A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
Hmm. So dentists and midwives have no scientific credentials or knowledge? LIke, say, they're still in the good old mediaeval barber surgeon and wise woman era?
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
Hmm. So dentists and midwives have no scientific credentials or knowledge? LIke, say, they're still in the good old mediaeval barber surgeon and wise woman era?
Relevant credentials, like epidemiology.
They are trained in infection control and know how much they and their patients will be at risk?
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
Yes, but he isn't jumping from that to the no-referendum conclusion (so it's still open to debate).
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
From September I expect most people will be working back in the office at least 3 days a week, with maybe the other 2 still WFH.
So I expect the big global cities like NYC and London to gradually rebound, though more workers will continue to move out to the outer suburbs and rural areas and bigger houses there and take advantage of the bigger space and mix of city life when they want it but a home life with more green space and fresh air
It is possible that the flagpole cities like London and NYC will do OK, as they are SO big and prestigious, people will still want to live and work there. If that happens, it is the 2nd order cities that will suffer much more. Chicago, say, or Manchester
They don't have the seductions of a New York or a London, but will have many of the nasty issues - crime, depopulation, and so on
I am particularly pessimistic about American cities. They are fucked
What is striking right now are the states of the housing market and the labour market.
The pandemic has forced (or enabled) a lot of people to reassess their priorities, and there is no doubt that the virtues of a cheaper but quieter life away from the ‘rat-race’ of the city has escalated massively, particularly for those in middle age who are already halfway up the housing ladder and able to contemplate cashing in their property price gains.
The state of the estate agents’ windows, out here in the beautiful but remote wilds, now only able to be filled by displaying properties already sold (in some cases without even a viewing) speaks volumes.
I hear from New York that the exodus from that particularly urban environment has been more dramatic still.
So a lot of people have exited the Labour market altogether and others are hanging in there, relying on WFA and WFH becoming permanent changes.
I predicted peak London back in the very early days of the pandemic, and stick by my view.
I disagree with Leon here - I'm optimistic about the future of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle - it's London I see in relative decline for a bit. The disadvantages of London - the expense, the arse-clenching, fun-sapping expense - are starting to outweigh the positives in a world where we don't need to be physically present quite so much. Whereas your second order cities can still offer city buzz - and, more importantly, exciting and pleasant suburbs - but at a much more affordable price. You can afford a four bedroomed house in Altrincham, Sale, Didsbury, Prestwich, Bramhall, Edgbaston, Bournville, Meanwood, Headingley, Jesmond, Gosforth, Cullercoats - for the price of a small flat in Crouch End.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
From September I expect most people will be working back in the office at least 3 days a week, with maybe the other 2 still WFH.
So I expect the big global cities like NYC and London to gradually rebound, though more workers will continue to move out to the outer suburbs and rural areas and bigger houses there and take advantage of the bigger space and mix of city life when they want it but a home life with more green space and fresh air
It is possible that the flagpole cities like London and NYC will do OK, as they are SO big and prestigious, people will still want to live and work there. If that happens, it is the 2nd order cities that will suffer much more. Chicago, say, or Manchester
They don't have the seductions of a New York or a London, but will have many of the nasty issues - crime, depopulation, and so on
I am particularly pessimistic about American cities. They are fucked
What is striking right now are the states of the housing market and the labour market.
The pandemic has forced (or enabled) a lot of people to reassess their priorities, and there is no doubt that the virtues of a cheaper but quieter life away from the ‘rat-race’ of the city has escalated massively, particularly for those in middle age who are already halfway up the housing ladder and able to contemplate cashing in their property price gains.
The state of the estate agents’ windows, out here in the beautiful but remote wilds, now only able to be filled by displaying properties already sold (in some cases without even a viewing) speaks volumes.
I hear from New York that the exodus from that particularly urban environment has been more dramatic still.
So a lot of people have exited the Labour market altogether and others are hanging in there, relying on WFA and WFH becoming permanent changes.
I predicted peak London back in the very early days of the pandemic, and stick by my view.
Does peak London mean you think London prices will fall significantly or flatline whilst rural prices increase?
Zone 1/2 flats do still seem down on pre pandemic levels but not by much. Decent houses and new builds still priced at ever increasing prices thanks to govt props.
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
Hmm. So dentists and midwives have no scientific credentials or knowledge? LIke, say, they're still in the good old mediaeval barber surgeon and wise woman era?
Relevant credentials, like epidemiology.
They are trained in infection control and know how much they and their patients will be at risk?
But they aren't scientists that are experts in the field of epidemiology, are they?
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
And there you have a refutation to another great Scotch expert shibboleth, the brainwashed homogeneity of Nat opinion.
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
Also, the rebounded London might look different.
If the working world is moving towards a model of working alone on some days, working together on other days, there won't be the same need to pour millions of workers into London every day. But there will still be a need for a hub where remote workers can do all the stuff that workers do when they congregate.
London is still fantastically well configured for that- all the lines of communication pass through it, in a way that doesn't really work for anywhere else. And if a couple of days in the Big Smoke, pressing the flesh, becomes the norm... the market for all the fun stuff London has to offer looks quite promising. More so than at the moment, because working in London full-time dulls the senses as to what's on offer.
It is, however, ridiculously peripheral. It's tucked away right down there in the bottom corner of the country.
Londoners have always had a mysterious belief that London was somehow really easy for everyone else to get to - but everywhere else was somehow far too difficult for Londoners to get to. That may change, if London breathes out for a bit.
The places I’ve always found ridiculously inaccessible are East Surrey and Kent.
There just isn’t a decent road to them, largely because they’re next to London and all the roads there are a bit shit.
Plus there are almost no direct trains, or even changes at the same station. Again, because of London.
I remember some yeats ago complaining that HS2 wasn't linked to HS1 in any useful way - ie no prospect of you, me or anyone else north of Islington being able to take a direct train to somewhere civilised like Avignon without having to get out in London and walk between stations with your luggage, or take the Tube ditto, and I was sneered at here for being so demanding ...
Slouching towards St Pancras...
Indeed. Where the likes of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure were born.
I love it actually - and pay mental homage to Hardy when I am there - but not changing trains unnecessarily.
Splashing the cash could have no better destination.
On St P? Oh, I think it has come out very well - and preserved that fine station in a useful role. Though IIRC it was the Marylebone chap who built his Great Central Railway to continental loading gauge. Pity that was never used.
Anyway, dinner calls soon so have a nice evening all.
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
Hmm. So dentists and midwives have no scientific credentials or knowledge? LIke, say, they're still in the good old mediaeval barber surgeon and wise woman era?
Relevant credentials, like epidemiology.
They are trained in infection control and know how much they and their patients will be at risk?
Is there a missing Oxford comma? “…dentists, and students with no scientific credentials.” That would mean that it’s onynthe students with no scientific credentials.
With these letter writing campaigns i honestly don't see why they feel the need to try and inflate the numbers. It was clear when they said they had got 1000 signatures in a day, it was going to be all and sundry.
It is much more effective if you have just have a core of widely respected expects in the field. Quality over quantity and all that.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
Hmm. So dentists and midwives have no scientific credentials or knowledge? LIke, say, they're still in the good old mediaeval barber surgeon and wise woman era?
Relevant credentials, like epidemiology.
They are trained in infection control and know how much they and their patients will be at risk?
Is there a missing Oxford comma? “…dentists, and students with no scientific credentials.” That would mean that it’s onynthe students with no scientific credentials.
I think I should get out more.
Well that rules out the Christ Church dons from having any opinion at all to do with covid.
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
From September I expect most people will be working back in the office at least 3 days a week, with maybe the other 2 still WFH.
So I expect the big global cities like NYC and London to gradually rebound, though more workers will continue to move out to the outer suburbs and rural areas and bigger houses there and take advantage of the bigger space and mix of city life when they want it but a home life with more green space and fresh air
It is possible that the flagpole cities like London and NYC will do OK, as they are SO big and prestigious, people will still want to live and work there. If that happens, it is the 2nd order cities that will suffer much more. Chicago, say, or Manchester
They don't have the seductions of a New York or a London, but will have many of the nasty issues - crime, depopulation, and so on
I am particularly pessimistic about American cities. They are fucked
What is striking right now are the states of the housing market and the labour market.
The pandemic has forced (or enabled) a lot of people to reassess their priorities, and there is no doubt that the virtues of a cheaper but quieter life away from the ‘rat-race’ of the city has escalated massively, particularly for those in middle age who are already halfway up the housing ladder and able to contemplate cashing in their property price gains.
The state of the estate agents’ windows, out here in the beautiful but remote wilds, now only able to be filled by displaying properties already sold (in some cases without even a viewing) speaks volumes.
I hear from New York that the exodus from that particularly urban environment has been more dramatic still.
So a lot of people have exited the Labour market altogether and others are hanging in there, relying on WFA and WFH becoming permanent changes.
I predicted peak London back in the very early days of the pandemic, and stick by my view.
I disagree with Leon here - I'm optimistic about the future of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle - it's London I see in relative decline for a bit. The disadvantages of London - the expense, the arse-clenching, fun-sapping expense - are starting to outweigh the positives in a world where we don't need to be physically present quite so much. Whereas your second order cities can still offer city buzz - and, more importantly, exciting and pleasant suburbs - but at a much more affordable price. You can afford a four bedroomed house in Altrincham, Sale, Didsbury, Prestwich, Bramhall, Edgbaston, Bournville, Meanwood, Headingley, Jesmond, Gosforth, Cullercoats - for the price of a small flat in Crouch End.
A bit of relative improvement of the second order cities for a while would I think be good for everyone. The same phenomenon has been happening for a couple of decades in France and it makes a visit to somewhere like Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse or Nantes much more rewarding than it would have been in the past. Meanwhile Paris has been in relative decline since pretty much the 1970s but remains a supremely enjoyable (and supremely expensive) city to visit.
A scathing letter which demanded Freedom Day be delayed and was backed by more than 1,200 'experts' allowed people with no scientific credentials to sign it.
Hmm. So dentists and midwives have no scientific credentials or knowledge? LIke, say, they're still in the good old mediaeval barber surgeon and wise woman era?
Do they take into account the incredible damage that each day of lockdown is doing to society? How people are learning to be fearful of others, etc.
Not just men in their 20's, one guy who went to the semi has now infected his entire family including his mother in law and one of my work colleagues is just waiting to see if his family (who watched the final at this guys place go) down with it too
Schools also helping the spread - roll on the holidays
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
And there you have a refutation to another great Scotch expert shibboleth, the brainwashed homogeneity of Nat opinion.
No, just Malc, I fully accept that there are other opinions. I’m just saying that it’s Malc’s view and thus not one wholly outside the range of Nat discourse and so perhaps reasonable to adopt? You’ll search in vain for any comments from me on domestic Scottish political matters - I fully confess to knowing very little. But people on here opine on the politics of a number of jurisdictions across the world.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
Ever since Derren Brown first appeared on TV in 1999, I've been worried — though fascinated — by how easy it appears to be to brainwash people. Brown was able to get people to do the most incredible things simply by the force of his character. He could make people drink vinegar and believe they were drinking a normal soft drink, for example, in front of an audience of thousands. He also got someone to confess to a murder they hadn't committed, and others to take part in an armed robbery in the City of London based on mind control. In one of his more recent shows, he got people to push an innocent person off the top of a tall building, (though of course they weren't really going to fall the whole way).
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
Also, the rebounded London might look different.
If the working world is moving towards a model of working alone on some days, working together on other days, there won't be the same need to pour millions of workers into London every day. But there will still be a need for a hub where remote workers can do all the stuff that workers do when they congregate.
London is still fantastically well configured for that- all the lines of communication pass through it, in a way that doesn't really work for anywhere else. And if a couple of days in the Big Smoke, pressing the flesh, becomes the norm... the market for all the fun stuff London has to offer looks quite promising. More so than at the moment, because working in London full-time dulls the senses as to what's on offer.
It is, however, ridiculously peripheral. It's tucked away right down there in the bottom corner of the country.
Londoners have always had a mysterious belief that London was somehow really easy for everyone else to get to - but everywhere else was somehow far too difficult for Londoners to get to. That may change, if London breathes out for a bit.
The places I’ve always found ridiculously inaccessible are East Surrey and Kent.
There just isn’t a decent road to them, largely because they’re next to London and all the roads there are a bit shit.
Plus there are almost no direct trains, or even changes at the same station. Again, because of London.
I remember some yeats ago complaining that HS2 wasn't linked to HS1 in any useful way - ie no prospect of you, me or anyone else north of Islington being able to take a direct train to somewhere civilised like Avignon without having to get out in London and walk between stations with your luggage, or take the Tube ditto, and I was sneered at here for being so demanding ...
Slouching towards St Pancras...
Indeed. Where the likes of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure were born.
I love it actually - and pay mental homage to Hardy when I am there - but not changing trains unnecessarily.
That was a lacklustre comeback to your typo "some yeats ago"
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
You are too impatient. Yes, with the vaccines, Covid will be a largely preventable disease, but the vaccines haven't been fully deployed yet, or had time to work fully, for something approaching 15m adults. So we need to put up with the biosecurity measures for a bit longer.
Not just men in their 20's, one guy who went to the semi has now infected his entire family including his mother in law and one of my work colleagues is just waiting to see if his family (who watched the final at this guys place go) down with it too
Schools also helping the spread - roll on the holidays
Mentally I'm all for getting it over with quickly rather than let the same number of people catch it and get ill over a longer period. Particularly if a bit of overshoot now protects us in winter and/or with any new variants. Scientifically there are probably strong reasons why I'm wrong of course.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
From September I expect most people will be working back in the office at least 3 days a week, with maybe the other 2 still WFH.
So I expect the big global cities like NYC and London to gradually rebound, though more workers will continue to move out to the outer suburbs and rural areas and bigger houses there and take advantage of the bigger space and mix of city life when they want it but a home life with more green space and fresh air
It is possible that the flagpole cities like London and NYC will do OK, as they are SO big and prestigious, people will still want to live and work there. If that happens, it is the 2nd order cities that will suffer much more. Chicago, say, or Manchester
They don't have the seductions of a New York or a London, but will have many of the nasty issues - crime, depopulation, and so on
I am particularly pessimistic about American cities. They are fucked
What is striking right now are the states of the housing market and the labour market.
The pandemic has forced (or enabled) a lot of people to reassess their priorities, and there is no doubt that the virtues of a cheaper but quieter life away from the ‘rat-race’ of the city has escalated massively, particularly for those in middle age who are already halfway up the housing ladder and able to contemplate cashing in their property price gains.
The state of the estate agents’ windows, out here in the beautiful but remote wilds, now only able to be filled by displaying properties already sold (in some cases without even a viewing) speaks volumes.
I hear from New York that the exodus from that particularly urban environment has been more dramatic still.
So a lot of people have exited the Labour market altogether and others are hanging in there, relying on WFA and WFH becoming permanent changes.
I predicted peak London back in the very early days of the pandemic, and stick by my view.
Does peak London mean you think London prices will fall significantly or flatline whilst rural prices increase?
Zone 1/2 flats do still seem down on pre pandemic levels but not by much. Decent houses and new builds still priced at ever increasing prices thanks to govt props.
My son in laws parents are both in care, one with dementia, and last september the bungalow was valued at £215,000
He decided it needed to be sold and last week had an updated valuation of £255,000
The day after it was listed 5 prospective buyers viewed and he had an immediate full price offer and another one at £257,000 from a buyer who has sold to a first time buyer
Utterly astonishing but then Colwyn Bay and Llandudno are extremely popular retirement areas
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
And there you have a refutation to another great Scotch expert shibboleth, the brainwashed homogeneity of Nat opinion.
No, just Malc, I fully accept that there are other opinions. I’m just saying that it’s Malc’s view and thus not one wholly outside the range of Nat discourse and so perhaps reasonable to adopt? You’ll search in vain for any comments from me on domestic Scottish political matters - I fully confess to knowing very little. But people on here opine on the politics of a number of jurisdictions across the world.
'Nat' is specifically a SNP member/supporter, and really should be called Scottish National Party member (and unspecified 'nationalist' is not very useful given that there are plenty of British nationalists about). Independistas are a wider kirk or rather constellation of kirks than that. The Socialists, a fair sector of the Labour Party (both members and voters), lots of otherwise unoriented, some Tories, some independents, the Greens (a lot of them anyway).
The persistent use of 'nat' on PB by a certain person in particular is presumably used to try and drive the narrative that only the SNP vote counts for instance when discussing indyref 2 [edit!] when of course the Scottish Greens' official party policy is for indyref.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
Also, the rebounded London might look different.
If the working world is moving towards a model of working alone on some days, working together on other days, there won't be the same need to pour millions of workers into London every day. But there will still be a need for a hub where remote workers can do all the stuff that workers do when they congregate.
London is still fantastically well configured for that- all the lines of communication pass through it, in a way that doesn't really work for anywhere else. And if a couple of days in the Big Smoke, pressing the flesh, becomes the norm... the market for all the fun stuff London has to offer looks quite promising. More so than at the moment, because working in London full-time dulls the senses as to what's on offer.
It is, however, ridiculously peripheral. It's tucked away right down there in the bottom corner of the country.
Londoners have always had a mysterious belief that London was somehow really easy for everyone else to get to - but everywhere else was somehow far too difficult for Londoners to get to. That may change, if London breathes out for a bit.
The places I’ve always found ridiculously inaccessible are East Surrey and Kent.
There just isn’t a decent road to them, largely because they’re next to London and all the roads there are a bit shit.
Plus there are almost no direct trains, or even changes at the same station. Again, because of London.
I remember some yeats ago complaining that HS2 wasn't linked to HS1 in any useful way - ie no prospect of you, me or anyone else north of Islington being able to take a direct train to somewhere civilised like Avignon without having to get out in London and walk between stations with your luggage, or take the Tube ditto, and I was sneered at here for being so demanding ...
Slouching towards St Pancras...
Indeed. Where the likes of Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure were born.
I love it actually - and pay mental homage to Hardy when I am there - but not changing trains unnecessarily.
That was a lacklustre comeback to your typo "some yeats ago"
Ah - I thought it was a nice allusion to the state of despair induced by the trek from Euston (or even KX).
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
Feel free to convince us that you can tell the difference between, say, 12yo Bunnahabhain, 10yo Bowmore and 15yo Ardbeg Uigeadail in blind tasting.
True story. My great great great something grandfather on my mum’s side, James Mutter, used to own Bowmore. The family only sold it in 1925 but my branch had long since moved to England. But I still know sod all about Scotland or whisky (even to the point that I had to correct myself after putting an ‘e’ in it in there).
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
From September I expect most people will be working back in the office at least 3 days a week, with maybe the other 2 still WFH.
So I expect the big global cities like NYC and London to gradually rebound, though more workers will continue to move out to the outer suburbs and rural areas and bigger houses there and take advantage of the bigger space and mix of city life when they want it but a home life with more green space and fresh air
It is possible that the flagpole cities like London and NYC will do OK, as they are SO big and prestigious, people will still want to live and work there. If that happens, it is the 2nd order cities that will suffer much more. Chicago, say, or Manchester
They don't have the seductions of a New York or a London, but will have many of the nasty issues - crime, depopulation, and so on
I am particularly pessimistic about American cities. They are fucked
What is striking right now are the states of the housing market and the labour market.
The pandemic has forced (or enabled) a lot of people to reassess their priorities, and there is no doubt that the virtues of a cheaper but quieter life away from the ‘rat-race’ of the city has escalated massively, particularly for those in middle age who are already halfway up the housing ladder and able to contemplate cashing in their property price gains.
The state of the estate agents’ windows, out here in the beautiful but remote wilds, now only able to be filled by displaying properties already sold (in some cases without even a viewing) speaks volumes.
I hear from New York that the exodus from that particularly urban environment has been more dramatic still.
So a lot of people have exited the Labour market altogether and others are hanging in there, relying on WFA and WFH becoming permanent changes.
I predicted peak London back in the very early days of the pandemic, and stick by my view.
I disagree with Leon here - I'm optimistic about the future of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle - it's London I see in relative decline for a bit. The disadvantages of London - the expense, the arse-clenching, fun-sapping expense - are starting to outweigh the positives in a world where we don't need to be physically present quite so much. Whereas your second order cities can still offer city buzz - and, more importantly, exciting and pleasant suburbs - but at a much more affordable price. You can afford a four bedroomed house in Altrincham, Sale, Didsbury, Prestwich, Bramhall, Edgbaston, Bournville, Meanwood, Headingley, Jesmond, Gosforth, Cullercoats - for the price of a small flat in Crouch End.
This is straight back to the need to undistort the housing market.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
And there you have a refutation to another great Scotch expert shibboleth, the brainwashed homogeneity of Nat opinion.
No, just Malc, I fully accept that there are other opinions. I’m just saying that it’s Malc’s view and thus not one wholly outside the range of Nat discourse and so perhaps reasonable to adopt? You’ll search in vain for any comments from me on domestic Scottish political matters - I fully confess to knowing very little. But people on here opine on the politics of a number of jurisdictions across the world.
'Nat' is specifically a SNP member/supporter, and really should be called Scottish National Party member (and unspecified 'nationalist' is not very useful given that there are plenty of British nationalists about). Independistas are a wider kirk or rather constellation of kirks than that. The Socialists, a fair sector of the Labour Party (both members and voters), lots of otherwise unoriented, some Tories, some independents, the Greens (a lot of them anyway).
The persistent use of 'nat' on PB by a certain person in particular is presumably used to try and drive the narrative that only the SNP vote counts for instance when discussing indyref 2 [edit!] when of course the Scottish Greens' official party policy is for indyref.
Apologies. As I have already said on this thread I try not to comment on Scottish politics. Now you see why.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
From September I expect most people will be working back in the office at least 3 days a week, with maybe the other 2 still WFH.
So I expect the big global cities like NYC and London to gradually rebound, though more workers will continue to move out to the outer suburbs and rural areas and bigger houses there and take advantage of the bigger space and mix of city life when they want it but a home life with more green space and fresh air
It is possible that the flagpole cities like London and NYC will do OK, as they are SO big and prestigious, people will still want to live and work there. If that happens, it is the 2nd order cities that will suffer much more. Chicago, say, or Manchester
They don't have the seductions of a New York or a London, but will have many of the nasty issues - crime, depopulation, and so on
I am particularly pessimistic about American cities. They are fucked
What is striking right now are the states of the housing market and the labour market.
The pandemic has forced (or enabled) a lot of people to reassess their priorities, and there is no doubt that the virtues of a cheaper but quieter life away from the ‘rat-race’ of the city has escalated massively, particularly for those in middle age who are already halfway up the housing ladder and able to contemplate cashing in their property price gains.
The state of the estate agents’ windows, out here in the beautiful but remote wilds, now only able to be filled by displaying properties already sold (in some cases without even a viewing) speaks volumes.
I hear from New York that the exodus from that particularly urban environment has been more dramatic still.
So a lot of people have exited the Labour market altogether and others are hanging in there, relying on WFA and WFH becoming permanent changes.
I predicted peak London back in the very early days of the pandemic, and stick by my view.
I disagree with Leon here - I'm optimistic about the future of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle - it's London I see in relative decline for a bit. The disadvantages of London - the expense, the arse-clenching, fun-sapping expense - are starting to outweigh the positives in a world where we don't need to be physically present quite so much. Whereas your second order cities can still offer city buzz - and, more importantly, exciting and pleasant suburbs - but at a much more affordable price. You can afford a four bedroomed house in Altrincham, Sale, Didsbury, Prestwich, Bramhall, Edgbaston, Bournville, Meanwood, Headingley, Jesmond, Gosforth, Cullercoats - for the price of a small flat in Crouch End.
A bit of relative improvement of the second order cities for a while would I think be good for everyone. The same phenomenon has been happening for a couple of decades in France and it makes a visit to somewhere like Bordeaux, Lyon, Toulouse or Nantes much more rewarding than it would have been in the past. Meanwhile Paris has been in relative decline since pretty much the 1970s but remains a supremely enjoyable (and supremely expensive) city to visit.
Alistair Meeks will be happy to hear his famous sneaky fuckers have come good at last.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Thats a good article, I remember reading it at the time. I suppose the interesting thing is that the economic damage does not seem to have been as catastrophic as we envisaged 15 months ago, given the amount of time we have spent in lockdown.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Just skimmed some of the early comments on your thread.
"Well argued" from alanbrooke, "Brilliant header" from rottenborough, "A great header" from MarqueeMark, "Good article" from myself.
Intriguing that you see the response as not complimentary, it was, at least early in the thread (not going to re-read it all!).
The complementary comments were mostly to do with the quality of the writing. Many were not happy with the actual argument I was making. A similar header would still be controversial on here today, though less so I suspect.
My feeling is that the wisest commentator during the pandemic has been Lord Sumption, who has focused on the legality of suspending liberal democracy in this way, and that the public has sleep-walked into something that it doesn't understand.
I recall a very early-pandemic comment on here from - I think - @FrancisUrquhart - who, when China had locked down (so this must have been late Feb 2020) - chuckled "of course they couldn't do this here". I posted in agreement. SAGE and the government agreed too. Then Italy happened and SAGE, as documented Ferguson, twigged that it COULD happen here. So it did.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
Ever since Derren Brown first appeared on TV in 1999, I've been worried — though fascinated — by how easy it appears to be to brainwash people. Brown was able to get people to do the most incredible things simply by the force of his character. He could make people drink vinegar and believe they were drinking a normal soft drink, for example, in front of an audience of thousands. He also got someone to confess to a murder they hadn't committed, and others to take part in an armed robbery in the City of London based on mind control. In one of his more recent shows, he got people to push an innocent person off the top of a tall building, (though of course they weren't really going to fall the whole way).
Thats it - the sense that people are being brainwashed. I hope @Richard_Nabavi and others are correct, that this shall pass once the vaccines are fully deployed; but it does feel like people are being manipulated and are just willing to switch from a free society to a totalitarian one without giving it much thought.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
Ever since Derren Brown first appeared on TV in 1999, I've been worried — though fascinated — by how easy it appears to be to brainwash people. Brown was able to get people to do the most incredible things simply by the force of his character. He could make people drink vinegar and believe they were drinking a normal soft drink, for example, in front of an audience of thousands. He also got someone to confess to a murder they hadn't committed, and others to take part in an armed robbery in the City of London based on mind control. In one of his more recent shows, he got people to push an innocent person off the top of a tall building, (though of course they weren't really going to fall the whole way).
Thats it - the sense that people are being brainwashed. I hope @Richard_Nabavi and others are correct, that this shall pass once the vaccines are fully deployed; but it does feel like people are being manipulated and are just willing to switch from a free society to a totalitarian one without giving it much thought.
The Brits are a generally law abiding and rule following folk. And they don’t like confrontation. Well sorry gang but that’s got to end. If there are rules you disagree with as seriously as you state, then stop following them. And don’t avoid any confrontation that follows, use it as an opportunity to lead and persuade.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Thats a good article, I remember reading it at the time. I suppose the interesting thing is that the economic damage does not seem to have been as catastrophic as we envisaged 15 months ago, given the amount of time we have spent in lockdown.
Agreed, this has surprised me too. Though not all out of the woodwork yet, and we have the massive amount of money we have borrowed/printed.
The piece was written, of course, pre-vaccine and my view was that government policy should be in line with worst-case scenario, i.e that a vaccine would never be discovered and we had a new endemic threat. This turned out to be incorrect, but it was, I maintain, the right assumption to make at the time.
The vaccine persuaded me to come on board with the 3rd lockdown (I never agreed with the 2nd) because the NHS was coming under pressure again and vaccines were the light at the end of the tunnel - the silver bullet (to mix metaphors). Nowt it is clear they are not. Look at how the argument in the face of fewer deaths is turning to long-Covid as an excuse to restrict liberties, working under a definition which means that someone feeling a little peaky after 12 week allowed to self-diagnose with this.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Just skimmed some of the early comments on your thread.
"Well argued" from alanbrooke, "Brilliant header" from rottenborough, "A great header" from MarqueeMark, "Good article" from myself.
Intriguing that you see the response as not complimentary, it was, at least early in the thread (not going to re-read it all!).
I wrote that it was "always brave to be a contrarian voice. Well done." DavidL wrote "Really good header".
The response seems pretty good skimming it. Don't knock yourself Stocky!
Yes, generally people on PB were (and still are) lockdown sceptics. I wasn’t popular on here for pointing out in November that a second lockdown including school closures was both necessary and inevitable and the longer we delayed the longer and nastier it was likely to be.
But I wonder if Stocky was perhaps thinking of the first response, from Foxy, suggesting that the article was framing a false dichotomy. Which it probably was, given if people are too scared to go out it doesn’t really matter what the regulations are.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Just skimmed some of the early comments on your thread.
"Well argued" from alanbrooke, "Brilliant header" from rottenborough, "A great header" from MarqueeMark, "Good article" from myself.
Intriguing that you see the response as not complimentary, it was, at least early in the thread (not going to re-read it all!).
The complementary comments were mostly to do with the quality of the writing. Many were not happy with the actual argument I was making. A similar header would still be controversial on here today, though less so I suspect.
My feeling is that the wisest commentator during the pandemic has been Lord Sumption, who has focused on the legality of suspending liberal democracy in this way, and that the public has sleep-walked into something that it doesn't understand.
I recall a very early-pandemic comment on here from - I think - @FrancisUrquhart - who, when China had locked down (so this must have been late Feb 2020) - chuckled "of course they couldn't do this here". I posted in agreement. SAGE and the government agreed too. Then Italy happened and SAGE, as documented Ferguson, twigged that it COULD happen here. So it did.
I am also a great admirer of Lord Sumption. I just get the feeling that he is from another age and a generation that will soon die. I've got a young son and want him to benefit from the same freedoms we had; the sad reality is that we cannot rely on older people to defend them, we have to do so ourselves. But the people who go on the anti-lockdown protests seem to be madder than those who support the rules!
That's a pity, it was good. We had a very select PB Tory (as I was then!) dinner there some years ago. That was the evening at the end of which @JohnO famously fell asleep on the train and woke up in Bournemouth or somewhere.
It's certainly not the only casualty. It's not clear if The Ledbury will ever re-open - it was one of the top two or three restaurants in London.
The Ledbury might be gone?! Wow
I was never a massive fan but it had such a stellar reputation....
Another victim is the Atlantic Bar at Sheekeys, which was a blissful place to guzzle oysters in fine style and yet at reasonable prices. They've now folded it into the main restaurant which is twice as pricey, and the food is somehow worse
Is London collapsing? Is it worth staying?
It was only a couple of days ago you were telling us you sensed it roaring back.
It has clearly escaped your attention that I am prone to mood swings. I am also prone to wishful thinking. I want London to roar back to life (likewise Paris, NYC, and so on), and yet if I am honest with myself I am not sure how it happens, logically. Certainly not soon
The world has changed for good. Working From Home is not going away. If you can or must Work From Home you will work somewhere spacious and green, maybe sunny and warm. That ain't London
Meanwhile so many of the other things that made London life seductive - restaurants, shops, galleries, opera houses, everything, the whole glittering cavalcade, are either damaged, diminished or dead
So why live in London, or NYC? As crime spirals?
For several decades the great western cities enjoyed power and wealth and ever increasing prestige (and populations). That epoch is over. The process is flung into reverse
London will likely rebound in time. But it will take a long time
From September I expect most people will be working back in the office at least 3 days a week, with maybe the other 2 still WFH.
So I expect the big global cities like NYC and London to gradually rebound, though more workers will continue to move out to the outer suburbs and rural areas and bigger houses there and take advantage of the bigger space and mix of city life when they want it but a home life with more green space and fresh air
It is possible that the flagpole cities like London and NYC will do OK, as they are SO big and prestigious, people will still want to live and work there. If that happens, it is the 2nd order cities that will suffer much more. Chicago, say, or Manchester
They don't have the seductions of a New York or a London, but will have many of the nasty issues - crime, depopulation, and so on
I am particularly pessimistic about American cities. They are fucked
I'm fascinated by what little I know of how Rome has ebbed and flowed through the centuries. It must have been a weird experience living in it during its worst years.
With these letter writing campaigns i honestly don't see why they feel the need to try and inflate the numbers. It was clear when they said they had got 1000 signatures in a day, it was going to be all and sundry.
It is much more effective if you have just have a core of widely respected expects in the field. Quality over quantity and all that.
It's a common enough problem in so many areas there must be something in us that just wants to believe something more if lots of people seem to be behind it. These campaigns are silly as someone always emerges who wasn't really on board, or is an idiot and so on. When a better argument well made is more important than 100 fools.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Just skimmed some of the early comments on your thread.
"Well argued" from alanbrooke, "Brilliant header" from rottenborough, "A great header" from MarqueeMark, "Good article" from myself.
Intriguing that you see the response as not complimentary, it was, at least early in the thread (not going to re-read it all!).
The complementary comments were mostly to do with the quality of the writing. Many were not happy with the actual argument I was making. A similar header would still be controversial on here today, though less so I suspect.
My feeling is that the wisest commentator during the pandemic has been Lord Sumption, who has focused on the legality of suspending liberal democracy in this way, and that the public has sleep-walked into something that it doesn't understand.
I recall a very early-pandemic comment on here from - I think - @FrancisUrquhart - who, when China had locked down (so this must have been late Feb 2020) - chuckled "of course they couldn't do this here". I posted in agreement. SAGE and the government agreed too. Then Italy happened and SAGE, as documented Ferguson, twigged that it COULD happen here. So it did.
I am also a great admirer of Lord Sumption. I just get the feeling that he is from another age and a generation that will soon die. I've got a young son and want him to benefit from the same freedoms we had; the sad reality is that we cannot rely on older people to defend them, we have to do so ourselves. But the people who go on the anti-lockdown protests seem to be madder than those who support the rules!
Given how his tone of argument shifts wildly once he moves on to Covid, to the point it doesn't even read like the same guy and definitely far less persuasive than his other stuff, Sumption still comes across as a bit mad on the subject, just more intelligently so. If he could maintain the focus and tone of some of his other stuff he'd have been listened to more.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
And there you have a refutation to another great Scotch expert shibboleth, the brainwashed homogeneity of Nat opinion.
Over now to SNP MP David Linden: "One of the reasons we’re on this league table for the first time is we don’t have those levels of natural immunity that perhaps other people in the UK might have."
"There’s an awful lot of work going on to try and reduce that virus."
Go on, David, say "exponential", puh-lease!
For the record, Ms Divvie, as a responsible adult I wouldn't mind another indyref at all in which one side put forward its best plan for independence and the other side its best plan for improving the union, rather than "Braveheart forever!" and "We only need to get lucky once" versus "You've watched too much Braveheart" and "You don't even know what currency you want" sh*tfest.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Thats a good article, I remember reading it at the time. I suppose the interesting thing is that the economic damage does not seem to have been as catastrophic as we envisaged 15 months ago, given the amount of time we have spent in lockdown.
Agreed, this has surprised me too. Though not all out of the woodwork yet, and we have the massive amount of money we have borrowed/printed.
The piece was written, of course, pre-vaccine and my view was that government policy should be in line with worst-case scenario, i.e that a vaccine would never be discovered and we had a new endemic threat. This turned out to be incorrect, but it was, I maintain, the right assumption to make at the time.
The vaccine persuaded me to come on board with the 3rd lockdown (I never agreed with the 2nd) because the NHS was coming under pressure again and vaccines were the light at the end of the tunnel - the silver bullet (to mix metaphors). Nowt it is clear they are not. Look at how the argument in the face of fewer deaths is turning to long-Covid as an excuse to restrict liberties, working under a definition which means that someone feeling a little peaky after 12 week allowed to self-diagnose with this.
Yes - the long covid needs seriously looking at. I cannot find the articles, but there is a liverpool university lecturer in tropical medicine who had it very bad (ie in bed for 20 hour a day) and wrote about it. He eventually beat it by what would colloquially be described as willpower.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
Excellent post - and you've alighted on an aspect I've been thinking about writing a header about.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I think that is fair. The measures taken are so extreme, have such imposition, that they can only be justified in the very worse situations, not merely as preventative 'abundance of caution' style situation.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
Ever since Derren Brown first appeared on TV in 1999, I've been worried — though fascinated — by how easy it appears to be to brainwash people. Brown was able to get people to do the most incredible things simply by the force of his character. He could make people drink vinegar and believe they were drinking a normal soft drink, for example, in front of an audience of thousands. He also got someone to confess to a murder they hadn't committed, and others to take part in an armed robbery in the City of London based on mind control. In one of his more recent shows, he got people to push an innocent person off the top of a tall building, (though of course they weren't really going to fall the whole way).
Thats it - the sense that people are being brainwashed. I hope @Richard_Nabavi and others are correct, that this shall pass once the vaccines are fully deployed; but it does feel like people are being manipulated and are just willing to switch from a free society to a totalitarian one without giving it much thought.
Thing with Derren Brown is this - he is a magician/illusionist. He says he doesn’t use stooges. Of course he says that. And Paul Daniels really can make women levitate, and penn and teller survive being run over by a truck... Remember - all such people lie.
I know it can become a lot more complex, and introducing religion into the mix certainly does, but in general I've never had a problem with the basic principle that an organisation can require those in a customer facing role to, IDK, dress a certain way, cover tattoos, that sort of thing. Question of reasonable lines I suppose.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
Just skimmed some of the early comments on your thread.
"Well argued" from alanbrooke, "Brilliant header" from rottenborough, "A great header" from MarqueeMark, "Good article" from myself.
Intriguing that you see the response as not complimentary, it was, at least early in the thread (not going to re-read it all!).
The complementary comments were mostly to do with the quality of the writing. Many were not happy with the actual argument I was making. A similar header would still be controversial on here today, though less so I suspect.
My feeling is that the wisest commentator during the pandemic has been Lord Sumption, who has focused on the legality of suspending liberal democracy in this way, and that the public has sleep-walked into something that it doesn't understand.
I recall a very early-pandemic comment on here from - I think - @FrancisUrquhart - who, when China had locked down (so this must have been late Feb 2020) - chuckled "of course they couldn't do this here". I posted in agreement. SAGE and the government agreed too. Then Italy happened and SAGE, as documented Ferguson, twigged that it COULD happen here. So it did.
I am also a great admirer of Lord Sumption. I just get the feeling that he is from another age and a generation that will soon die. I've got a young son and want him to benefit from the same freedoms we had; the sad reality is that we cannot rely on older people to defend them, we have to do so ourselves. But the people who go on the anti-lockdown protests seem to be madder than those who support the rules!
Yes, I've never protested in my life and half of me wants to go on such a protest but the other half couldn't stomach some of the loons who would be present.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
Excellent post - and you've alighted on an aspect I've been thinking about writing a header about.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
Isn't it basically a cliche that liberals don't defend liberalism enough?
I'm hardly an exemplar of defending liberal ideals, but I'd certainly agree these things have to be fought for just to be maintained - it's easy to slip away from it, in fact it is the natural state of things for most of time.
I suspect the latter may come up a bit in the next book on my reading list 'The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty', among many other things.
On a different topic, there are literally hundreds of comments chez the Daily Mail today describing the flooding and suffering in Germany as "punishment" for the EU's conduct during Brexit, or joking about it on similar lines. What a truly putrid and decaying culture the entire Brexit process has unleashed for a certain strand of society.
Whereas Mondays rainstorm in London was God crying about the football…
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I've always been a big supporter of devolution within England so was interested in the Prime Minister's comments today.
I'm not wholly sure what a "County Deal" is and it doesn't seem the Prime Minister is either. Surrey and Hampshire are not London and expecting Tim Oliver to take over "transport" beyond local buses and cycling seems curious. Are we suggesting for example the County Councils take over South Western Railway? To be fair, they could only do a better job.
There's no mention of proper devolution such as ending capping and allowing Councils to set whatever Council Tax they consider justified for service provision. There's no mention (no surprise) of handing planning control back to elected local councillors (might be good if you wanted to stop the drift of disillusioned Conservatives to the LDs) and, more important, no mention of moving powers to local authorities and providing adequate resources (public health being one example).
The problem with County Councils is so much of their funding is taken up by the provision of care to adults and children - until and unless we see a resolution to the provision and funding of adult social care in particular (those the cost of provision of care to vulnerable children is another big drain on resources), the financial question is going to bedevil progress in other areas.
It also seems the Government has backed away from any talk of ending two-tier local Government and this will be another issue - again, back to Surrey where the Conservative-run County Council faces eleven Districts and Boroughs, many of whom are now run by anti-Conservative groupings. Seeking a common approach to devolution is almost impossible in such a dislocated political environment.
On a different topic, there are literally hundreds of comments chez the Daily Mail today describing the flooding and suffering in Germany as "punishment" for the EU's conduct during Brexit, or joking about it on similar lines. What a truly putrid and decaying culture the entire Brexit process has unleashed for a certain strand of society.
Whereas Mondays rainstorm in London was God crying about the football…
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
Excellent post - and you've alighted on an aspect I've been thinking about writing a header about.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
There's no such thing as "checks and balances". Look at the USA, SCOTUS, voting rights, Texas and more for that.
Liberal democracy can only survive as long as people want to have it and are willing to fight for it. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberalism.
Relying upon checks and balances means that people take it for granted and that is when things go wrong.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
And there you have a refutation to another great Scotch expert shibboleth, the brainwashed homogeneity of Nat opinion.
Over now to SNP MP David Linden: "One of the reasons we’re on this league table for the first time is we don’t have those levels of natural immunity that perhaps other people in the UK might have."
"There’s an awful lot of work going on to try and reduce that virus."
Go on, David, say "exponential", puh-lease!
For the record, Ms Divvie, as a responsible adult I wouldn't mind another indyref at all in which one side put forward its best plan for independence and the other side its best plan for improving the union, rather than "Braveheart forever!" and "We only need to get lucky once" versus "You've watched too much Braveheart" and "You don't even know what currency you want" sh*tfest.
It was actually the Unionist side who had watched too much Braveheart ...
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
A Scotch expert as I live and breathe.
TBF I think that’s Malc’s view as well. If he’s not qualified then who is?
And there you have a refutation to another great Scotch expert shibboleth, the brainwashed homogeneity of Nat opinion.
No, just Malc, I fully accept that there are other opinions. I’m just saying that it’s Malc’s view and thus not one wholly outside the range of Nat discourse and so perhaps reasonable to adopt? You’ll search in vain for any comments from me on domestic Scottish political matters - I fully confess to knowing very little. But people on here opine on the politics of a number of jurisdictions across the world.
'Nat' is specifically a SNP member/supporter, and really should be called Scottish National Party member (and unspecified 'nationalist' is not very useful given that there are plenty of British nationalists about). Independistas are a wider kirk or rather constellation of kirks than that. The Socialists, a fair sector of the Labour Party (both members and voters), lots of otherwise unoriented, some Tories, some independents, the Greens (a lot of them anyway).
The persistent use of 'nat' on PB by a certain person in particular is presumably used to try and drive the narrative that only the SNP vote counts for instance when discussing indyref 2 [edit!] when of course the Scottish Greens' official party policy is for indyref.
Apologies. As I have already said on this thread I try not to comment on Scottish politics. Now you see why.
No need to apologise at all - it was a good question (and one others coujld do well to ask).
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.
The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November.
It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.
The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.
But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.
“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I've always been a big supporter of devolution within England so was interested in the Prime Minister's comments today.
I'm not wholly sure what a "County Deal" is and it doesn't seem the Prime Minister is either. Surrey and Hampshire are not London and expecting Tim Oliver to take over "transport" beyond local buses and cycling seems curious. Are we suggesting for example the County Councils take over South Western Railway? To be fair, they could only do a better job.
There's no mention of proper devolution such as ending capping and allowing Councils to set whatever Council Tax they consider justified for service provision. There's no mention (no surprise) of handing planning control back to elected local councillors (might be good if you wanted to stop the drift of disillusioned Conservatives to the LDs) and, more important, no mention of moving powers to local authorities and providing adequate resources (public health being one example).
The problem with County Councils is so much of their funding is taken up by the provision of care to adults and children - until and unless we see a resolution to the provision and funding of adult social care in particular (those the cost of provision of care to vulnerable children is another big drain on resources), the financial question is going to bedevil progress in other areas.
It also seems the Government has backed away from any talk of ending two-tier local Government and this will be another issue - again, back to Surrey where the Conservative-run County Council faces eleven Districts and Boroughs, many of whom are now run by anti-Conservative groupings. Seeking a common approach to devolution is almost impossible in such a dislocated political environment.
The problem I suppose is that some counties are sufficiently populous and wealthy to thrive as devolved units in their own right. Kent must be at least a match for Wales in that regard. Or Surrey. Or Yorkshire if you merge all the ridings. Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire would probably all have the necessary critical mass too.
But then there are others that simply won’t. Cornwall. Cumbria. Rutland. Shropshire. Herefordshire.
And several marginal cases. Staffordshire. Gloucestershire. Derbyshire.
Which is why nobody has ever proposed county by county devolution since Henry VIII abolished all bar one of the palatinates.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I didn't ask for a qualitative opinion on their merits (in principle almost impossible between distilleries, even on the same island) - merely a taxonomic assignment.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
Excellent post - and you've alighted on an aspect I've been thinking about writing a header about.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
There's no such thing as "checks and balances". Look at the USA, SCOTUS, voting rights, Texas and more for that.
Liberal democracy can only survive as long as people want to have it and are willing to fight for it. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberalism.
Relying upon checks and balances means that people take it for granted and that is when things go wrong.
I think the problem you have got is that people on the whole don't seem to be particularly bothered, and we don't have the checks and balances inherent in a written constitution. The unfortunate reality is that it is an elite project; it is the same people again and again who stand up for liberal democracy in its most fundamental form, and suprisingly they are right wing conservative backbench MPs.
Isn't it basically a cliche that liberals don't defend liberalism enough?
I'm hardly an exemplar of defending liberal ideals, but I'd certainly agree these things have to be fought for just to be maintained - it's easy to slip away from it, in fact it is the natural state of things for most of time.
I suspect the latter may come up a bit in the next book on my reading list 'The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty', among many other things.
I'm not sure I agree - this has been an extraordinary situation (not unlike wartime). Unlike previous pandemics when the Government decided to basically let the virus run its course through the population (either because they didn't or couldn't do anything else), we had a number of options.
Technology enabled hundreds of thousands if not millions of British workers to continue working from their own home - that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago. The same technology and ingenuity allowed a vaccine to be developed, tested and implemented in not much more than a year, an unprecedented achievement.
Both actions (and others) saved lives, possibly many thousands.
Has there been a cost? Yes, clearly but economic damage can be mitigated, lives cannot be re-created.
As liberals, we accept restraints on our freedoms for "the common good" - an overtly individualistic approach is more libertarian than liberal. Liberals accept and understand the value of society and community and sacrificing a small amount of personal freedom to protect the lives of others is entirely justifiable.
Where I do agree is the temptation of Government to maintain restrictive legislation long after the necessity has passed. Aspects of the 1939 Emergency Powers Act were still valid until the 1960s - it took a brave Liberal to end the fiasco of identity cards.
Normality has to not just mean taking off a mask - it has to mean the repeal of all restrictive legislation (including anything which ceded control or power to the Executive from the legislature). We can't have Ministers continuing to hold powers which should sit with the Commons.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I didn't ask for a qualitative opinion on their merits (in principle almost impossible between distilleries, even on the same island) - merely a taxonomic assignment.
I find that Bunnahabhain has a very distinctive peaty taste, while the Bowmore is less so, but I couldn't tell how old each one was.
I haven't had an Ardbeg for ages though I do remember it being pretty peaty: I'm not sure I could tell it from the Bunnahabhain.
The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.
The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November.
It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.
The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.
But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.
“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I didn't ask for a qualitative opinion on their merits (in principle almost impossible between distilleries, even on the same island) - merely a taxonomic assignment.
I find that Bunnahabhain has a very distinctive peaty taste, while the Bowmore is less so, but I couldn't tell how old each one was.
I haven't had an Ardbeg for ages though I do remember it being pretty peaty: I'm not sure I could tell it from the Bunnahabhain.
Quite. I prefer other malts on the whole - particularly north of Inverness. My late father adored the Islay malts for their peatiness and I used to buy him a bottle of Uigeadail every birthday and Christmas plus a bottle of something else from the shop on the Mound in Edinburgh for a bit of variety.
He was also a SMWS member and I'm still working my way through what was left of his SMWS collection. Mrs C wouldn't believe me when I told her the probate valuer for his furniture would need to check it out. She was absolutely staggered when the first thing he did when he spotted the bottles was to fish out his mobey and carefully check the numbers - some of the individual bottlings are worth very considerable sums now. No jackpots for me, but at least I can enjoy them with a clear conscience.
The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.
The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November.
It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.
The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.
But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.
“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”
The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.
The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November.
It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.
The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.
But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.
“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”
One of the deadliest threats to any academic is a DPhil, sorry PhD student with the time to go through one's research and really check everything out, if only for his/her own edification.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
Excellent post - and you've alighted on an aspect I've been thinking about writing a header about.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
There's no such thing as "checks and balances". Look at the USA, SCOTUS, voting rights, Texas and more for that.
Liberal democracy can only survive as long as people want to have it and are willing to fight for it. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberalism.
Relying upon checks and balances means that people take it for granted and that is when things go wrong.
I think the problem you have got is that people on the whole don't seem to be particularly bothered, and we don't have the checks and balances inherent in a written constitution. The unfortunate reality is that it is an elite project; it is the same people again and again who stand up for liberal democracy in its most fundamental form, and suprisingly they are right wing conservative backbench MPs.
I think our lack of a written constitution is a good thing not a bad thing. As I said I don't think "checks and balances" work, they lead to complacency. If the wrong person gets in charge of the checks then you're screwed. See: SCOTUS.
The UK has arguably the world's longest and most successful history of liberal democracy, evolved over centuries, and it is the people that ensure it. As we don't rely upon checks and balances so we've got people from all parties vigilant to protect liberalism.
I must agree with those of you who favour Fixed Term Parliaments and I regret that PM will regain power to select election date.
I can see next GE being October 2023 (which avoids Lab and Con Conferences) or May 2024. Problem with either is that it cannot be too close to Scottish Independence Referendum. Also Boundary Changes legally happen July 2023 and 3 months may be too tight for MPs who must find another seat as their present seat disappears or significantly changes against their party. Toss up between October 2023 and May 2024.
A Sindyref rerun is unlikely to happen unless the SNP and Greens together win a majority of votes in the Holyrood election in 2026, or at least in the next British general election. The main way it could come about earlier is if a majority vote for pro-indy parties in a Holyrood election that's called early. But that would require that SNP MSPs take their noses out of the trough and risk their seats - in a country which so far this century has voted 12 times out of 12 to stay in the Union.
The SNP and SGs already have the majority - so tht at is not the issue. Whether at Holyrood or the Scottish Westminster seats.
Yeah but you've also got Nicola Sturgeon who'd rather be matron of the nation and pad her own nest rather than risk a referendum she might lose.
I didn't ask for a qualitative opinion on their merits (in principle almost impossible between distilleries, even on the same island) - merely a taxonomic assignment.
I find that Bunnahabhain has a very distinctive peaty taste, while the Bowmore is less so, but I couldn't tell how old each one was.
I haven't had an Ardbeg for ages though I do remember it being pretty peaty: I'm not sure I could tell it from the Bunnahabhain.
Quite. I prefer other malts on the whole - particularly north of Inverness. My late father adored the Islay malts for their peatiness and I used to buy him a bottle of Uigeadail every birthday and Christmas plus a bottle of something else from the shop on the Mound in Edinburgh for a bit of variety.
He was also a SMWS member and I'm still working my way through what was left of his SMWS collection. Mrs C wouldn't believe me when I told her the probate valuer for his furniture would need to check it out. She was absolutely staggered when the first thing he did when he spotted the bottles was to fish out his mobey and carefully check the numbers - some of the individual bottlings are worth very considerable sums now. No jackpots for me, but at least I can enjoy them with a clear conscience.
The thing about a great single malt is that that you savour it (or at least I do) so a bottle can last for weeks of steady drinking.
I had a dozen or so bottles of various whisk(e)ys at the start of the Pandemic and I'm only about half way though them now.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
Excellent post - and you've alighted on an aspect I've been thinking about writing a header about.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
There's no such thing as "checks and balances". Look at the USA, SCOTUS, voting rights, Texas and more for that.
Liberal democracy can only survive as long as people want to have it and are willing to fight for it. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberalism.
Relying upon checks and balances means that people take it for granted and that is when things go wrong.
I think the problem you have got is that people on the whole don't seem to be particularly bothered, and we don't have the checks and balances inherent in a written constitution. The unfortunate reality is that it is an elite project; it is the same people again and again who stand up for liberal democracy in its most fundamental form, and suprisingly they are right wing conservative backbench MPs.
Our constitution is written. It’s just not codified.
I've always been a big supporter of devolution within England so was interested in the Prime Minister's comments today.
I'm not wholly sure what a "County Deal" is and it doesn't seem the Prime Minister is either. Surrey and Hampshire are not London and expecting Tim Oliver to take over "transport" beyond local buses and cycling seems curious. Are we suggesting for example the County Councils take over South Western Railway? To be fair, they could only do a better job.
There's no mention of proper devolution such as ending capping and allowing Councils to set whatever Council Tax they consider justified for service provision. There's no mention (no surprise) of handing planning control back to elected local councillors (might be good if you wanted to stop the drift of disillusioned Conservatives to the LDs) and, more important, no mention of moving powers to local authorities and providing adequate resources (public health being one example).
The problem with County Councils is so much of their funding is taken up by the provision of care to adults and children - until and unless we see a resolution to the provision and funding of adult social care in particular (those the cost of provision of care to vulnerable children is another big drain on resources), the financial question is going to bedevil progress in other areas.
It also seems the Government has backed away from any talk of ending two-tier local Government and this will be another issue - again, back to Surrey where the Conservative-run County Council faces eleven Districts and Boroughs, many of whom are now run by anti-Conservative groupings. Seeking a common approach to devolution is almost impossible in such a dislocated political environment.
The problem I suppose is that some counties are sufficiently populous and wealthy to thrive as devolved units in their own right. Kent must be at least a match for Wales in that regard. Or Surrey. Or Yorkshire if you merge all the ridings. Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire would probably all have the necessary critical mass too.
But then there are others that simply won’t. Cornwall. Cumbria. Rutland. Shropshire. Herefordshire.
And several marginal cases. Staffordshire. Gloucestershire. Derbyshire.
Which is why nobody has ever proposed county by county devolution since Henry VIII abolished all bar one of the palatinates.
The population of Wales is about 3 million. The only county-like entities that would match that would be Greater London, West Midlands, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.
Other impressive counties are relatively titchy. Take Hampshire. Even folding Portsmouth and Southampton back in only gets you to 1.8 million, about the same as Kent and Essex. For comparison, N Ireland is 1.6 million. Other counties are just to small to take on other functions. Cambridgeshire is about 850k, Oxfordshire is 680k.
Which is why people who look at devolving from Westminster end up creating regions, and the concept of regions makes lots of people cry. Meanwhile England as an entity is just too big to manage well. So we're stuck.
The other elephant in the room is money. It was bad enough 20 years ago; basically the maximum allowed council income matched the minimum standard of expected services, so there was approximately no political discretion at all. That was before austerity, the 2% rule on Council Tax and the ballooning of social care costs. You have to wonder why anyone in local government bothers any more.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
Ever since Derren Brown first appeared on TV in 1999, I've been worried — though fascinated — by how easy it appears to be to brainwash people. Brown was able to get people to do the most incredible things simply by the force of his character. He could make people drink vinegar and believe they were drinking a normal soft drink, for example, in front of an audience of thousands. He also got someone to confess to a murder they hadn't committed, and others to take part in an armed robbery in the City of London based on mind control. In one of his more recent shows, he got people to push an innocent person off the top of a tall building, (though of course they weren't really going to fall the whole way).
Thats it - the sense that people are being brainwashed. I hope @Richard_Nabavi and others are correct, that this shall pass once the vaccines are fully deployed; but it does feel like people are being manipulated and are just willing to switch from a free society to a totalitarian one without giving it much thought.
Thing with Derren Brown is this - he is a magician/illusionist. He says he doesn’t use stooges. Of course he says that. And Paul Daniels really can make women levitate, and penn and teller survive being run over by a truck... Remember - all such people lie.
I have been to several Derren Brown shows. Arrive early, hang about in the foyer and you will work out how a fair bit of the shows are done that involve audience participation. Lets just say it amazing how much people inadvertently reveal when they are excitably hanging around.
I see the Guardian is knocking out a piece reporting on leaked documents from a meeting between Putin and his offcials suggesting that the policy was to bust a gut to get Trump in in 2016.
There is something about this story that doesnt pass the smell test. If you are one of those that long believed this was Russian policy and they had Donald's balls in a vice there is nothing new. Its almost like a retrospective rehash of what perhaps is already known or at reasonably deduced.
Oddly no sign of a single killer or new revelation, which apparently the appendices of these documents may have had. Yet those appendices dont appear in the haul the Guardian has seen.
That leaves some questions. Who released something that doesnt shed any new light, confirms nothing & reinforces opinions, probably on both sides, of the Trump is a shill argument.
And why? If you had this document haul, you might have some serious dynamite there, yet the stuff that is hinted at in one reported section isnt part of the leaked docs.
Isn't it basically a cliche that liberals don't defend liberalism enough?
I'm hardly an exemplar of defending liberal ideals, but I'd certainly agree these things have to be fought for just to be maintained - it's easy to slip away from it, in fact it is the natural state of things for most of time.
I suspect the latter may come up a bit in the next book on my reading list 'The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty', among many other things.
I'm not sure I agree - this has been an extraordinary situation (not unlike wartime). Unlike previous pandemics when the Government decided to basically let the virus run its course through the population (either because they didn't or couldn't do anything else), we had a number of options.
Technology enabled hundreds of thousands if not millions of British workers to continue working from their own home - that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago. The same technology and ingenuity allowed a vaccine to be developed, tested and implemented in not much more than a year, an unprecedented achievement.
Both actions (and others) saved lives, possibly many thousands.
Has there been a cost? Yes, clearly but economic damage can be mitigated, lives cannot be re-created.
As liberals, we accept restraints on our freedoms for "the common good" - an overtly individualistic approach is more libertarian than liberal. Liberals accept and understand the value of society and community and sacrificing a small amount of personal freedom to protect the lives of others is entirely justifiable.
Where I do agree is the temptation of Government to maintain restrictive legislation long after the necessity has passed. Aspects of the 1939 Emergency Powers Act were still valid until the 1960s - it took a brave Liberal to end the fiasco of identity cards.
Normality has to not just mean taking off a mask - it has to mean the repeal of all restrictive legislation (including anything which ceded control or power to the Executive from the legislature). We can't have Ministers continuing to hold powers which should sit with the Commons.
I wasn't saying accepting some restrictions as necessary was not possible for liberals. I don't think anyone beyond an extreme few are saying that. I was making a general observation that it is sometimes argued liberals are often too complacent that things will always be the way they were. So I'm not sure where the disagreement comes in.
I've always been a big supporter of devolution within England so was interested in the Prime Minister's comments today.
I'm not wholly sure what a "County Deal" is and it doesn't seem the Prime Minister is either. Surrey and Hampshire are not London and expecting Tim Oliver to take over "transport" beyond local buses and cycling seems curious. Are we suggesting for example the County Councils take over South Western Railway? To be fair, they could only do a better job.
There's no mention of proper devolution such as ending capping and allowing Councils to set whatever Council Tax they consider justified for service provision. There's no mention (no surprise) of handing planning control back to elected local councillors (might be good if you wanted to stop the drift of disillusioned Conservatives to the LDs) and, more important, no mention of moving powers to local authorities and providing adequate resources (public health being one example).
The problem with County Councils is so much of their funding is taken up by the provision of care to adults and children - until and unless we see a resolution to the provision and funding of adult social care in particular (those the cost of provision of care to vulnerable children is another big drain on resources), the financial question is going to bedevil progress in other areas.
It also seems the Government has backed away from any talk of ending two-tier local Government and this will be another issue - again, back to Surrey where the Conservative-run County Council faces eleven Districts and Boroughs, many of whom are now run by anti-Conservative groupings. Seeking a common approach to devolution is almost impossible in such a dislocated political environment.
The problem I suppose is that some counties are sufficiently populous and wealthy to thrive as devolved units in their own right. Kent must be at least a match for Wales in that regard. Or Surrey. Or Yorkshire if you merge all the ridings. Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire would probably all have the necessary critical mass too.
But then there are others that simply won’t. Cornwall. Cumbria. Rutland. Shropshire. Herefordshire.
And several marginal cases. Staffordshire. Gloucestershire. Derbyshire.
Which is why nobody has ever proposed county by county devolution since Henry VIII abolished all bar one of the palatinates.
The population of Wales is about 3 million. The only county-like entities that would match that would be Greater London, West Midlands, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.
Other impressive counties are relatively titchy. Take Hampshire. Even folding Portsmouth and Southampton back in only gets you to 1.8 million, about the same as Kent and Essex. For comparison, N Ireland is 1.6 million. Other counties are just to small to take on other functions. Cambridgeshire is about 850k, Oxfordshire is 680k.
Which is why people who look at devolving from Westminster end up creating regions, and the concept of regions makes lots of people cry. Meanwhile England as an entity is just too big to manage well. So we're stuck.
The other elephant in the room is money. It was bad enough 20 years ago; basically the maximum allowed council income matched the minimum standard of expected services, so there was approximately no political discretion at all. That was before austerity, the 2% rule on Council Tax and the ballooning of social care costs. You have to wonder why anyone in local government bothers any more.
1.8 million is three times the size of Luxembourg, nearly 4 times the size of Malta, and bigger than 12 US states, including Hawaii and New Hampshire.
I really think we are done in over Covid. My 'live and let live' elderly neighbour, who happily had dinner parties throughout the first lockdown, told me that she now thinks that masks and hand sanitiser should stay for good, as they help with stopping the flu.
I've been in group chats with university friends and they all seem to believe that the covid rules, including being pinged and covid passports should be accepted and any loss of civil liberties is acceptable on the basis that some people in society cannot police themselves.
They just don't engage with the fact that the hospitalisation rate is low, when I bring that up they move on to saying it is justifed by a need to protect the vulnerable, who are medically unable to take the vaccine. But the reality is that this category of people are also likely to be at risk from a whole load of other diseases going around and we don't undertake large scale societal interventions to protect them from these.
I don't know what the answer is, the only thing that keeps me sane is the fact that the kids parents at my sons school all refused one day to wear masks. But I think this pandemic has driven the country mad.
@darkage You are clearly as pole-axed by this as I am.
I could see the writing on the wall as early as March last year. I wrote a header about it. At the time I thought that most people had not twigged the seriousness of the pandemic. All they were focused on was health and they failed to see that we have a new enduring risk in life. They gave no acknowledgement of liberties or the economy - i.e. the wider picture. I argued that making health and the NHS the-only-thing-that-matters was a mistake and the initial lockdown should not have been extended past the original 12 weeks. It was a brave piece to write at the time, but look where were are now.
Liberals have been caught in a pincer-movement between authoritarian rule-followers on the right and dystopian illiberals on the left. I think that more of the former can be turned than the latter, especially as fear tapers more and more. The latter have revealed that they never liked liberal democracy in the first place - particularly the liberal bit - and there is some glee in constraining liberties under a dominant state apparatus. They are clearly happy for this to endure, perhaps permanently.
These two groups have the numbers. And we have a spineless populist government who follow not lead.
It is genuinely terrifying if you are a liberal. Your fears are justified.
Thanks for this. PB is keeping me sane at the moment, along with a few heroic back bench conservative MPs. My own view is that lockdowns are exceptionally justified where there is an absolute medical emergency; as there was for perhaps two brief periods of time. But now we must regard it as a preventable disease, the prevention being the vaccine. I am coming to the view that the other stuff - the assymptomatic testing, self isolation, pinging, covid apps etc etc have absolutely no place at all in a free society and should be absolutely rejected.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Ditto.
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
It's quite disappointing the number of people failing to stand up for liberal democracy and for freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of movement, parliamnetary scrutiny, etc. I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted two years ago when we appeared to have it. I was never one to particularly prioritise a written constitution because I honestly didn’t think any of these things we're under threat. It's very disappointing to realise many of your fellow countrymen see it is quite disposable and are actually quite partial to arbitrary rules, especially for other people. If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
Excellent post - and you've alighted on an aspect I've been thinking about writing a header about.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
There's no such thing as "checks and balances". Look at the USA, SCOTUS, voting rights, Texas and more for that.
Liberal democracy can only survive as long as people want to have it and are willing to fight for it. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberalism.
Relying upon checks and balances means that people take it for granted and that is when things go wrong.
I think the problem you have got is that people on the whole don't seem to be particularly bothered, and we don't have the checks and balances inherent in a written constitution. The unfortunate reality is that it is an elite project; it is the same people again and again who stand up for liberal democracy in its most fundamental form, and suprisingly they are right wing conservative backbench MPs.
Our constitution is written. It’s just not codified.
Indeed and the beauty of that is that our constitution is so easily changed.
Take the FTPA discussed earlier. The PM being able to call an election was a part of our constituency, changed on the whim of Nick Clegg to stop Cameron cutting and running, then that was meant to be a part of our constitution but it didn't suit first Theresa May then Boris, and now its changing again.
Other countries if they'd passed eg a constitutional amendment like the FTPA they're stuck with it much more than we are in the UK.
Yippee! A sub-sample thread! I look forward to mountains of posts pointing out why sub-samples are useless and people highlighting them are idiots. PB is, after all, famous for its consistency and fairness. Anecdata will then be produced claiming that people with degrees are huge fans of the man sacked from three jobs for dishonesty.
While we’re patiently waiting, here’s the Ipsos Mori findings for Scottish VI:
10% for the Scottish Lib Dems must be one of their best polls in years. The fact that ragin Wullie is retiring must surely be a factor. Alex Cole-Hamilton might be a lightweight, but at least he doesn’t do that fake anger thing all the time.
Yippee! A sub-sample thread! I look forward to mountains of posts pointing out why sub-samples are useless and people highlighting them are idiots. PB is, after all, famous for its consistency and fairness. Anecdata will then be produced claiming that people with degrees are huge fans of the man sacked from three jobs for dishonesty.
While we’re patiently waiting, here’s the Ipsos Mori findings for Scottish VI:
10% for the Scottish Lib Dems must be one of their best polls in years. The fact that ragin Wullie is retiring must surely be a factor. Alex Cole-Hamilton might be a lightweight, but at least he doesn’t do that fake anger thing all the time.
That poll was conducted entirely before Willie Rennie's announcement.
Comments
Heil.... Heil.... Heil
You can afford a four bedroomed house in Altrincham, Sale, Didsbury, Prestwich, Bramhall, Edgbaston, Bournville, Meanwood, Headingley, Jesmond, Gosforth, Cullercoats - for the price of a small flat in Crouch End.
I know that there are a lot of people who share my fears, but we are overruled by the forces you describe. I am also deeply troubled by this contradiction where people support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves. But if the illiberal pursuit of biosecurity gets taken to its conclusion, that option won't be open to them anymore - they are sleepwalking in to a totalitarian nightmare; and we have to find a way of stopping it.
Zone 1/2 flats do still seem down on pre pandemic levels but not by much. Decent houses and new builds still priced at ever increasing prices thanks to govt props.
Anyway, dinner calls soon so have a nice evening all.
I think I should get out more.
It is much more effective if you have just have a core of widely respected expects in the field. Quality over quantity and all that.
Does @malcolmg ?
Schools also helping the spread - roll on the holidays
An interview on C4 News with KSI you might find interesting (at end)
Though where you say "support the rules but obviously don't follow them, they keep making exceptions for themselves" I don't think I'm seeing this from the people I know, but that is just my bubble. Most people I know think broadly as we do.
My original piece for PB is below by the way. The comments are well worth a read 15 months on (you need to scroll right down to bottom). Most were not complimentary.
https://www7.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/04/01/from-stocky-why-it-should-be-made-clear-that-lockdown-will-not-extend-past-12-weeks/
He decided it needed to be sold and last week had an updated valuation of £255,000
The day after it was listed 5 prospective buyers viewed and he had an immediate full price offer and another one at £257,000 from a buyer who has sold to a first time buyer
Utterly astonishing but then Colwyn Bay and Llandudno are extremely popular retirement areas
The persistent use of 'nat' on PB by a certain person in particular is presumably used to try and drive the narrative that only the SNP vote counts for instance when discussing indyref 2 [edit!] when of course the Scottish Greens' official party policy is for indyref.
If only there was a political party who was prepared to advocate liberal democracy.
"Well argued" from alanbrooke, "Brilliant header" from rottenborough, "A great header" from MarqueeMark, "Good article" from myself.
Intriguing that you see the response as not complimentary, it was, at least early in the thread (not going to re-read it all!).
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/02/02/a-tale-of-twelve-cities-the-perplexing-underperformance-of-britains-second-tier/
The response seems pretty good skimming it. Don't knock yourself Stocky!
My feeling is that the wisest commentator during the pandemic has been Lord Sumption, who has focused on the legality of suspending liberal democracy in this way, and that the public has sleep-walked into something that it doesn't understand.
I recall a very early-pandemic comment on here from - I think - @FrancisUrquhart - who, when China had locked down (so this must have been late Feb 2020) - chuckled "of course they couldn't do this here". I posted in agreement. SAGE and the government agreed too. Then Italy happened and SAGE, as documented Ferguson, twigged that it COULD happen here. So it did.
The piece was written, of course, pre-vaccine and my view was that government policy should be in line with worst-case scenario, i.e that a vaccine would never be discovered and we had a new endemic threat. This turned out to be incorrect, but it was, I maintain, the right assumption to make at the time.
The vaccine persuaded me to come on board with the 3rd lockdown (I never agreed with the 2nd) because the NHS was coming under pressure again and vaccines were the light at the end of the tunnel - the silver bullet (to mix metaphors). Nowt it is clear they are not. Look at how the argument in the face of fewer deaths is turning to long-Covid as an excuse to restrict liberties, working under a definition which means that someone feeling a little peaky after 12 week allowed to self-diagnose with this.
But I wonder if Stocky was perhaps thinking of the first response, from Foxy, suggesting that the article was framing a false dichotomy. Which it probably was, given if people are too scared to go out it doesn’t really matter what the regulations are.
"There’s an awful lot of work going on to try and reduce that virus."
Go on, David, say "exponential", puh-lease!
For the record, Ms Divvie, as a responsible adult I wouldn't mind another indyref at all in which one side put forward its best plan for independence and the other side its best plan for improving the union, rather than "Braveheart forever!" and "We only need to get lucky once" versus "You've watched too much Braveheart" and "You don't even know what currency you want" sh*tfest.
FBPE twitter literally shaking right now.
"I think I broadly took liberal democracy for granted" - yes, liberals did. My pet theory is that many liberals don't care that much whether we are governed by a moderate CP or a moderate LP. Who cares? - we live under the umbrella of a liberal democracy so we've won already.
My! The complacency. We never had the checks and balances did we?
I'm hardly an exemplar of defending liberal ideals, but I'd certainly agree these things have to be fought for just to be maintained - it's easy to slip away from it, in fact it is the natural state of things for most of time.
I suspect the latter may come up a bit in the next book on my reading list 'The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty', among many other things.
I've always been a big supporter of devolution within England so was interested in the Prime Minister's comments today.
I'm not wholly sure what a "County Deal" is and it doesn't seem the Prime Minister is either. Surrey and Hampshire are not London and expecting Tim Oliver to take over "transport" beyond local buses and cycling seems curious. Are we suggesting for example the County Councils take over South Western Railway? To be fair, they could only do a better job.
There's no mention of proper devolution such as ending capping and allowing Councils to set whatever Council Tax they consider justified for service provision. There's no mention (no surprise) of handing planning control back to elected local councillors (might be good if you wanted to stop the drift of disillusioned Conservatives to the LDs) and, more important, no mention of moving powers to local authorities and providing adequate resources (public health being one example).
The problem with County Councils is so much of their funding is taken up by the provision of care to adults and children - until and unless we see a resolution to the provision and funding of adult social care in particular (those the cost of provision of care to vulnerable children is another big drain on resources), the financial question is going to bedevil progress in other areas.
It also seems the Government has backed away from any talk of ending two-tier local Government and this will be another issue - again, back to Surrey where the Conservative-run County Council faces eleven Districts and Boroughs, many of whom are now run by anti-Conservative groupings. Seeking a common approach to devolution is almost impossible in such a dislocated political environment.
Liberal democracy can only survive as long as people want to have it and are willing to fight for it. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberalism.
Relying upon checks and balances means that people take it for granted and that is when things go wrong.
https://www.masterofmalt.com/whiskies/bunnahabhain/bunnahabhain-25-year-old-whisky/
The efficacy of a drug being promoted by rightwing figures worldwide for treating Covid-19 is in serious doubt after a major study suggesting the treatment is effective against the virus was withdrawn due to “ethical concerns”.
The preprint study on the efficacy and safety of ivermectin – a drug used against parasites such as worms and headlice – in treating Covid-19, led by Dr Ahmed Elgazzar from Benha University in Egypt, was published on the Research Square website in November.
It claimed to be a randomised control trial, a type of study crucial in medicine because it is considered to provide the most reliable evidence on the effectiveness of interventions due to the minimal risk of confounding factors influencing the results. Elgazzar is listed as chief editor of the Benha Medical Journal, and is an editorial board member.
The study found that patients with Covid-19 treated in hospital who “received ivermectin early reported substantial recovery” and that there was “a substantial improvement and reduction in mortality rate in ivermectin treated groups” by 90%.
But the drug’s promise as a treatment for the virus is in serious doubt after the Elgazzar study was pulled from the Research Square website on Thursday “due to ethical concerns”. Research Square did not outline what those concerns were.
A medical student in London, Jack Lawrence, was among the first to identify serious concerns about the paper, leading to the retraction. He first became aware of the Elgazzar preprint when it was assigned to him by one of his lecturers for an assignment that formed part of his master’s degree. He found the introduction section of the paper appeared to have been almost entirely plagiarised.
It appeared that the authors had run entire paragraphs from press releases and websites about ivermectin and Covid-19 through a thesaurus to change key words. “Humorously, this led to them changing ‘severe acute respiratory syndrome’ to ‘extreme intense respiratory syndrome’ on one occasion,” Lawrence said.
The data also looked suspicious to Lawrence, with the raw data apparently contradicting the study protocol on several occasions.
“The authors claimed to have done the study only on 18-80 year olds, but at least three patients in the dataset were under 18,” Lawrence said.
“The authors claimed they conducted the study between the 8th of June and 20th of September 2020, however most of the patients who died were admitted into hospital and died before the 8th of June according to the raw data. The data was also terribly formatted, and includes one patient who left hospital on the non-existent date of 31/06/2020.”
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/16/huge-study-supporting-ivermectin-as-covid-treatment-withdrawn-over-ethical-concerns
Not even whisky, but whiskey, and certainly not scotch.
But then there are others that simply won’t. Cornwall. Cumbria. Rutland. Shropshire. Herefordshire.
And several marginal cases. Staffordshire. Gloucestershire. Derbyshire.
Which is why nobody has ever proposed county by county devolution since Henry VIII abolished all bar one of the palatinates.
Technology enabled hundreds of thousands if not millions of British workers to continue working from their own home - that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago. The same technology and ingenuity allowed a vaccine to be developed, tested and implemented in not much more than a year, an unprecedented achievement.
Both actions (and others) saved lives, possibly many thousands.
Has there been a cost? Yes, clearly but economic damage can be mitigated, lives cannot be re-created.
As liberals, we accept restraints on our freedoms for "the common good" - an overtly individualistic approach is more libertarian than liberal. Liberals accept and understand the value of society and community and sacrificing a small amount of personal freedom to protect the lives of others is entirely justifiable.
Where I do agree is the temptation of Government to maintain restrictive legislation long after the necessity has passed. Aspects of the 1939 Emergency Powers Act were still valid until the 1960s - it took a brave Liberal to end the fiasco of identity cards.
Normality has to not just mean taking off a mask - it has to mean the repeal of all restrictive legislation (including anything which ceded control or power to the Executive from the legislature). We can't have Ministers continuing to hold powers which should sit with the Commons.
I haven't had an Ardbeg for ages though I do remember it being pretty peaty: I'm not sure I could tell it from the Bunnahabhain.
We should go into bridge sales, these people are such easy marks.
https://twitter.com/gbnews/status/1415747756694646799?s=21
He was also a SMWS member and I'm still working my way through what was left of his SMWS collection. Mrs C wouldn't believe me when I told her the probate valuer for his furniture would need to check it out. She was absolutely staggered when the first thing he did when he spotted the bottles was to fish out his mobey and carefully check the numbers - some of the individual bottlings are worth very considerable sums now. No jackpots for me, but at least I can enjoy them with a clear conscience.
"On Tuesday a contributing presenter took the knee live on air and this was an unacceptable breach of our standards."
The UK has arguably the world's longest and most successful history of liberal democracy, evolved over centuries, and it is the people that ensure it. As we don't rely upon checks and balances so we've got people from all parties vigilant to protect liberalism.
I had a dozen or so bottles of various whisk(e)ys at the start of the Pandemic and I'm only about half way though them now.
Other impressive counties are relatively titchy. Take Hampshire. Even folding Portsmouth and Southampton back in only gets you to 1.8 million, about the same as Kent and Essex. For comparison, N Ireland is 1.6 million. Other counties are just to small to take on other functions. Cambridgeshire is about 850k, Oxfordshire is 680k.
Which is why people who look at devolving from Westminster end up creating regions, and the concept of regions makes lots of people cry. Meanwhile England as an entity is just too big to manage well. So we're stuck.
The other elephant in the room is money. It was bad enough 20 years ago; basically the maximum allowed council income matched the minimum standard of expected services, so there was approximately no political discretion at all. That was before austerity, the 2% rule on Council Tax and the ballooning of social care costs. You have to wonder why anyone in local government bothers any more.
There is something about this story that doesnt pass the smell test. If you are one of those that long believed this was Russian policy and they had Donald's balls in a vice there is nothing new. Its almost like a retrospective rehash of what perhaps is already known or at reasonably deduced.
Oddly no sign of a single killer or new revelation, which apparently the appendices of these documents may have had. Yet those appendices dont appear in the haul the Guardian has seen.
That leaves some questions. Who released something that doesnt shed any new light, confirms nothing & reinforces opinions, probably on both sides, of the Trump is a shill argument.
And why? If you had this document haul, you might have some serious dynamite there, yet the stuff that is hinted at in one reported section isnt part of the leaked docs.
Take the FTPA discussed earlier. The PM being able to call an election was a part of our constituency, changed on the whim of Nick Clegg to stop Cameron cutting and running, then that was meant to be a part of our constitution but it didn't suit first Theresa May then Boris, and now its changing again.
Other countries if they'd passed eg a constitutional amendment like the FTPA they're stuck with it much more than we are in the UK.