's a shame that his predecessor was literally building that world and until he resigned was putting in steel reinforcement for it. It's going to be a very, very long road now to get any sense of normality as a nation. You can already see the nation has been divided down the same idiotic lines as always where one side thinks the other is evil and vice versa. Honestly, my wife was accused by her mother of supporting killing old people last night because she was happy that Boris named an end day in England. It's completely ridiculous.
I'm shocked at how many people seemingly never want this pandemic to end...
Its amazing isn't it. The science is relatively simple - pox is going to mutate if we keep creating the conditions allowing it to do so. The existing mutations get increasingly agile and able to get around the vaccines. So obviously we should drop all restrictions, let it rip and "though some of you are going to die, that's a risk I am willing to take".
Letting everyone catch it in the summer when the prevalent variant does not escape the vaccine to any significant extent and we have vaccinated enough people to make it little more dangerous than the flu, seems exactly the right thing to do.
I thought the only reason we delayed opening up completely was the worry over the variant formerly known as Indian being less resistant to the vaccines, so we bought a bit more time? Deaths haven’t gone up much, intensive cares are not overwhelmed, so why are people, including those who moaned when the re opening was delayed, calling it a gamble now?
Because the UK, almost uniquely in the developed world, seems to have Zerocovidians at the very highest level of public discourse.
It's a real shame. It's OK to have even 50,000 cases of Covid a day *if* they are not leading to particularly heightened levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
Indeed, it would probably be more useful for the government to target hospitalisations and deaths rather than cases per se, because the reality is that people *aren't* getting really sick right now, because the most vulnerable have been vaccinated.
Yes
Sir Keir is saying it’s reckless, it should be done gradually etc, but that is what’s happening! We were meant to be fully open a month earlier, but the government were cautious. I don’t see why he is calling for even more caution on the back of the vaccines working as intended. It really is a case of being paralysed by fear. I live with an unvaccinated vulnerable person, we have to be careful, but that doesn’t mean the whole of society has to join us
He’s thinking about it politically
If it goes well Boris was “reckless but lucky”
If it doesn’t then he capitalises on all the downside
It’s vile
Calling for an incremental approach, which was government policy until the conservatives lost a couple of by-elections, is hardly vile.
Ashcroft was setting up to blame Boris personally for all future deaths
Last time I checked he was Prime Minister. If the buck doesn't stop with him then with whom?
Vile? You really have come up with some snooty crap recently.
Blaming someone personally for deaths is not decent. Blame him for the macro decision.
I’m coming from a perspective where my late father caught COVID in hospital. But we are not blaming the NHS.
Mr. Flatlander, isn't there a feminist Monopoly that gives female players more money?
I have to say I've not heard of that one, but it wouldn't surprise me. The original 'feminist' board games go back a long way. eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffragetto
I did take part in a Monopoly tournament once, sponsored by one of the large consultancies. Maybe 300 competitors.
I got to the final game but as you'd expect 3 players decided to stitch it up and effectively give the win to one of them so as to share the (not insubstantial) prize. I believe the winner then kept it all to himself!
I wonder which party he went on to work for.
Fair enough if the game had been Diplomacy, of course...
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
No they didn't. They were asked if/when they would continue to wear masks and said in crowded spaces, when people felt uncomfortable, and one other time.
They didn't say people should do the same.
So the CMO says that he would wear a mask in "any situation which was indoors and crowded, or indoors with close proximity to other people". Is he doing that (a) for fun, or (b) because as a medic he knows that he needs to?
This one is very clear. The medics say wear a mask, the politicians have chosen to ignore them.
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 was more perfidious Albion than perfidious EU.
The EU never kept a secret of the fact they wanted Ever Closer Union and the EU's evolution into being a Federal nation state has never been a secret.
But in the UK over the past 35 years, arguably from Delors speech to the TUC onwards, the EEC/EU and the UK have drifted apart.
Its ended up suiting both sides in the UK to rewrite history to claim that the EU is/was about economics rather than a nascent federation. For Eurosceptics it suited them to pretend we'd joined a trade bloc and it had changed - its true it had changed but that it would change was never a secret when we joined. For Europhiles it suited them to pretend the EU is still primarily a trade bloc, because they knew that the majority of Britons now don't want ever closer union and a federal Europe.
You can't pull the wool over people's eyes for long though. Europhiles needed to make an argument for Ever Closer Union, not pretend it didn't exist or that Dave had abolished it. They didn't, so they lost and deservedly so.
I think perfidious Albion hits the nail on the head. The behaviour of the right-wing in this country, since free market fundamentalism became the lodestar of Conservative thought, sickens me. They have ripped us out of Europe, and they will happily tear the union asunder and throw NI to the wolves, in their pursuit of unfettered, amoral profit without responsibility.
Health Secretary Sajid Javid says: "We can't live in a world where all we are thinking about is COVID".
It's a shame that his predecessor was literally building that world and until he resigned was putting in steel reinforcement for it. It's going to be a very, very long road now to get any sense of normality as a nation. You can already see the nation has been divided down the same idiotic lines as always where one side thinks the other is evil and vice versa. Honestly, my wife was accused by her mother of supporting killing old people last night because she was happy that Boris named an end day in England. It's completely ridiculous.
I'm shocked at how many people seemingly never want this pandemic to end...
Its amazing isn't it. The science is relatively simple - pox is going to mutate if we keep creating the conditions allowing it to do so. The existing mutations get increasingly agile and able to get around the vaccines. So obviously we should drop all restrictions, let it rip and "though some of you are going to die, that's a risk I am willing to take".
Thats not really correct. There is a limited pool of viable mutations available and covid has been exploring them world wide. There are only some that are of concern, and hundreds/thousands that have little or no impact on the ability to infect/spread/kill. it may be that to evade a vaccine, a mutation may make the disease less severe. Covid isn't trying to kill people, its not looking for gaps in the armour to get at us. Its just a virus replicating in hosts, with occasional miss-steps that may or may not affect the nature of the virus.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
No they didn't. They were asked if/when they would continue to wear masks and said in crowded spaces, when people felt uncomfortable, and one other time.
They didn't say people should do the same.
So the CMO says that he would wear a mask in "any situation which was indoors and crowded, or indoors with close proximity to other people". Is he doing that (a) for fun, or (b) because as a medic he knows that he needs to?
This one is very clear. The medics say wear a mask, the politicians have chosen to ignore them.
He is a medic. Ask your doctor if they'd like to join you for a cigarette followed by a bottle of Stoly. Chances are they'd say no thank you (well actually we know doctors smoke and drink like madmen, but CMO, on TV, perhaps not).
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
I don't think that, in general, every bit of public health advice has to be made into law, rather than remaining as advice that we're asked to comply with.
1. People don't follow advice, hence the need to compel them 2. The advice - as stated by cabinet ministers downwards - is to ditch the mask and distancing. Yes a few others suggest they may wear a mask at times. But what people are hearing is "we don't need them".
I think you are being deliberately obtuse. Masks and distancing no longer a legal mandate, but adopt a personal risk assessment for your own health and consider that you may put others at risk. Its not fucking hard.
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.
We break up at the end of next week, though I think some schools may go on a bit longer.
I thought the only reason we delayed opening up completely was the worry over the variant formerly known as Indian being less resistant to the vaccines, so we bought a bit more time? Deaths haven’t gone up much, intensive cares are not overwhelmed, so why are people, including those who moaned when the re opening was delayed, calling it a gamble now?
Because the UK, almost uniquely in the developed world, seems to have Zerocovidians at the very highest level of public discourse.
It's a real shame. It's OK to have even 50,000 cases of Covid a day *if* they are not leading to particularly heightened levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
Indeed, it would probably be more useful for the government to target hospitalisations and deaths rather than cases per se, because the reality is that people *aren't* getting really sick right now, because the most vulnerable have been vaccinated.
Yes
Sir Keir is saying it’s reckless, it should be done gradually etc, but that is what’s happening! We were meant to be fully open a month earlier, but the government were cautious. I don’t see why he is calling for even more caution on the back of the vaccines working as intended. It really is a case of being paralysed by fear. I live with an unvaccinated vulnerable person, we have to be careful, but that doesn’t mean the whole of society has to join us
He’s thinking about it politically
If it goes well Boris was “reckless but lucky”
If it doesn’t then he capitalises on all the downside
It’s vile
Calling for an incremental approach, which was government policy until the conservatives lost a couple of by-elections, is hardly vile.
Ashcroft was setting up to blame Boris personally for all future deaths
Last time I checked he was Prime Minister. If the buck doesn't stop with him then with whom?
Vile? You really have come up with some snooty crap recently.
Blaming someone personally for deaths is not decent. Blame him for the macro decision.
I’m coming from a perspective where my late father caught COVID in hospital. But we are not blaming the NHS.
Blaming someone personally for deaths that are a direct result of their actions and decisions made is not decent? He is in charge. It all comes back to him. Other world leaders have the basic decency to accept their decisions kill people and offer at least remorse for the nature of the job.
I am of course sorry about your father, and its your choice to do as you do - we are all commanded to forgive. But when people decide that the person making the decision is responsible for the decision it is not "vile".
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.
We break up at the end of next week, though I think some schools may go on a bit longer.
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.
The quote is everywhere, but no references to a specific source.
Excellent thanks for finding it - I suppose every sports group adapts it to their own purposes hence I had heard it referencing hunting which I suppose is a bastardisation of bullfighting.
Edit: I like the description, though, of a sport being something you can get killed doing.
Edit II: in which case hunting would take its rightful place, but not fishing or shooting.
Mountaineering used to be an Olympic discipline, in that an award was made to the most impressive exploit of the past 4 years.
Climbing is back this year, but as a totally unrecognisable and artificial thing which bears little resemblance to pitting yourself against the elements. I'm not quite sure what the point of it is, although at least it is measurable, unlike gymnastics.
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.
The quote is everywhere, but no references to a specific source.
Excellent thanks for finding it - I suppose every sports group adapts it to their own purposes hence I had heard it referencing hunting which I suppose is a bastardisation of bullfighting.
Edit: I like the description, though, of a sport being something you can get killed doing.
Edit II: in which case hunting would take its rightful place, but not fishing or shooting.
Mountaineering used to be an Olympic discipline, in that an award was made to the most impressive exploit of the past 4 years.
Climbing is back this year, but as a totally unrecognisable and artificial thing which bears little resemblance to pitting yourself against the elements. I'm not quite sure what the point of it is, although at least it is measurable, unlike gymnastics.
I'm guessing they won't be dressed in Harris Tweed jackets and thick woolen socks either more's the pity.
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.
The EU was open and honest about it.
It was the UK establishment which lied or were in denial about it.
The contemporaneous articles and interviews, considering the debates that were going on at the time, don't support that assertion at all.
Contemporaneous to what time?
The UK establishment was willing to argue for ever closer union in 1975, arguing it was a good thing. So they won a landslide victory by two votes to one in the referendum.
But for one reason or another by 2016 the UK establishment, across the board, was unwilling to be open and honest and say ever closer union was a good thing. Instead they wanted to hide it away, pretend it didn't exist, pretend Dave's deal abolished it etc - and they lost as a result.
At some time between 1975 and 2016 the whole British establishment, across the board, lost any interest in Ever Closer Union. The EU didn't. So the EU refused to reform and rejected Dave's requests for meaningful reforms - and then the Europhiles lost the referendum because they had no positive vision to sell. By 2016 nobody contemporaneous was hitting the airwaves selling the virtues of Ever Closer Union.
The UK establishment decided the pursuit of mammon is more important than the wellbeing of the population and the country. Ever closer union would have placed unacceptable barriers on the ability of the rich to get richer and to hide their gains offshore.
I thought the only reason we delayed opening up completely was the worry over the variant formerly known as Indian being less resistant to the vaccines, so we bought a bit more time? Deaths haven’t gone up much, intensive cares are not overwhelmed, so why are people, including those who moaned when the re opening was delayed, calling it a gamble now?
Because the UK, almost uniquely in the developed world, seems to have Zerocovidians at the very highest level of public discourse.
It's a real shame. It's OK to have even 50,000 cases of Covid a day *if* they are not leading to particularly heightened levels of hospitalisations and deaths.
Indeed, it would probably be more useful for the government to target hospitalisations and deaths rather than cases per se, because the reality is that people *aren't* getting really sick right now, because the most vulnerable have been vaccinated.
Yes
Sir Keir is saying it’s reckless, it should be done gradually etc, but that is what’s happening! We were meant to be fully open a month earlier, but the government were cautious. I don’t see why he is calling for even more caution on the back of the vaccines working as intended. It really is a case of being paralysed by fear. I live with an unvaccinated vulnerable person, we have to be careful, but that doesn’t mean the whole of society has to join us
He’s thinking about it politically
If it goes well Boris was “reckless but lucky”
If it doesn’t then he capitalises on all the downside
It’s vile
Calling for an incremental approach, which was government policy until the conservatives lost a couple of by-elections, is hardly vile.
Ashcroft was setting up to blame Boris personally for all future deaths
Last time I checked he was Prime Minister. If the buck doesn't stop with him then with whom?
Vile? You really have come up with some snooty crap recently.
Blaming someone personally for deaths is not decent. Blame him for the macro decision.
I’m coming from a perspective where my late father caught COVID in hospital. But we are not blaming the NHS.
Blaming someone personally for deaths that are a direct result of their actions and decisions made is not decent? He is in charge. It all comes back to him. Other world leaders have the basic decency to accept their decisions kill people and offer at least remorse for the nature of the job.
I am of course sorry about your father, and its your choice to do as you do - we are all commanded to forgive. But when people decide that the person making the decision is responsible for the decision it is not "vile".
Should the govt ban alcohol?
Actually we have a good test case. They have banned drugs but as you noted, the pesky people only keep on ignoring the law, taking drugs, and finding themselves dead, one way or another.
I think for many people, any vestige of restrictions is "continued lockdown". Is it logical? No of course not, but it is deep within the psyche of the nation. It seems that the government is keen to address this. I agree with the approach.
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.
The EU was open and honest about it.
It was the UK establishment which lied or were in denial about it.
The contemporaneous articles and interviews, considering the debates that were going on at the time, don't support that assertion at all.
Contemporaneous to what time?
The UK establishment was willing to argue for ever closer union in 1975, arguing it was a good thing. So they won a landslide victory by two votes to one in the referendum.
But for one reason or another by 2016 the UK establishment, across the board, was unwilling to be open and honest and say ever closer union was a good thing. Instead they wanted to hide it away, pretend it didn't exist, pretend Dave's deal abolished it etc - and they lost as a result.
At some time between 1975 and 2016 the whole British establishment, across the board, lost any interest in Ever Closer Union. The EU didn't. So the EU refused to reform and rejected Dave's requests for meaningful reforms - and then the Europhiles lost the referendum because they had no positive vision to sell. By 2016 nobody contemporaneous was hitting the airwaves selling the virtues of Ever Closer Union.
The UK establishment decided the pursuit of mammon is more important than the wellbeing of the population and the country. Ever closer union would have placed unacceptable barriers on the ability of the rich to get richer and to hide their gains offshore.
Why did the pro-Remain side decide not to argue in favour of Ever Closer Union in 2016?
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.
The quote is everywhere, but no references to a specific source.
Excellent thanks for finding it - I suppose every sports group adapts it to their own purposes hence I had heard it referencing hunting which I suppose is a bastardisation of bullfighting.
Edit: I like the description, though, of a sport being something you can get killed doing.
Edit II: in which case hunting would take its rightful place, but not fishing or shooting.
Mountaineering used to be an Olympic discipline, in that an award was made to the most impressive exploit of the past 4 years.
Climbing is back this year, but as a totally unrecognisable and artificial thing which bears little resemblance to pitting yourself against the elements. I'm not quite sure what the point of it is, although at least it is measurable, unlike gymnastics.
I'm guessing they won't be dressed in Harris Tweed jackets and thick woolen socks either more's the pity.
Harris Tweed was actually very effective as a mountaineering garment, if a little heavy. But sadly no. And no nailed boots either.
I suspect some of those who enjoyed the women's tennis recently might quite enjoy it.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Both Whitty and Vallance said at the presser yesterday that people absolutely should continue to wear masks in enclosed crowded spaces. Just minutes after clown stood inbetween them and said that such mask wearing was not required.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
I don't think that, in general, every bit of public health advice has to be made into law, rather than remaining as advice that we're asked to comply with.
1. People don't follow advice, hence the need to compel them 2. The advice - as stated by cabinet ministers downwards - is to ditch the mask and distancing. Yes a few others suggest they may wear a mask at times. But what people are hearing is "we don't need them".
I think you are being deliberately obtuse. Masks and distancing no longer a legal mandate, but adopt a personal risk assessment for your own health and consider that you may put others at risk. Its not fucking hard.
If its not fucking hard then why is it so fucking hard that we had to fucking mandate the required behaviour? People are not going to wear masks now. Recognising that most people don't make a "personal risk assessment" of other people (who masks protect, not the wearer) is not fucking hard.
Comments
OfVolt (sounds like one of the unluckier Handmaids) would insist that any charger can be accessed the same way, that they remain maintained and in service not abandoned, that charges remain viable.
In short they need to ensure that if we are going to outlaw the sale of non-EV vehicles that the network to charge EVs is as easy and plentiful as petrol filling stations are.
Dear Mr
@SimonMcCoyTV
, I noticed the other day that you claimed “What we joined was a trading bloc”, and this is a damaging line to take for the country. Please let me explain.
https://twitter.com/EmporersNewC/status/1411762084782747649?s=20
https://twitter.com/mattforde/status/1412338879684874245?s=20
Only 37% of UK voters overall think the UK is institutionally racist and divisive compared to 52% of Labour voters so am not sure how you work that one out.
It does show that to win an overall majority Labour will need to become more culturally conservative and less woke even if it has more support for some of its economic policies
Russia
Tunisia
This isn't just to do with vaccination rates. For example, see the differences in vaccination rates and death rates between Russia and Ukraine.
@rwjdingwall
·
40m
As a member of government advisory bodies, I have always felt it would be incompatible with that status not to wear a face covering where legally required to. However, I shall cease to do so from 19 July when these requirements lapse. (1/10)
Not enough support for better ventilation...fine, but how much longer would we have to delay opening up before many more buildings have better ventilation? Next year?
More payments for isolation....well given only 20% actually complete isolation properly, while for some it is about money, hosing more money at this, won't magically get that figure really really high as for many it is about attitude...so that won't solve covid spread either.
Masks on public transport...i think this is fair enough criticism, but if you are going to be allowing pubs, gyms, restaurants etc, dropping social distance limits and gathering numbers (most spread is via friend / family interactions), how much difference does this make to stop spread? Are Labour saying we have to keep all these other restrictions?
And Ashworth rather dishonestly has moved goalposts talking about only 50% of PEOPLE vaccinated.
So how much longer does Labour think we need to carry on with current restrictions? To get through vaccinating kids that several more months, then what about booster shots, do we have to wait for those to be done? For better ventilation, that's months, or more like years....
Con 41 (-1)
Lab 35 (+2)
LDM 8 (-1)
Grn 4 (-1)
SNP 3 (-1)
Other 9 (+1)
https://twitter.com/SavantaComRes/status/1412338585240588289?s=20
That's going to be one heck of a Scottish SubSample!
Everybody else put out a vid from the point where the door was opened.
The Times included the previous 15 seconds, after they had been asked to get out, when they were laughing and pratting about with a phone camera.
The Times version:https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/met-police-urged-to-release-bianca-williams-and-ricardo-dos-santos-car-video-cbtmsqq93
The Telegraph version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7ZSFZqEsaM
I'd say that on this one Cressida Dick was wrong to cave in to the narrative quite so easily in the first place.
Ice dancing is the particular example here. Definitely not a sport. Not measurable. Very clever but too subjective to be a sport.
There is a sliding scale after that - diving, for example, is surprisingly measurable. But not as measurable as the 100m sprint.
Mine are extreme opinions on this, but not particularly strongly held ones.
@BallouxFrancois
·
42m
A difficulty in the #COVID19 discussion lies in many failing to acknowledge trade-offs in any pandemic mitigation measure. This is rarely explicitly stated. One exception is the 'zerocovid' CAG group whose first mission statement states "There is no trade-off".
Velox would be pre '57, in which case the Healey would be one of the earlier models than the 3000 ?
So glad these patriotic Tories truly understand their country.
If it only takes 5 minutes to catch covid, that's an awful lot of possible connections where it could be spread.
As I commented on this last night, public transport is about the last place that masks should be removed from but it seems that Boris doesn't want to upset anyone.
They control for wind speed, but not temperature, altitude or track surface, all of which could affect the times
This is my version
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/577532/great-game-britain
Games as propaganda have a long history of course, and many of these were propaganda to some extent.
Interesting to ask whether today's yoof will have a different view of the world thanks to video gaming. GTA and the like aren't exactly 'selling' locations or a particular view of politics. At least, not the ones I see played.
But no, Johnson wanted to be the "Big I Am" and declare "freedom day" and bask in the easy headlines.
37-19=18; 52-37=15; 18>15 was how I worked it out.
Given quantum of Labour voters is smaller than Tory voters, you would expect the Tory number to be more similar to the average, not less. So Labour voters are more representative of the split in the country than Tories, despite being smaller in number.
As Luntz himself said, Labour needs to be better at framing the discussion and explaining its position.
It gave respondents a choice of two extreme positions, which I don't think reflect the real views of most voters.
Part of the project to bring the US culture wars over here - something that sensible conservatives decry.
nb Luntz is an operative, not a pollster as understood in the UK.
It was the UK establishment which lied or were in denial about it.
If we unlocked as they are doing, but maintained the requirement for social distancing and mask wearing indoors, then we tick most boxes without saying let it rip. Hard to say "the scientists say they aren't needed" when they stand there at the announcement that they aren't needed and say that actually they are.
Incoming screeching of how its discriminatory....and media finding edge cases of unfairness.
2) It would have been unworkable and unenforcable. Come round to my place for a party! Remember your face mask!
3) It will actually lead to worse health outcomes in the long run. If we are to unlock, we need to do so in the summer.
4) And there is more to health than covid.
If you're in that sort of situation, then this isn't too bad - especially if the alternative means a greater fear of getting the dreaded lurgy.
Incidentally - an update on the Seventh Day Adventist preacher who was preaching anti-vax, locally. He had a frank and full exchange of views with another preacher and has been ejected/walked off in a huff from that church.
Vaccination only provides *some*protection against Delta infection (it's main effect seems to be to reduce severity), so you should still wear your mask to protect others even after double jabbage.
Plus, who wants to spend 10 days off work if you get a mild or asymptomatic infection having been double jabbed?
And something to concentrate on instead of all the other problems we might have (personal or national)?
They didn't say people should do the same.
The EU never kept a secret of the fact they wanted Ever Closer Union and the EU's evolution into being a Federal nation state has never been a secret.
But in the UK over the past 35 years, arguably from Delors speech to the TUC onwards, the EEC/EU and the UK have drifted apart.
Its ended up suiting both sides in the UK to rewrite history to claim that the EU is/was about economics rather than a nascent federation. For Eurosceptics it suited them to pretend we'd joined a trade bloc and it had changed - its true it had changed but that it would change was never a secret when we joined. For Europhiles it suited them to pretend the EU is still primarily a trade bloc, because they knew that the majority of Britons now don't want ever closer union and a federal Europe.
You can't pull the wool over people's eyes for long though. Europhiles needed to make an argument for Ever Closer Union, not pretend it didn't exist or that Dave had abolished it. They didn't, so they lost and deservedly so.
Again, we are being told we can unlock now because the science says restrictions are not needed. Yet the CMO and the CSA both directly contradict this and state the case to maintain masks and distancing.
So you can make your argument and that's fine. It is the argument that we've binned the science and accepted Liar lying to us.
Following the fall of the Wall, and the rapid incorporation of Eastern Europe into the European "orbit", there was a massive acceleration.
Maybe that is the secret of Boris' strength versus Starmer's weakness.
How can bullfighting be a sport, when only one party to the enterprise is participating by choice?
The UK establishment was willing to argue for ever closer union in 1975, arguing it was a good thing. So they won a landslide victory by two votes to one in the referendum.
But for one reason or another by 2016 the UK establishment, across the board, was unwilling to be open and honest and say ever closer union was a good thing. Instead they wanted to hide it away, pretend it didn't exist, pretend Dave's deal abolished it etc - and they lost as a result.
At some time between 1975 and 2016 the whole British establishment, across the board, lost any interest in Ever Closer Union. The EU didn't. So the EU refused to reform and rejected Dave's requests for meaningful reforms - and then the Europhiles lost the referendum because they had no positive vision to sell. By 2016 nobody contemporaneous was hitting the airwaves selling the virtues of Ever Closer Union.
The deceit / denial by the UK establishment grew steadily over the following decades.
2. The advice - as stated by cabinet ministers downwards - is to ditch the mask and distancing. Yes a few others suggest they may wear a mask at times. But what people are hearing is "we don't need them".
Edit: I like the description, though, of a sport being something you can get killed doing.
Edit II: in which case hunting would take its rightful place, but not fishing or shooting.
Which is the issue. The UK lost any desire to have it as an aspiration, the EU nations didn't suddenly gain the aspiration. Which is why its right that we left them to do their own thing, rather than us trying to be a wrench in the system bringing the whole project down with us.
I’m coming from a perspective where my late father caught COVID in hospital. But we are not blaming the NHS.
I did take part in a Monopoly tournament once, sponsored by one of the large consultancies. Maybe 300 competitors.
I got to the final game but as you'd expect 3 players decided to stitch it up and effectively give the win to one of them so as to share the (not insubstantial) prize. I believe the winner then kept it all to himself!
I wonder which party he went on to work for.
Fair enough if the game had been Diplomacy, of course...
SNP MP lays part of the blame for rise of covid cases in Scotland on UK Government
https://twitter.com/paulhutcheon/status/1412342876206477312?s=20
This one is very clear. The medics say wear a mask, the politicians have chosen to ignore them.
https://twitter.com/perthshiremags/status/1412157735794360328?s=21
I am of course sorry about your father, and its your choice to do as you do - we are all commanded to forgive. But when people decide that the person making the decision is responsible for the decision it is not "vile".
Climbing is back this year, but as a totally unrecognisable and artificial thing which bears little resemblance to pitting yourself against the elements. I'm not quite sure what the point of it is, although at least it is measurable, unlike gymnastics.
Actually we have a good test case. They have banned drugs but as you noted, the pesky people only keep on ignoring the law, taking drugs, and finding themselves dead, one way or another.
I think for many people, any vestige of restrictions is "continued lockdown". Is it logical? No of course not, but it is deep within the psyche of the nation. It seems that the government is keen to address this. I agree with the approach.
LOL
I suspect some of those who enjoyed the women's tennis recently might quite enjoy it.
https://twitter.com/paullewismoney/status/1412317319875989505?s=21