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.
Charles prefers it when the rich man is left to his castle and the poor man remains at the gate.
Ridiculous - how is the poor man supposed to attend upon the rich man to serve if left at the gate?
He was supposed to use the servant's entrance.
@Gardenwalker please take the time to look at The Fore website to see what we are doing to prove you wrong.
Or if you are particularly enthusiastic look at the Master Charitable Trust on the Charitable Commission website.
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.
That was my point: the PM should take responsibility for the systemic decisions. If he gets it wrong blame him for that. To blame him for individual deaths is just wrong - and unhealthy for those who lose family members. Blame and anger are very easy emotions but very unproductive when dealing with personal loss.
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.
Have you ever heard of a small bank called Deutsche Bank?
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.
Charles prefers it when the rich man is left to his castle and the poor man remains at the gate.
Ridiculous - how is the poor man supposed to attend upon the rich man to serve if left at the gate?
He was supposed to use the servant's entrance.
@Gardenwalker please take the time to look at The Fore website to see what we are doing to prove you wrong.
Or if you are particularly enthusiastic look at the Master Charitable Trust on the Charitable Commission website.
You honestly don't have to justify yourselves to the likes of us - charity work looks great btw.
I am not in such a position to make such decisions so I honestly don't know. What is it about the link between philanthropy to make lives better and supporting policies which makes the same lives worse? Not remotely a question personal to you, it is a trend that seems pretty universal.
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.
Charles prefers it when the rich man is left to his castle and the poor man remains at the gate.
Ridiculous - how is the poor man supposed to attend upon the rich man to serve if left at the gate?
He was supposed to use the servant's entrance.
@Gardenwalker please take the time to look at The Fore website to see what we are doing to prove you wrong.
Or if you are particularly enthusiastic look at the Master Charitable Trust on the Charitable Commission website.
Very interesting.
I have the vaguest of links in this space via a mate who set up a consultancy on social impact.
What I don’t get Charles is why this admirable approach is not more clearly reflected in your own postings! You seem consistently in favour of unearned privilege.
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.
It comes down to personal judgement and accessing risk not only to yourself but to others. But if someone who knows his stuff and has access to all the research and science of it all and said what he said I am going to listen to him more than politicians who have made no case whatsoever for the argument to not wear them particularly in the scenarios that Whitty described.
Listen to Boris' speech, when he announced that mandatory mask wearing is going. He never made a case for it being removed.
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.
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.
Wasn’t the idea that Mallory & Irvine were inadequately attired found to be something of a myth? Pretty cutting edge for the time I understood..
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.
Wasn’t the idea that Mallory & Irvine were inadequately attired found to be something of a myth? Pretty cutting edge for the time I understood..
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.
Gordon Brown's remarks about Cameron's take on his assistance were thought-provoking.
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.
Wasn’t the idea that Mallory & Irvine were inadequately attired found to be something of a myth? Pretty cutting edge for the time I understood..
Yes, absolutely. I believe someone tested a copy of his clothing at altitude fairly recently and found it surprisingly good.
The oxygen system was a bit basic (hence Irvine being taken, of course) but there was little wrong with the attire.
There's no reason to think Mallory couldn't have made it but sometimes it just isn't your day.
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.
The main difference being that one is an Olympic sport, and the other is a professional sport.
Sport England and other funding bodies, are heavily biased towards Olympic sports, where they fund coaching and pay £30k ish as a salary to people with prospects of winning medals. As we’ve seen in the last couple of decades, it makes a massive difference to the Olympic medal tally.
I have to say that I'm extremely angry about the situation I'm going to be put in on the 19th of July.
The work from home advice will be lifted so I will have to go back to commuting into London
I won't be double jabbed until the end of August.
The mask mandate will end on public transport. I was on the train to London last week and about 70% of passengers weren't wearing masks. God knows what it will be like when it's not mandatory.
It really does feel like the government has accepted the inevitability of people in my age group catching COVID which after a year and a half of being very careful is hugely depressing.
That’s up to your boss not the government.
Mine has decided he expects everyone in the office at least 3 days a week from September (with the provision that you can’t always have Monday and Friday at home)
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Or if you are particularly enthusiastic look at the Master Charitable Trust on the Charitable Commission website.
I am not in such a position to make such decisions so I honestly don't know. What is it about the link between philanthropy to make lives better and supporting policies which makes the same lives worse? Not remotely a question personal to you, it is a trend that seems pretty universal.
I have the vaguest of links in this space via a mate who set up a consultancy on social impact.
What I don’t get Charles is why this admirable approach is not more clearly reflected in your own postings! You seem consistently in favour of unearned privilege.
Listen to Boris' speech, when he announced that mandatory mask wearing is going. He never made a case for it being removed.
Short version - reconstructions of what Mallory was actually was wearing were tested on Everest.
The oxygen system was a bit basic (hence Irvine being taken, of course) but there was little wrong with the attire.
There's no reason to think Mallory couldn't have made it but sometimes it just isn't your day.
Sport England and other funding bodies, are heavily biased towards Olympic sports, where they fund coaching and pay £30k ish as a salary to people with prospects of winning medals. As we’ve seen in the last couple of decades, it makes a massive difference to the Olympic medal tally.
Mine has decided he expects everyone in the office at least 3 days a week from September (with the provision that you can’t always have Monday and Friday at home)